Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)

***^½
Country: US
Director: H. C. Potter


When I think of a Cary Grant movie, I tend to think of him playing someone unmarried, generally a sophisticate of some kind—a playboy, cat burglar, spy, or professional gambler. Whether he is being pursued or doing the pursuing, I think of Grant as becoming romantically involved during the movie with a beautiful woman—Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn. If he does happen to be married (or divorced), I see him in a tempestuous relationship with someone like Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, or Rosalind Russell. What I normally don't picture when I think of Cary Grant movies is Cary Grant living a settled middle-class family life with a wife, children, and unexciting job. Yet that is exactly the kind of man he plays in one of my favorite films of his, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

In this picture Grant plays a New York adman, Jim Blandings (even his name makes him sound ordinary), with a wife, Muriel (Myrna Loy), and two young daughters. Everything about the Blandings is conventional. They live in a New York City apartment, their daughters attend an expensive, progressive private school, they have a devoted longtime housekeeper and a pet canary. The only real problem they face is that they have outgrown their two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. This is conveyed in the opening minutes of the picture, as Grant gets out of bed at exactly 7:30 a.m. and begins his morning regimen. In one long take the camera follows Grant as he moves through the cramped apartment, down the narrow hallway, carefully maneuvering around furniture from one small room to the next. He finally ends up in the tiny bathroom, where, in a precisely timed physical comedy routine performed from the waist up, he attempts to shave while his wife attempts to perform her morning toilet at the same time .

Muriel's solution to the uncomfortable living conditions is to knock out a wall and redecorate. Jim has a more radical solution—buy a Colonial farmhouse in Connecticut he has seen advertised in the newspaper, join the postwar exodus from the city, and become a commuter. When Muriel agrees to the plan, the Blandings think their space problem is solved. Little do they know that their real problems are just beginning. When the house they've bought turns out to be a wreck that is beyond repair, they reluctantly follow expert advice to have it demolished and start from scratch with a new house. The new solution to their problems, however, proves to be a Pandora's Box, as one complication leads to another in a cascading series of comic mishaps. As each of these crises is dealt with, another arises and expenses mount. "Anyone who builds a house today is crazy," Jim finally complains. "You start to build a house and wind up in the poorhouse." But by now it's too late to turn back, and when the Blandings family is suddenly evicted from their apartment, they must move into the new house before it is even finished.

Jim has other problems to deal with as well. At work he has been saddled with a problem account no one else has been able to cope with, a canned pork product called Wham. As the deadline for a new advertising slogan for the product approaches, he just can't come up with anything suitable. On the personal front, he must deal with family friend Bill Cole, an attorney whose constant presence advising the Blandings on the numerous legal ramifications of the project begins to arouse Jim's jealousy. You see, Muriel dated Bill in college and was once briefly engaged to him. That Bill has never married leads everyone (including the viewer) to suspect he is still carrying a torch for Muriel.

Like the W. C. Fields movies of the 1930s, this film is a study of comic frustration, the reactions of a man to situations and people—including his own family—that test his patience at every turn. But being Cary Grant, not W. C. Fields, Jim Blandings must keep up his cool demeanor and conceal his bewilderment at all times, whether dealing with his patronizing daughters, sweetly headstrong wife, difficult construction workers, or that elusive advertising slogan. Grant plumbs these situations for their maximum comedic effect and, using his finely calibrated sense of timing whether the comedy is physical or verbal, never lets us lose sight of the exasperation simmering just beneath his controlled surface.

He always seems to find just the right balance between expressiveness and restraint, the constant struggle to tamp down explosive emotions just before they manage to burst through. From the slow burn as his young daughter lectures him at the breakfast table on the advertising industry's callous exploitation of human gullibility, to the record number of trademark Cary Grant double-takes he delivers in the scene where he comes home after spending the night in the city, only to find that his one-time rival Bill Cole has spent the night in the house alone with Muriel—above all, he uses his facial expressions to convey the struggle between his inner frustration and his need to maintain composure. Seldom has the depiction of such a struggle—played with apparent seriousness—seemed so funny.

If Grant uses all his considerable expertise to suggest without openly showing, in all fairness it must be admitted that he is given an ideal context in which to showcase this ability. The excellent screenplay is by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, a writing and later writing-directing team who were no strangers to comedy that blends subtle physical humor with witty verbal humor, working together on some thirty pictures, including several films for Bob Hope, Bing Crosby (both separately and together), and Danny Kaye. The plot, adapted from a 1946 novel, isn't exactly unfamiliar, resembling in many ways the very entertaining 1942 Jack Benny movie George Washington Slept Here, based on a play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. But if a number of the situations are similar, the characters are distinct from Hart and Kaufman's, and the addition of elements such as the Blandings children moves the plot in new directions. And Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, with their obvious onscreen chemistry, strike me as a more convincing couple than grouchy, self-centered Jack Benny and gorgeous Ann Sheridan.

Kudos must also go to Grant's costars, Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas, who lend Grant expert support. At this point Loy, who had been one of the biggest box office stars of the late 1930s when she was at MGM, was just re-establishing her acting career after taking several years off during World War II to work for the Red Cross. Like most actresses in their early forties, she didn't have an easy time finding more mature characters to play. Onscreen, she had been a mother for several years, to Nick Junior in the Thin Man movies, but by the mid-1940s that series was winding down. In The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), playing the mother of a grown daughter, she showed what a fine dramatic actress she could be. But she was really at her best in light comedies like Mr. Blandings. No screen actress of the studio era was able to combine a surface manner of deadpan comic vagueness with underlying intelligence the way Loy did, a combination of qualities that comes through beautifully in the scene where she describes to the decorators the exact shade of color she wants each room in the new house to be painted.

An equally inspired casting decision was the choice of Melvyn Douglas to play Bill Cole. Like Loy, Douglas had been involved in the war effort for several years and when he returned to pictures after the war found it impossible to get the kind of parts he was accustomed to. In the 1930s Douglas was a sort of "poor man's" Cary Grant, often being cast as the same kind of sophisticated, urbane character Grant was associated with. In fact, Douglas got the best role of his early career, playing opposite Greta Garbo as an impoverished French count in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, only because Grant, Lubitsch's first choice for the part, turned it down, probably because he sensed that Garbo's was the dominant role. So casting Douglas as the college rival of Jim Blandings for Muriel's affection made perfect movie sense. For his part, Douglas seems content to play second fiddle to Cary Grant, never trying to upstage him, but finding his own niche in the proceedings by regarding Jim Blandings's befuddlement and misguided jealousy with amused detachment as he narrates the picture in voice-over.

Despite the departure of Cary Grant from his accustomed screen persona and despite the presence of old pros Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas, not to mention a number of scene-stealing character actors like Louise Beavers, Reginald Denny, and Harry Shannon, this is first and foremost a Cary Grant picture with Grant very much at the center of the movie. Cary Grant was really a far more versatile actor than he is usually given credit for. He may have made a very successful career of impersonating his own self-created screen persona, but if you look at a list of all the movies he made, it's clear that this screen persona was actually quite an adaptable one. It also seems clear that for a few years after World War II he made a real effort to stretch the boundaries of that persona in films like Notorious, The Bishop's Wife, People Will Talk, and this one before returning in the 1950s to roles that were a more comfortable fit with his debonair image. Grant's harassed family man in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House might not be as extreme a departure as some of the parts he essayed during this period, but in hewing closer to the familiar and still being in many ways unprecedented, it is one of his most delightful performances and among my very favorites of the thirty-five year long career of the man I consider the quintessential screen actor.

This post is part of the LAMB Acting School 101 on Cary Grant. For more on this event click here.

Movie Houses: Memorable Homes from Ten Classic Films

Ever since Aristotle wrote his Poetics breaking down narrative literature into its constituent parts, setting—where and when a story takes place—has been considered one of the fundamental elements of narration. In narrative film, which is essentially a visual art, where the action occurs is if anything even more important than in literature. In the past I've written about the importance of setting in Mon Oncle and also in The Haunting and The Magnificent Ambersons, specifically the houses where those movies take place. In this post I'd like to discuss ten more movies where the setting not only is visually striking and vividly atmospheric, but also plays an important part in the narrative. Here they are, then, in no particular order:

• Citizen Kane (1941). "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree," wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That Charles Foster Kane named his mansion Xanadu is a good indication of the character's megalomania. The house depicted in Citizen Kane certainly seems to be the residence of a man with delusions of grandeur. And its position high on a hilltop—part fortress, part prison—underscores the isolation of Kane in his later years. Xanadu is the first thing we see in the movie, a light in one window, the window of the room where Kane lies dying and utters that enigmatic last word "Rosebud" as the snow globe slips out of his hand and rolls across the floor. It's also the last thing we see, in complete darkness now with smoke rising from the chimney. What a frisson when we realize exactly what is burning in that massive fireplace in front of which the second Mrs. Kane whiled away the hours with her jigsaw puzzles.

• Lost Horizon (1937). Shangri-La has become synonymous with paradise, and practically everyone, not just moviegoers, recognizes the name. When Frank Capra filmed James Hilton's novel, his set designers came up with an unforgettable vision of that exotic Himalayan home of ageless monks and their Utopian community. The design details could only be called eclectic, an eccentric fusion of modernist, Babylonian, Moorish, and Asian elements, both inside and out, that mirrors the vague East/West mysticism of the monks. The grounds are complete with reflecting pools, wandering ornamental wildfowl, architectonic conifers, and weeping Chinese trees. Dominating it all are the radiant blue skies and brilliant sunlight of Southern California.

• Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). This house could have come right out of a Currier & Ives print, so closely does it conform to the archetype of the upper middle-class American home circa 1900. The movie, all about the tribulations of the Smith family when they learn they must leave St. Louis after the father of the family takes a job in New York City, follows what will be the last few months in their familiar home as the family faces the approaching move with mounting apprehension. This house should be an idyllic place, a place of security, stability, and happiness. And everything about it does indeed convey exactly those feelings of wholesome normalcy. Who could bear to leave a place of such idealized Midwestern homeyness for the uncertainty of life in the big city?

• The Beauty and the Beast (1946). Cocteau's vision of the Beast's home is ravishingly beautiful, strange, and magical. This is a living house, where everything—from the caryatids supporting the fireplace mantelshelf to the candelabra held by human arms that swivel to light Belle's passage down the dark hallway to her room—is alive. The imaginative detail that went into this setting—indeed, into everything about the movie, including its props, costumes, and makeup—is astounding and, once seen, impossible to forget. There has never been anything quite like it in any other live-action movie: a fairy tale vision that easily does justice to the fantastic story it's such a big part of.

• Rebel Without a Cause (1955). One of the first, and probably the definitive, teen alienation movies, with James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo as the alienated teens. Near the end of the movie the three meet at an abandoned mansion and in a poignant sequence role-play the ideal family they long for in their real lives. This is a place of escape and fantasy, and its dereliction suggests the impossibility of their dream world. The actual location used was the Getty Mansion in Hollywood, where those scenes were shot over the course of several nights. This is, coincidentally, the same location used as Norma Desmond's mansion in Sunset Boulevard, and the empty swimming pool with Dean, Wood, and Mineo in it pictured above is the same one in which the body of Joe Gillis floats as he narrates that movie in flashback. This and other filming locations for Rebel are described in a fascinating post at the blogsite Dear Old Hollywood, which is where I located the screenshot above.

• Rebecca (1940). "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Nobody who has seen this movie will forget that line. Nor will they forget the spooky seaside mansion where Maxim de Winter takes his shy, unassertive second wife, a house that is in a sense haunted by the dead Rebecca, the charismatic first wife of Maxim de Winter. At Manderley the second Mrs. de Winter's isolation is not only physical but also social. A former paid companion, she is intimidated by the responsibility of being in charge of such a large house and staff (especially the resentful, domineering Mrs. Danvers) and by trying desperately to fit in with the idle rich with whom her new husband socializes. Alfred Hitchcock, himself the son of a greengrocer, makes Manderley a representation of the profoundly ingrained class system of pre-World War II Britain and makes it easy for the viewer to identify with the class insecurity of the timid young bride unaccustomed to the privilege and wealth of her new social position.

• Gone with the Wind (1939). So essential is Scarlett O'Hara's plantation Tara to the movie that composer Max Steiner actually gave it its own musical theme. Tara represents an idealized vision of the antebellum South. Its destruction in the Civil War devastates Scarlett, and her obsession with restoring it to its previous glory becomes the driving motivation of her life. To achieve this she marries two men she doesn't love for their money and even kills. At the end of the movie, after she has lost everything else, she returns to Tara and vows to make it the Edenic place it once was. In its way, Tara is nearly as essential to the plot of the movie as any of the main characters. In a movie of lavish expenditure, clearly not a dollar was spared by David O. Selznick on making Tara the image of everything it stands for in Scarlett's memory.

• Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Shot at several palaces in Bavaria, this movie would be inconceivable without its locations. Remove those and what would remain? Little but enigmatic characters and an impenetrable fugue of a plot. It's the look of this movie that makes it an unforgettable one of a kind: those people encountering one another in baroque salons encrusted with elaborate ornamentation or in mind-bending halls of mirrors, or standing about like statues in those absolutely symmetrical, geometric French-style gardens. Forget the people, forget trying to make sense of the plot or the dialogue. Just lose yourself in those timeless, hallucinatory images. Location, location, location—that's what this film is all about.

• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). While most of the other homes I've written about are rather grand places, the setting of this film is just the opposite. Located in a run-down building ironically named Elysian Fields, the home of Stanley and Stella Kowalski is a shabby, cramped apartment. The set designers (who won an Oscar for their work) actually turn the movie's stage origin to its advantage by creating a claustrophobic vision of poverty that looks all the more stark in the film's black-and-white cinematography by Harry Stradling, better known for opulent movies like The Picture of Dorian Gray or Technicolor extravaganzas like The Pirate and My Fair Lady. Here he perfectly captures the bleakness of the Kowalskis' apartment, with its sparse furnishings, overstuffed appearance, harsh lighting, and hanging electric cords snaking across the top of the frame. Stanley Kowalski, in his sweaty T-shirt, looks right at home here, but his fantasist sister-in-law Blanche du Bois, in her frilly, virginal Southern belle frocks, seems completely out of place in this absolutely realistic vision of limited resources and frustrated hopes.

• Psycho (1960). How else could I end this post but with what is probably the most identifiable movie house in all cinema? Old-fashioned, a bit dilapidated, and in need of a fresh coat of paint it may be, but once you've seen what goes on inside, that ordinary-looking old house looming eerily on an isolated hilltop will be burned into your memory, the ultimate image of creepiness, menace, and perversion hiding behind an innocuous facade—just like its inhabitant, Norman Bates. Who but Alfred Hitchcock could have taken such a hackneyed idea and made it so thoroughly convincing and so thoroughly entertaining?

I've limited myself to ten memorable movie homes drawn from my favorite era in cinema, some of the ones that made the strongest impressions on me. If anyone would like to add favorites of your own, please do leave a comment.

Unseen Menace at Hill House: Robert Wise's The Haunting

During his 45-year long career as a motion picture director, Robert Wise (1914-2005) worked in just about every imaginable genre: fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, boxing movies, multi-generational family sagas, tearjerkers, war pictures, romances, historical epics. In his early career he showed a special affinity for film noir, and many of his later movies in other genres, such as I Want to Live! and the heist movie Odds Against Tomorrow, have a distinct film noir look and sensibility. He came late to musicals, but the first one he directed, West Side Story (1961) won him his first Oscar for directing, and his second musical, The Sound of Music (1965), won him a second Oscar for directing four years later.

In between these two big-budget, large-scale productions, Wise went to England and directed a modestly-budgeted black-and-white film with no major stars, The Haunting (1963). This is perhaps the definitive example of the haunted-house movie, a venerable genre dating back at least to 1927's The Cat and the Canary and one of enduring popularity. Based on the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, published in 1959, The Haunting has a simple premise. A psychical researcher, Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), invites several people with confirmed psychic abilities to spend time with him in the supposedly haunted Hill House in New England as part of a research project to determine if any objective signs of haunting can be verified. In the end, only three people accept his invitation: Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), a skeptical young man with no psychic abilities who is about to inherit Hill House, Theodora (Claire Bloom), a clairvoyant, and Nell Lance (Julie Harris), a depressed woman with a history of attracting paranormal phenomena.

As for plot, not a great deal really happens. The four characters meet, become acquainted, and spend several nights in the house. During this time strange things do indeed occur. The movie accepts as a given the existence of the supernatural. There is no uncertainty or ambiguity here as in The Innocents (1961), the wonderful movie based on the short novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in which the film neither confirms nor denies the existence of the ghosts that Deborah Kerr believes haunt the house where she has been hired as governess to two strange children. In that movie the ghosts might be real or they might be figments of Kerr's troubled imagination; the viewer never knows for sure. In The Haunting there is never any doubt that some strange force, whether ghostly or otherwise, is present in Hill House and torments its inhabitants.

On the other hand, the exact nature of this mysterious force is never revealed, and it is never shown or made explicit in any way. This approach is not surprising, given Robert Wise's history. His first experiences as a credited director were at RKO for producer Val Lewton. Lewton was the man famous for the nine low-budget horror films he produced at RKO in the 1940s in which the horror, while quite real, was never actually shown but only suggested. Not only did this strategy keep the budget down by eliminating the need for special effects, but Lewton felt strongly that horror was most effective when only suggested and not seen. Typical of this approach is the first Lewton film in this vein, the classic The Cat People (1942).

Two of the three movies Wise directed for Lewton were horror films—The Curse of the Cat People (1944), co-directed with Gunther von Fritsch and ostensibly a sequel to The Cat People, although it has very little to do with the original movie, and The Body Snatcher (1945), based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson and inspired by the notorious Burke and Hare, grave robbers in 19th-century Scotland. Wise's decision to apply the Lewton approach to The Haunting was a prudent one. It reconfirmed Lewton's premise that the prospect of horror can be a good deal more frightening than the actual experience, that unseen menace can evoke a greater sense of dread in the characters and in the viewer than monsters that are shown, and that the human imagination's inchoate images of horror can be far more potent agents of terror than those that are manifest. In fact, Wise has called The Haunting "almost [a] tribute to Lewton and my days with him."

One reason the Lewton approach is so effective is that it requires the viewer to be more than just a passive recipient of horrifying images; it makes the viewer become an active participant in his or her own terrorization. The greatest source of fear then becomes fear itself. In The Haunting this is true not only of the audience but of the characters in the movie as well. The monstrous force in Hill House seems intent on teasing and terrifying these people without ever revealing itself. The movie's emphasis therefore is less on action than on characterization, less on what happens than on the effect events have on the people involved. This is especially true of Nell, and although The Haunting is technically an ensemble piece, it is her character above all else that powers the movie.

Nell narrates the movie through her thoughts and internal responses. She is in many ways an archetypal Shirley Jackson character. Like the main character in Jackson's best known and frequently anthologized short story "The Lottery," Nell is a woman who finds herself trapped in a situation of escalating unreality, dread, and horror, a situation in which a personally destructive outcome becomes more and more certain and unavoidable, until finally there is nothing to do but give in and let the inevitable happen. As in "The Lottery," this is a state of victimhood that seems paradoxically both random and predestined. Once the sequence of events is set in motion, the end result becomes inescapable. This loss of control over one's destiny surely lies at the heart of all horror stories: What could be more frightening than the prospect of losing control of one's life to an all-powerful force of destruction?

The menace to Nell comes not only from the outside, from the house itself, but also from the inside, for her own internal sense of fatalism drives her to reach out and embrace the destructive power whose presence in the house she senses. As in all great tragedies, Nell is at least in part the agent of her own destruction, driven by forces that originate deep within her and over which she has no control. She is a deeply troubled woman who feels guilt over her mother's death and extreme alienation from her family and the world around her. "For the past eleven years," she says at one point, "I've been walled up on a desert island. . . . The only thing that kept me going was the feeling that someday something extraordinary would happen."

When Nell learns of Hill House, even before she goes there, she becomes convinced almost to the point of obsession that her destiny lies there. And once she arrives, this conviction grows ever stronger. Her anxiety exacerbated by the sexual attraction she feels for Dr. Markway (and perhaps by a repressed response to the lesbianism of Theo), she becomes progressively more delusional, believing with the certainty of the truly paranoid that something malevolent in the house is targeting her.

Nell actually begins to feel that her consciousness is merging with whatever mystical force it is that inhabits the house: "I'm coming apart a little at a time," she says. "I'm disappearing inch by inch into this house." One of the eeriest sequences in the movie occurs when Dr. Markway's wife turns up unexpectedly and the house terrorizes her and attempts to drive her out. It is almost as if an act of thought-transference between Nell and the house occurs and the house, reacting to the jealousy and hostility of Nell toward Mrs. Markway, puts into effect Nell's subconscious wishes.

Wise's experience directing horror movies for Val Lewton is not the only of his formative experiences to influence The Haunting. Before becoming a director, Wise was for many years a film editor. Two of the last movies he edited before turning to directing were Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. (In fact, Wise has said in interviews that when The Magnificent Ambersons was taken out of Welles's control by RKO and re-edited after disastrous previews, he shot additional scenes, uncredited, to cover gaps in continuity.) If film noir got its attitude from John Huston's version of The Maltese Falcon, then it took its look from Citizen Kane. The Kane look informed much of Wise's work before West Side Story, and it is much in evidence in The Haunting, with its somber interiors, atmospheric use of light and shadow, and deep-focus photography perfected by Gregg Toland, the cinematographer of Citizen Kane.

From The Magnificent Ambersons Wise retained the concept of the house itself as an additional character in the movie. Anyone who has seen that movie knows what a huge role the house plays in it. Built specifically for the film, the Amberson house was at the time one of the most elaborate sets ever constructed, each room actually having four walls and a ceiling. RKO reused it or portions of it for many other films, including The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People. The grand staircase appears in Lewton's The Seventh Victim in two guises, first with its intricate stained-glass windows intact as part of the private school where Kin Hunter teaches, and again, its windows covered over with paneling, as the staircase of the apartment building where her sister lives.

In The Haunting, Hill House is literally a fifth main character. Like the Amberson house, it is a rambling Victorian Gothic mansion with a dark, ornately over-decorated, labyrinthine interior. But whereas the Amberson house is almost a place of refuge from the real world, Hill House is a sinister place whose inhabitants have a way of suffering tragic, violent, and sudden death, almost as though, as Nell believes, the house is possessed by an evil numinous presence that turns it into a malicious killer.

The final element that makes The Haunting such a good movie is Julie Harris, who plays the unstable Nell with such subtlety and precision. Harris is one of the great almost-unknown American actresses. She has appeared in many stage plays, movies, television episodes, and several television series. Her first movie was The Member of the Wedding (1952), in which she repeated her role as the tomboy Frankie in the play by Carson McCullers, which was based on her own novel. Harris was 27-years old when the movie was released, yet she convincingly plays a 12-year old girl (and in the process received an Oscar nomination as best actress). She was the first Sally Bowles on Broadway and in the movie version of I Am a Camera (1955). When she appeared in East of Eden (1955), she received top billing, above James Dean. From the late 1950's, she turned more to television and the stage. On television she has played Anastasia, Queen Victoria, Nora in A Doll's House, and Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. Her one-woman show, The Belle of Amherst, in which she played Emily Dickinson, is legendary, and she received a Tony award for it. In fact, she holds the record for more Tony nominations (ten) and wins (five, tied with Angela Lansbury) than any other performer.

Harris is especially known for playing introverted, sensitive, or neurotic roles—all qualities which made her the ideal choice to play Nell in The Haunting. It is to Wise's credit that he cast the most capable actress imaginable in the role of Nell and not a major star, for even with all its other strengths, for me the movie ultimately succeeds because of the complete authenticity of Harris's performance. Her ability to convince the viewer that this peculiar character is absolutely genuine takes the movie way beyond its genre. Harris makes you see from the beginning how Nell's fragility makes her susceptible to the destructive potential in the situation at Hill House, and she makes the gradual process of Nell's psychological disintegration vivid and believable.

It is illuminating to compare The Haunting to haunted-house movies with a more contemporary sensibility like the seminal Poltergeist (1982), a fine film in its own right. Poltergeist aims above all to thrill, and its thrills are the visceral kind. Its conventional middle-class characters and everyday suburban setting are intended in their ordinariness to create in the viewer a feeling of identification. Its very real monsters are shown in specific detail in both their ethereal form and their gruesome physical form. It supplies the viewer with a rational explanation for the events, an explanation that exists in a moral universe of guilt and punishment, a universe where bad things happen for comprehensible reasons and where chaos is a temporary anomaly that can be corrected.

The Haunting does none of these things. Its aim is to chill the viewer by evoking a disturbing mood and atmosphere. Its characters are far from typical—a rich boy, an academic in an esoteric field, a bohemian lesbian, and a self-tormented neurotic. Its setting is not part of a mundane modern community but macabre, antiquated, and isolated. Its evil too is real but is never shown and never explained in rational or moral terms; it exists solely as an incomprehensible irruption of chaos into the familiar world. It has neither larger meaning nor explanation; it simply is. Poltergeist is the updated movie equivalent of a sensationalistic but ultimately reassuring horror comic book from the 1950s. The Haunting is the movie equivalent of a subtle work of genre fiction that combines psychology with the supernatural to unnerve the reader without providing reassurance that the menace it describes can ever be controlled. It aims to leave the reader—or in the case of the movie, the viewer—in an unsettled state, the only sense of resolution relief that it all happened to someone else.

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The 2007 documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a Turner Classic Movies production narrated and co-produced by Martin Scorsese, is highly recommended. Robert Wise appears in archival footage as one of those interviewed about Lewton. The Haunting was remade, by most accounts unsuccessfully, in 1999.

Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 3

Monsieur Hulot in the Brave New World

Jacques Tati was not a hurried or haphazard filmmaker. His third feature-length film, Mon Oncle (1958), was released five years after his second, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, and the five years Tati spent making Mon Oncle is apparent in its meticulous conception and execution. One remarkable thing about Tati's films is the clear sense of evolution from one to the next. In each successive film he seemed to take elements he had perfected in the previous film and add new ones to the mix. In this way, his movies grew progressively more complex, more sophisticated, and more ambitious, in both the technical and the thematic sense.

Tati's first movie, Jour de Fête (1949), with its emphasis on physical comedy and the precision timing of its physical gags, has much in common with the work of Buster Keaton. His second movie, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, continues the physical comedy of Jour de Fête, although not in such a purely kinetic way, and builds on that film by intensifying the emphasis on characterization. It takes the concept of that earlier film's main character (François the village postman) as comic outsider and applies it even more assiduously to Tati's new creation, M. Hulot. Leaving in his wake a trail of comic chaos, M. Hulot becomes by the end of the movie the kind of social pariah Harold Lloyd played in movies like The Freshman.

Tati recognized that in M. Hulot he had created a perfect Everyman character, one whose simultaneous universality and individuality enabled Tati to devise nearly any conceivable comic situation around this versatile character. Keeping M. Hulot as the main character of Mon Oncle, Tati added to Keaton's physicality and Lloyd's use of character as the starting point of the story a new element: the topicality of Charles Chaplin. If Modern Times (1936)—admittedly, inspired at least in part by René Clair's A Nous la Liberté (1932)—is Chaplin's take on modernity, then Mon Oncle is the first of two movies in which Tati tackled head-on the same subject: the tribulations of the ordinary man alone and alienated in the mystifying modern world.

Yet in fact the germ of those two elements—modern life and alienation—is present in Tati's two earlier films. Consider François's flirtation with modernity in Jour de Fête, in which his disastrous experimentation with what he believes are modern American methods of postal delivery ends with his abandoning the idea and returning to traditional methods. Consider also the rather melancholic ending of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, in which M. Hulot, shunned by the adults at the seaside resort where he is vacationing, ends up on the beach with the children, just about the only people in the movie who will accept his childlike but well-intentioned misbehavior. In this ending there is a sense that M. Hulot is for the first time in his life consciously aware of his apartness from other people. With such awareness inevitably comes the onset of existential alienation, and that is precisely the state Tati explores in a satirical way in Mon Oncle.

Mon Oncle opens on a construction site with the sound of jackhammers heard behind the credits. The film immediately switches to a deserted early morning street in an old section of Paris, with mellow, jazzy Parisian popular music playing on the soundtrack. To the sounds of accordion, banjo, and vibraphone, a group of dogs—several mongrels and one purebred dachshund—are cheerfully roaming, romping with one another, scrounging through the street refuse, and marking their territory. The dogs make their way through a transitional zone with the rubble of razed buildings in the foreground and newly constructed apartment buildings that look like concrete boxes in the background, eventually ending up in a new suburban neighborhood in front of an ultra-modern bungalow with a modernistic metal gate. At this point the dachshund squeezes underneath the gate and is home. This is the house of the Arpels—M. Hulot's sister, her husband, and their son, his nephew Gérard.

In the first few minutes of the film, Tati has staked out his thematic territory: the contrast between the modern world of the Arpels and the traditional world of M. Hulot. Like Tati's earlier movies, Mon Oncle is loosely constructed as a series of episodes filled with sight and sound gags. But unlike Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, where M. Hulot is at the center of each episode, here the episodes are linked conceptually, by the idea of the conflict between modernity and tradition. From the beginning it is clear where Tati's sympathies lie: Everything about the modern world is depicted as soulless, characterless, and spiritually enervating as it relentlessly destroys the old to make way for the new, as it consumes the traditional world and dehumanizes its inhabitants like M. Hulot.

M. Hulot's neighborhood, where the movie starts, is colorful and lively. It is filled with people, activity, and life lived in the open. Everywhere we hear the sounds of life—of dogs barking, music playing, and people chatting with their neighbors and with the vendors in the market stalls of the square. In the streets we see eccentric characters—a deliveryman with a horse-drawn cart; a man sweeping the streets with a crudely fashioned broom; a tipsy man in a raincoat, pajamas, slippers, and beret walking his dog on a leash; a group of disheveled schoolboys who have ditched school playing practical jokes on unsuspecting strangers.

The world of the Arpels couldn't be more different. In their neighborhood the streets are empty except for automobiles. The buildings either present blank facades to the street or, like their own house, are sequestered behind fences. While M. Hulot either walks or rides his motocyclette, M. Arpel drives his huge American Oldsmobile everywhere, delivering his son to his newly built school that looks more like a factory or prison than a school, or to his own modern factory, where his company, Plastac, manufactures plastic pipes and hoses.

In Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Tati used locations to convey moods, and more specifically he used the Hôtel de la Plage, where M. Hulot spent his vacation, essentially as a character in the movie. In Mon Oncle, Tati also uses architecture and buildings as characters. M. Hulot's apartment building is a rambling, improvised structure clearly added to many times over the years without any thought of overall design. M. Hulot's apartment, on the top floor, is reached by a circuitous route up staircases, across an interior landing, down another flight of stairs, across an exterior terrace, around the side of the building, and up another flight of stairs that leads to his apartment, which appears to be a series of small rooms perched on a former rooftop.

M. Hulot's apartment building

The Arpel house, perhaps the most striking modern residence ever seen in a non-science fiction movie (it easily outdoes the houses in Leave Her to Heaven and North by Northwest), stands in total contrast to M. Hulot's building. To call this house futuristic would be an understatement. The yard leading to the front door is fragmented into geometric shapes that are paved or filled with gravel or tiny patches of precisely manicured grass. In this environment artificial flowers are preferred to real ones because "they're made to last." The few examples of real vegetation are topiary pruned into rigidly geometric forms—cubes, spheres, cones. Two plant-like structures espaliered on the wall of the house appear to be made of barbed wire, the barbs imitating leaves. Dominating all is a hideous fountain with a large, upright metal fish that vaguely resembles a marlin, spewing water dyed a cyanic blue color.

The house itself is a streamlined, two-story, block-like structure with two round windows resembling eyes in the main room of the second floor. The rooms in the uninviting, minimalist interior of the house are boxy, nearly empty of furnishings, and relentlessly colorless and monochromatic. In this house even a single leaf that has blown in from outdoors mars the perfect order and must be gingerly picked up and disposed of by the obsessively tidy Mme. Arpel. Everything in the hi-tech house that can be automated, mechanized, or turned into a gadget has been; even opening a kitchen cupboard is a complicated mechanical procedure that thoroughly confounds M. Hulot. To call this setting sterile would be putting it mildly.

The Arpels' futuristic house

But more importantly, this environment precisely reflects the way its inhabitants think and live. Theirs is a totally planned and controlled world with no room for spontaneity, a humorless place where playfulness is inappropriate, where every thing and every activity must be serious, practical, and functional. Being tidy, methodical, and productive are the most highly prized personal traits in this world. Having wholly internalized this ethos, M. and Mme. Arpel are the ultimate conformist consumers, with an almost worshipful attitude toward modernity and a fetishistic devotion to all things fashionable and up-to-date.

Only two people seem uncomfortable in this environment: M. Hulot and Gérard, the Arpels' young son. Gérard's parents attempt to instill in him their own belief in the value of the totally regimented life—scheduling his day, urging him to apply himself to productive pursuits like school and study, and discouraging him from any activities they deem frivolous. Naturally, the last includes most of the things Gérard would prefer to be doing. Just as the Arpels' dachshund Daqui enjoys roaming the streets with the mongrels of H. Hulot's shabby but colorful neighborhood, Gérard understandably prefers to play hooky and loaf with his uncle or the street kids in M. Hulot's neighborhood.

When Mme. Arpel decides that her brother is a bad influence on Gérard, she urges her husband to find M. Hulot a job in his plastics factory. This results in a long set piece—one of several in the film—that is essentially an extended version of one of the series of small misadventures in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Assigned a simple, mind-numbingly routine job—to oversee a self-regulating machine that extrudes lengths of what appears to be red plastic garden hose—M. Hulot turns an apparently foolproof job into a comic disaster. As his attention wanders, his lengths of hose, rather than being of regular and unvarying diameter, begin to resemble a string of sausages, all bulges and pinches. M. Hulot is unable either to keep up with the speed of the machine or to stop it before it extrudes a tremendous length of irregular hose that must be discarded.

Unable to perform this simple task, M. Hulot is in the end exiled by the Arpels, sent off to a new job at another factory in a different part of France. The last we see of him is as he is dropped off at the airport by M. Arpel and Gérard. It will be nine years before M. Hulot lands—in Tati's next film, Play Time (1967)—in a world even more unsettling than this one. In the brave new world of Mon Oncle, we at least see vestiges of a recognizably human environment precariously enduring the onslaught of modernity. In Play Time even those last vestiges of humanity will be gone forever.