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Ask FlickChick: Vicious rabbits, hypnotic hyjinks and more movie questions
Last Year at Marienbad courtesy StudioCanal
Questions about a two-headed rabbit movie, a killer hypnotist and why credits moved to the end of the movie from the start and more.
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!
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Question: In a film class a few years ago I saw a movie about a man trapped on an island. He falls in love with a woman, who is in love with or engaged to a different man. The image that's stuck in my memory is of the three of them in a garden: They make shadows on the ground, but the statues in the garden cast no shadow. I was just sitting in on the class and have absolutely no memory of anything else in the film but that scene. I tried googling what I could remember with no luck- can you help me? -- Penny
FlickChick: Something about the shadows (here's a larger image) makes me think Last Year at Marienbad (1962), which involves an oblique, almost ghostly relationship between a man referred to as X (Giorgio Albertazzi), a woman referred to a A (Delphine Seyrig) and A's husband or lover (Sacha Pitoeff). It's a classic film-course film and while they're not on an island, they are isolated within the grounds of a luxurious European spa hotel (the real Marienbad spa is in the Czech Republic). The plot, such as it is, involves X's attemps to convince A that they met and fell in love the previous year, and that she promised to run away with him. It's one of the love-it-or-hate-it greats of sixties art cinema and interestingly, it was inspired – uncredited - by a novel called the Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares that does take place on an island. Reading it sheds an interesting light on the movie's notoriously slippery narrative.
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Question: Here's something that's been bothering me for some time. When and why did movies change from the credits being in the beginning to the end? Older movies have all the credits prior to the beginning of the film and now the information is at the end. Why and when did it change? Thanks. J. S.
FlickChick: Sometime in the mid-sixties, and it was because credits got longer. That, in turn, I can only assume is because various unions militated for greater onscreen representation as part of their contracts and got it. If you look at movies made in the 1930s and '40s, the number of behind-the-scenes personnel credits onscreen is extremely small, whereas now the end credits can run for five or ten minutes (or more for a movie with heavy-duty special effects), which is a long time to expect moviegoers to wait for something to happen. The concession is that now you get the top credits at the beginning – stars, director, writer, producer and a handful of others – and everybody else goes to the end of the line. And almost all movies now show the credits over the movie's first scene, so even as you're seeing the names of high profile you're also getting into the movie. The downside is that moviegoers tend to walk out during the end credits. The upside is that you stand a far better chance of finding out who "laughing girl in elevator" was than you do with older movies. That may sound silly, but maybe "laughing girl in elevator" made a real impression in her two-minutes on screen and you want to look out for her in future. Fuller credits make it much easier to trace an actor's career from bit parts to starring roles than it was when you had to really on anecdotal evidence (an interview with someone who worked on a movie and remembers that she met a sweet girl named Marilyn Monroe who played the other cigarette girl) or squinting and saying "Wow, could that kid be a really young Burt Reynolds?"
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Question: I remember a horror movie about women who disfigure their faces after seeing a hypnotist or something like that. One sticks her face over the gas stove thinking it was a steamer or the sink or something. It was B&W and no, it wasn't The Wizard of Gore. Know the title? -- Kevin
FlickChick: You saw The Hypnotic Eye (1960), a nasty little shocker about a deranged mesmerist billed as "The great Desmond" (Jacques Bergerac) who hypnotizes women into mutilating themselves when they go home after his show. Is it good? No. Is it pretty amazing in a super-sleazy way? Yes, yes, yes. Especially when the "hypnotic eye" -– a swirling op-art disk – fills the screen.
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Question: I saw part of this movie over 15 years ago, when I was a child. It was back when you got charged for pay-per-view movies if you watched the channel for a longer then a few minutes. The movie had something to do with infected rabbits: I remember one scene in which a man and women character looked into a rabbit cage in some kind of medical building and the rabbit had two heads and scary teeth. Do you have any idea what it is? -- Michelle
FlickChick: I haven't seen Night of the Lepus (1972) in a long, long time – frankly it's such a bad, slow movie that I'm loathe to sit through it again, even with my finger on fast-forward – but when I hear about a scary movie with rabbits it's the first thing that comes to mind. A pair of zoologists are hired to try to disrupt the rabbit breeding cycle on behalf of a rancher with a serious bunny problem. But their research instead mutates their test rabbits into giant, meat-eating killer rabbits. Are you scared yet?
However, I also wonder whether you might have seen a few minutes of The Thing With Two Heads (1972), whose special effects team includes future effects guru Rick Baker – I remember a couple of lab scenes involving two-headed animal try-outs for the final transplant, which involves grafting the head of a white racist (poor one-time major movie star Ray Milland) onto the body of a black man (football player-turned-actor Rosie Grier) , whereupon the two heads launch into a screaming match across the inch or so that divides them.
Readers, any other thoughts?
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Jun 28, 2007 5:03 PM
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While there is the risk of those who contributed not getting their due because of people leaving at the end, I really like the movies that have NO credits at the beginning.
Like "Batman Begins" which briefly shows the title and then you're off and running. When you finally get to the end and it cuts to black and then you see "Directed by Christopher Nolan" it's really powerful somehow. You find yourself going "Good job Christopher!"
I've seen several recent movies that have done this. I think credits during the opening scenes can be distracting and they also spoil the surprise of some actors you may not have known were in the movie. For instance, I didn't know Morgan Freeman was in "Batman Begins" until he showed up and I was thrilled!
And I am one of those film geeks who will sit there until the last credit rolls or the usher comes and runs me off.... Because one of the downsides of some of the multi-plexes with their 87 million viewing times is they sometimes don't even run all the credits so they can get the next showing started. One can only hope this is a trend that doesn't continue....
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Jun 28, 2007 5:52 PM
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Maitland - How do you recall
specific scenes of movies seen so long
ago? Do you have a photographic memory,
refer to notes written during viewing
(whether for a review or not), or is there a published or internet source you
use? I'm always astounded at your range
of cinematic knowledge.
BTW: Nancy Drew is another
current movie that saves most credits until the end.
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Jun 28, 2007 9:40 PM
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I always stay until the end of the credits on any Disney movie just to see if they are going to throw something in at the last moment, such as Genie. It drives my kids crazy to sit and wait, but I'm the momma so wait we do.
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Jun 29, 2007 3:08 PM
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I, too, am the movie geek that stays through to the end of the credits (it drives my dates nuts!). My feeling is that lots of people are responsible for the movie and they deserve to have their names seen and noted. Just seems fair. And if there's some unexpected trivia (relatives of the leads and/or execs, for example) or something special at the end, that's a bonus. -- Jenny D
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Jun 29, 2007 3:56 PM
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I have a question related to the credits: when did the credits change from stationary placards (for lack of a better word) to being superimposed over the first scene or a 'live' shot?
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Jun 29, 2007 7:07 PM
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mjryan ...when did the credits change from stationary placards (for lack of a better word) to being superimposed over the first scene or a 'live' shot?
Late-1950s/early-1960s, a time when studio executives were in a complete and total panic about declining movie viewership and at a total loss to understand the interests and tastes of younger moviegoers.
I can't prove it, but my gut is that studio executives noticed that the kind of exploitation/independent pictures that were playing well to younger audiences where big Hollywood pictures weren't jumped right into the story, preferably with something exciting, and ran the credits over the opening scene rather than making the audience sit through a clever credits sequence before the movie started.
The sad thing is that the art of the title sequence is all but lost: I doubt that we'll ever again see anything like Saul Bass' title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (1962), a mini-movie that encapsulates the film's themes before it ever starts.
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Jun 29, 2007 9:16 PM
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Do you like title sequences? Here is a link to an interactive site chock full of images from the master, Saul Bass.
If you're like me, you love the title openings of, say, North by Northwest and The Seven Year Itch ... so you'd want to check this out:
http://www.notcoming.com/saulbass/index2.php
Then mosey on over to this page to read a tidbit about how Saul's work changed how we view movie titles (in the first 3 paragraphs):
http://www.designmuseum.org/design/saul-bass
Finally, finish things up by going to Saul's Wikipedia page where you can see some of his corporate logo design and a slew of his movie posters (Vertigo, baby!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bass
I hope you enjoy Saul as much as I do! He's a hero of mine.
P.S.
I love Phase IV too!
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Jun 29, 2007 11:54 PM
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achyfakey:
I hope you enjoy Saul as much as I do...I love Phase IV too!
Make no mistake: Bass was a genius. That said, my only memories of Phase IV (1972) are anecdotal: I saw it at the Riviera theater, which was torn down soon after to make way for a residential high rise (you can see a glimpse of it in 1973's The Seven Ups, in the car chase across 96th Street); I remember the awful skirt I was wearing, but nothing about the film except that it reminded me of The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971). Perhaps it's time for me to revisit it...
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Jun 30, 2007 1:23 AM
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I have no idea if you will like Phase IV in our post-post-modern world. But I do know that I consider it one of those mostly overlooked smaller sci-fi movies from the early 70s like Silent Running (you know... that age before Spielberg and Lucas where every sci-fi movie had to be "epic" and riddled with expensive effects).
Since you like Saul, it's probably worth a second run on DVD. What the hey...
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Jun 30, 2007 3:14 AM
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achyfakey: Phase IV is officially on my list of films to revisit when it comes to DVD. For the time being, even the OOP VHS tape is hard to come by.
jay: On the subject of my memory... photographic? Definitely not. Paradoxically, I'm someone who thinks in words but remembers images. It always blows my mind that my mother can recite long passages of poetry she memorized as a schoolgirl 60 years ago (she's English, and they were very big on memorizing in her day) while I can't keep two sentences in my head for ten minutes. That's why the weekly Movie Talk vodcast is totally extemporaneous except when I'm on prompter reading scripted copy... copy I wrote, mind you.
But I have an incredibly vivid memory for images: Not just images from movies, but paintings, plays, sculpture, ballets, comics... even images from books -- I couldn't quote the words, but I can remember the picture the words conjured for me. And that quirk of the way I process and store information happens to have served me well as a movie lover.
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Jun 30, 2007 2:30 PM
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