BIRDLAND - Book review

BIRDLAND

Eric Adams

 

Published in 1997, Birdland is psychological suspense novel that concerns Katie Jacobs, who learns about Vincent, a long-lost brother, revealed to her during her mother’s deathbed confession.  Her mother had been involved in the Hitchcock film The Birds. Kate traces Vincent to Bodega Bay, the eerie Californian coastal town of the movie.  The past is raising its head, it seems as Kate finds that Vincent is unduly influenced by a local eccentric, Madame Charay, who is obsessed with all things Hitchcockian. Befriended by the local psychologist, Rob, Kate begins to unravel the convoluted threads of the past. 

The denouement is comparable to Hitchcock himself.

Music to my ears!

I’ve been a fan of film music since the 1960s. So I was very interested and pleased to view three programmes on TV (BBC4) recently. Presented by composer Neil Brand, the series celebrates the art of cinema music and demonstrates how great soundtracks work.

Neil Brand

 

Neil Brand has been accompanying silent films for nearly 30 years, regularly throughout the UK and at film festivals and special events around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, America, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, and, in Italy, the Bologna, Aosta, Bergamo and Pordenone festivals where he has inaugurated the School of Music and Image.  

Training originally as an actor, he has made his name as a writer/performer/composer, scoring BFI video releases of such films as South (Shackleton's Journey to the South Pole), The Ring by Alfred Hitchcock, the great lost film The Life and Times of David Lloyd George and Early Cinema, avant-garde cinema and Russian pre-Soviet cinema. New DVD releases for the Danish Film Institute and Lobster Films, Paris as well as a highly acclaimed jazz score for the 1927 Anna Mae Wong movie Piccadilly which premiered live in September 2003 at the Lincoln Centre, New York and the Barbican concert hall in March 2004. His most recent DVD scores are for Silent Dickens, Silent Britain, The Cat and the Canary (1927) and the Laurel and Hardy short ‘You’re Darn Tootin’.

Brand has toured to Finland’s ‘Midnight Sun’ Festival, Padua Opera House, Kilkenny comedy festival, the Middle Eastern International Film Festival and throughout the UK and abroad with his ‘hilarious and touching’ one-man-show ‘The Silent Pianist Speaks’. He has written the title music and many scores for TV documentaries including Silent Clowns, Silent Britain, Great Britons, The Real Stephen Hawking, The Crimean War, In The Wild: Pandas with Debra Winger, Great Railway Journeys as well as scores for over 70 Radio 4 dramas including War and Peace, the Box of Delights, Brideshead Revisited, Showboat, and Sony award winner A Town Like Alice.

In his overview of cinema music, Brand tells us that the movie score is intended to make the audience hear what you need to – altering the emotional effect the movie makes by the sound attached. Brand moved through the silent era, where films were accompanied by a piano, orchestra or an organ, through the invention of the ‘click track’ to the point in 1933 where Max Steiner made film history by underscoring King Kong.

King Kong (1933)

There were many interesting insights – the simple sequence of notes that signifies a particular character (latterly, the character’s theme), the way Erich Wolfgang Korngold utilised three different themes in a single scene to illustrate the shifting mood of a conversation in Nottingham Forest. Then there is the score of Bernard Hermann for Psycho, with the violin line for the shower scene slashing sharply down the page, in time with the knife cuts – ironically, Hitchcock hadn’t wanted any music for this scene, but Hermann overrode him!

Thanks to composers like Korngold, Steiner and Hermann, classical style of music dominated the movies for many years. Brand then looked at how jazz and pop music became acceptable for soundtracks. John Barry was shown, emerging from his pop incarnation, The John Barry Seven, to Oscar-winning composer.

And finally, Brand showed how synthesisers took over. Not least, the Theremin, invented by a Russian of that name in 1928. This instrument was used by Miklós Rózsa in Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Bernard Hermann in The Day the Earth Stood Still, which led to the sound being adopted for almost all science fiction movies thereafter!

We were treated to interviews with some of the movie soundtrack greats – though never enough are included, inevitably. Richard Sherman, talking about his Mary Poppins music, Vangelis talking about Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, and Hans Zimmer discussing how his music affected the opening scene of Gladiator (I think he was robbed at the Oscars!). It was an audio-visual treat for any film buff.

Gladiator

 

Sadly, I feel that the music in many films (for TV or the theatre) now compromises the film, instead of complementing it. Recent films such as The Dark Knight Rises, A Good Day to Die Hard, TV’s Dr Who, and many US TV imports (though so far not Game of Thrones); the list is becoming longer. Usually, the pace of a film means that information has to be imparted ‘on the run’ so to speak, as there are few quiet moments, so drowned out exposition can ruin a viewer’s understanding of the plot and character motivation.

I get really irritated where a character is saying something in a dramatic moment but I can’t hear what was said. The music is dominant, drowning out the words, time and again. The blame must lie squarely with the director, who has the final say. The director knows what has been said by the character, so he doesn’t actually ‘not hear’ the words, they’re lodged in his head anyway. If I was the actor or scriptwriter for those drowned out scenes, I’d be mightily miffed.

 

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Footnote: If you enjoyed this short overview, maybe you would like my book of 16 short stories, When the Flowers Are in Bloom by Nik Morton (Solstice Publishing). Many of the tales are prize winners and several are based on true events. One of the stories, 'The Busker of Torrevieja', won an international prize and concerns musicians and the love of music.

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Book of the film: Vertigo

The book Vertigo was originally written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac in French, D’Entre Les Mortes (1954) and translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury as The Living and the Dead in 1956. I don’t believe the book’s beginning would attract a publisher nowadays; as it contains far too much exposition via lengthy dialogue. Still, the story itself is intriguing – hence the adaptation for Hitchcock’s 1958 film. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film diverges considerably from the book, save for the crucial deception.

The book's protagonist Flavières left the police due to his inability to cope with vertigo (or possibly acrophobia), and seemed at a loose end so he was grateful when his old friend Paul Gévigne asked for his help. However, Flavières wasn’t too happy when he found out he was hired to follow Paul’s wife, Madeleine. She was a mystery, it seemed. She had altered psychologically since they married and was obsessed with her strange past. Worse, Flavières found himself being obsessed by the beautiful Madeleine.

Unlike Kim Novak’s curvy blonde character of the movie, the book’s Madeleine was dark and slim. Of course we know that Hitchcock seemed to have his own obsession with blonde actresses. Madeleine wore a grey suit – as did Novak. And only her name was retained for the film; Flavières became Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) and Paul became Gavin Elster.

The story begins during the phoney war, before the Germans had invaded France. As it was written some nine years after the war, there’s no obvious reason why it wasn’t set in the 1950s, save that perhaps there’s a parallel between the fall from grace of Flavières and the collapse of his country. It’s obviously a French story, as Flavières ponders about Paul’s concern for his wife: after all, Madeleine ‘had every right to have a lover if she wanted to.’ Yes, typically French, that. Though even at this early stage (p22), Flavières found that he hoped she didn’t have a lover, as he felt he’d suffer acutely at the knowledge.

I don’t believe the film realistically showed the growing obsession James Stewart had for Kim Novak. The book conveys this gradually, subtly: ‘… he was mortified by the joy he felt at the prospect’ of following Madeleine. By p32 ‘he had only to think of her to lose his sense of proportion.’

Following the tragic events of Madeleine’s suicide, the German offensive of France began in earnest. Flavières went to pieces and ‘made little distinction now between the national disaster and his own. France was Madeleine lying crushed and bleeding at the foot of a church tower.’

At the beginning of Part Two, Flavières returns to post-war Paris, and his past seems to haunt him still. The similarities between the book and the film are there, though the Paul character died during the war. It would be unfair to detail much else, save to observe that since this is a French novel, it most definitely has noir undertones with an unhappy ending, in effect to gratify Flavières’ ‘taste for melancholy, solitude, and impotence.’

Book of the film: Rear Window

Rather the short story of the film, really, since its length is only about 16,000 words.

Cornell Woolrich was popular and prolific, producing a slew of short stories in the 1930s and 1940s. His influences were F Scott Fitzgerald and James M Cain, among others. His biographer, Francis M Nevins, believes Woolrich’s recurring leitmotif is loss of love. ‘Murder in Wax’ (1935) was his earliest attempt at a first-person narrative from the perspective of a woman. The Black Angel (1943) is about a terrified young wife’s race against time to prove the innocence of her husband convicted of murder, again a first-person female viewpoint. He was introverted and lived with and was dominated by his mother, Claire Attalie. She died in 1957, aged 83. Woolrich died in 1968, aged 65.

Alfred Hitchcock made his film of ‘Rear Window’ in 1954, based on Woolrich’s story ‘It had to be murder’ (1942), starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It’s unlikely that anyone reading this hasn’t seen the film, but I’ll still attempt to avoid spoilers. The point of the story is that the hero is confined to his apartment room and idly watches his neighbours – and fears that one of them has murdered his bedridden wife. But how can he prove it?

Many a good film has sprung from a short story, whether by Woolrich, Poe, Kipling, Lawrence, Conrad, James, du Maurier, Philip K Dick or King. The essence, the outline is evident, but there’s scope to add, which screenwriters may find easier than trying to cut out subplots, characters and events from a full-length work when working from a novel.

Woolrich was inventive and wrote with plenty of pace and ‘Rear Window’ is a good example of his shorter work. The first-person narrator is Hal Jeffries and he’s stuck in his apartment for some reason, watching the antics of his neighbours through their back windows. He states ‘… my movements were strictly limited… I could get from the window to the bed, and from the bed to the window, and that was all.’ The humorous ending of the story reveals that Hal was stuck in there with a plaster cast on his leg – which really cheats the reader since if we are to be in the scenes with Hal, we’d see the cast. The film, obviously, begins with a close-up of the cast on the leg of LB ‘Jeff’ Jeffries (James Stewart).

Unlike in the film, the story has no female involvement. Kelly plays a young socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont. In the film, Stella (Thelma Ritter), a cranky homecare nurse, calls daily; this role in the story belongs to Sam, a black friend/helper who brings in food or papers and is a mite superstitious: ‘My old mammy told it to me… Any time you hear (a cricket), that’s a sign of death – someplace close…’ Another character is Hal’s long suffering pal, Byrne, who worked on Homicide; the film character is Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey). And of course Lars Thorwald, played with such menace by Raymond Burr.

All of the philosophising between Stewart and Kelly was contrived padding and a little foreshadowing for the film – and actually slows the pace and dilutes the suspense which tends to build and build in the story. Indeed, Woolrich was a master at cranking up the suspense, often creating a race against the clock to save his protagonists. He certainly has a way with suspenseful phrasing – ‘I never heard the door open…behind me. A little eddy of air puffed through the dark at me.’

The denouement is slightly contrived in the story, but just believable; the film’s version is almost as bad, though giving Stewart the occupation of photographer makes sense of it.

As with so many works that have been translated into celluloid and reached millions, the action of reading has to attempt suspension of prior knowledge, which is not easy, otherwise the written source material offers few surprises. Even so, this is still worth reading.

Book of the film: Psycho

Thanks to the Alfred Hitchcock film, the character Norman Bates has entered that dubious pantheon of modern myth. Of course reading this book after being aware of the movie destroys some of Robert Bloch’s well-constructed suspense. Even so, it is still an intriguing and page-turning crime noir study of reader misdirection and dark psychology. And it’s also possible to appreciate the cunning structure of the novel and the subtle hints beneath the veneer presented by Bates.

Bates is fat and bespectacled and quite unprepossessing and dominated by his mother. He resents her but cannot seem to function without her in his life. He hides in his books but to no avail. He evokes some sympathy but is also somewhat unprepossessing. A memorable creation.

Mary Crane absconds from her job with a large sum of cash and heads for the home of her fiancé, Sam, intent on using the stolen money to help him get out of debt. She stops overnight off the beaten track at the Bates’ motel. The shower scene occurs on page 30, so she isn’t in the book much, but her presence is felt throughout as first Sam then her sister Lila start to wonder where she has gone. They are aided by the insurance private detective Arbogast.

Bloch masterfully weaves the individual stories of Bates, his mother, Mary Crane, Sam, Lila and Arbogast. His story is unsettling since it seems that the main protagonists are not destined to survive. Then those who do remain are brought to the creepy storm-laden denouement.

This is a short book, with hardly any words wasted in deceptively simple prose. Usually, Bloch enjoys peppering his stories with wordplay but here the narrative doesn’t seem to need it – though he can’t resist one final foray in the last sentence.

Inevitably, a film script is going to differ from its source: Psycho was in fact a difficult book to film as there was a great deal of internal monologue to create character, move the story forward and to misdirect. Some of this was achieved by voice-over for thoughts. Apparently, as there was a real Mary Crane in Phoenix at the time of the film, it was decided to rename this character Marion (played by Janet Leigh). Her boyfriend Sam and the detective Arbogast kept their names, as did Bates. The Marion character didn’t succumb in the shower scene until the film was 40 minutes into the story, with just over an hour to go. Neither in stature nor appearance did Anthony Perkins resemble the Bates character in the book, but he certainly claimed the role as his own with creepily nuanced under-acting.

If you have only seen the film but not read the book, I’d recommend finding a copy; it’s worthwhile. The entry for the film in Wikipedia is quite comprehensive and fascinating.