More Farley Granger, Movie Miscellanea

Have I cornered you yet to see the movie Once? No? Then let me harangue you now; you totally should go see it. It’s a very understated musical, in that people don’t spontaneously break out dancing and singing, there’s actual context for the songs. And the songs are pretty fantastic. So go, see it, make a mental not to put in the netflix queue, what have you.

In a bit of weird coincidence, I just turned on the TV and found Alfred Hitchcock Presents on. Odd. Anyway, I went to see Strangers on a Train, followed by an intereview with its star, Farley Granger, who is 83 years old (that’s an unscientific conclusion based on the murmurings going on around us in the theater). He almost tripped on my bag! I kid, actually, I moved it before he came past my row. They made the poor man--who was very frail and thin but wore jeans, a track jacket, and jaunty keds--teeter in from the back of the theater. Then they hoisted him up on stage, where they had also lofted up chairs, and they did an Inside the Actor’s Studio type thing.

Anyway, the theater’s owner prefaced the discussion with a series of questions about the movie that he asked the audience to ponder. He asked us, for example, to mull over our impressions of Ruth Roman as the female lead (if you’ve seen the movie, she plays the tennis pro’s fiancee; the one he wants to divorce his wife for). She apparently was not Hitchcock’s first choice--he wanted Grace Kelly--but the studio insisted that he use an actress contractually obligated to them. Apparently there’s some sort of consensus opinion that Roman was miscast and that Hitchcock’s favored cool blonde, presumably Kelly, but possibly someone else, would have been more appropriate.

I found the whole question befuddling. The character is essentially the supportive love interest. That’s the sum total of her character development. I’m not sure how another actress would have added anything different to it (to contrast, imagine the crazy guy from the train played by someone different). In fact, what I noticed most about her performance was the costumes, shiny, metallic-like fabrics, absurdly detailed. And as a separate note, I have no idea where in nature women in 1950s films existed, with impossibly thin waists and gigantic cleavage.

Here’s the thing. If you’ve seen the movie, or pretty much any movie at the time, you’d note that the variety of female characters tended to fall into a narrow spectrum, mostly archetypes: the femme fatale, the good girl, the mother, the good wife, the elderly lady. What these dudes are arguing over is basically hair color.