The movie would have been great if it had gone beyond telling the story and explored why Ray was doing what he was doing. He was using heroin because his isolation as a blind man and, secondarily, as a black man was a burden—yes, but why weren’t good music and fame enough? He had a wonderful wife and yet was an inveterate womanizer—we get no inkling why. Finally, as with all biographies as opposed to fictional stories, how to end the movie powerfully is a problem. Ray uses a few sentences of print to cover the last half of Ray’s life. This seems anti-climactic. Also, by focusing on Ray’s climb to fame, we know Ray as an aggressive, womanizing heroin addict. He kicked heroin cold turkey just before the end of the movie. Maybe he was different. Maybe we would have a different impression of the man if we saw the second half of his life.
Whenever movies start from such inspiration instead of from a good story or an interesting character, I get worried. North by Northwest shows some raggedness. For example, it is never explained (maybe we’ll just forget) why the Cary Grant character was mistakenly kidnapped by the foreign espionage agents. Sure it was a case of mistaken identify, but later we learn that the “man” targeted for kidnapping was a CIA creation that did not really exist. Although I enjoyed the vivid colour photography and Hitchcock’s sense of composition for each scene, there were small, annoying problems with the acting. The creators of the film had Jimmy Stewart in mind for the hero, but Cary Grant wound up playing the part, and he was too relentlessly well-dressed. Eve Marie Saint played the lovely blonde, but she was not lovely and the blonde looked fake. Much to my surprise when I saw her in news reels, she was very pretty. If those looks had appeared in the movie, they would have helped explain the behaviour of her character. Overall, I question whether Hitchcock, the master of planning every scene and every camera angle, actually got the best from his actors. Incidentally, North by Northwest is often called a film noir but it is not. All in all, especially if you like Cary Grant, it is a pleasant enough viewing experience.
Old School In this comedy, a thirty-year old businessman comes home early from a sales convention to find his wife just getting started on an orgy. To console him, his three buddies help him rent and house-warm an old house on the edge of campus. The guys sort of return to their ways of old, or what they wished the old days had been like, or what they could make the old days now that they have a decade of acumen, or what is as much like the old days as the young people will allow--with what I thought were hilarious results. The most memorable image is of Will Ferrell streaking to the stadium oblivious to the fact that no one from the party is following him and that his new wife is driving by in the car.