I can’t unsee this Psycho set photo, and particularly John Gavin’s man-toes and especially those hush-puppy slip-ons. I’m sorry but the man’s stock has just dropped a few points, and I mean eternally.
BTW: This was shot during filming of the Phoenix hotel room scene, and Janet Leigh’s satin or silk bathrobe is the same one that “Marion Crane” wore just prior to taking a shower in cabin #1 at the Bates Motel.
I’ve watched and re-watched The Big Country since it hit Bluray in 2011, and especially since the much improved KL Studio Classic version was released in ‘18. I know this film cold, every scene and line and Technirama shot, every bridge and stanza in Jerome Moross’s score, etc.
But until last night, I hadn’t noticed a very glaring element in the final shot, the one in which Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons and Alfonso Bedoya ride down a rugged mountain trail and into a large valley below.
Throughout the entire film the dominant outdoor color (aside from the sky) is pale straw…the landscape is seemingly under-watered and parched as far as the camera can see, the dry prairie grass covering the plains and hills in every direction.
And then in the final shot and for the first time in the film, the entire valley is covered in green.
Was this a visual metaphor that director William Wyler decided upon, signifying health and ample water and a happy ending as far as human nature allowed? Or had nature simply shifted gears or seasons by sprouting fresh grass toward the end of principal photography?
I know that I can’t recall another outdoor film, western or not, in which an entire eye-filling landscape changes its mind so completely at the very last moment.
Imagine being so clueless, so bottom-of-the-barrel and perverse in your movie brain that when somebody asks “favorite Gene Hackman film?”, you actually respond “Superman”!
In no particular order: Crimson Tide, The Firm, Hoosiers, Night Moves, All Night Long, Downhill Racer, The French Connection (Friedkin & Frankenheimer), The Conversation, Bonnie and Clyde, Another Woman, Young Frankenstein, Mississippi Burning.
I’ve just read Adriane Quinlan’s 4.7 “Curbed” piece about Paul Schrader’s life these days at The Coterie, a pricey (at least $15K monthly) luxury high-rise for interesting (read: fairly loaded) seniors. It’s called “Paul Schrader’s Very Paul Schrader Days in Assisted Living.”
This is a dry, well-written observational that almost reminded me at times of Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.” But unlike his well-tended wife Marybeth, Paul doesn’t seem to be living “in” assisted living, or at least not according to my limited understanding of that term.
Living in The Coterie is easy and luxurious, sure, but with Paul churning out screenplays, planning to shoot a kind of Ivan Ilyich-type drama with Richard Gere later this year and thinking about visiting a Manhattan dive bar in order to counter-balance a feeling of too much sterility and perhaps keep in touch with the hurlyburly to some degree, he seems to be living in a fashion that’s more adjacent to assisted living (out of necessity for his wife) than “in” it.
