Stamp of a Director: Alfred Hitchcock

On Films and Filmmaking
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

"To me Psycho (1960) was a big comedy. Had to be."

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."

"Our original title, you know, was 'The Man in Lincoln`s Nose'. Couldn't use it, though. They also wouldn't let us shoot people on Mount Rushmore. Can`t deface a national monument. And it`s a pity, too, because I had a wonderful shot in mind of Cary Grant hiding in Lincon`s nose and having a sneezing fit." — On 'North by Northwest', 1959

"For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake."

"To make a great film you need three things—the script, the script and the script."

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."

"Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."

"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."

"Self-plagiarism is style."

"Cary Grant is the only actor I ever loved in my whole life."

"There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating."

On Murder
"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homely places like the kitchen table."

"Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement and, occasionally, a hearty meal."

"In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man."

"One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life."

On Fear
"The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them."

"I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline-production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one."

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."

"I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes... have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I've never tasted it."
— On his lifelong fear of eggs.

"Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film."

On Television
"Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up every time."

"Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."

"Television has brought back murder into the home—where it belongs."

On Books
"The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book—it makes a very poor doorstop."

Note: You'll find 18 other Celebrity Stamps under Labels. On October 31, 2011, I wrote a short piece on Hitchcockian humour that includes some of the quotes reproduced above. You can read it here.

Who is Nevada Carter?

Dallas Wayne…a voice that rustled like silk…a gun that spat sudden death.

It’s been a while since I wrote about the new and used books I have added to my ever-growing collection. 

Last week, I picked up a secondhand western paperback called Frontier Steel by Nevada Carter. I liked the cover image and the blurb on the back promised a tale of intense action and adventure, set in Nevada Territory just after the war.

It says, “Dallas Wayne was a Texan who’d come out of the war with nothing more than a powerful urge to make up for lost time. He settled north-west of Virginia City and within four years was a rich man. Then out of the past one blustery day rode a rider who told the men in the Green Door Saloon a grisly tale of murder…”

I’m not going to spoil the fun by revealing the rest of it. However, I’m intrigued by the writer, Nevada Carter, who appears to have no presence in cyberspace. A few sites, including Amazon (see below), have a list of his novels written between 1965 and 1997, assuming that Frontier Steel is his first book. I’m not sure that it is.

1965: Frontier Steel
1966: Hangtown Sheriff
1972: Gunsight Range
1973: The Green Hills
1974: A Man Called Faro
1975: Badlands Trail
1975: Fugitive Trail
1977: Lost Trail
1979: The Outsiders
1980: Buffalo Range
1981: Perdition Range
1981: Chaparral Trail
1985: Texan Fast Gun
1986: Horse Camp
1993: Cedar Valley
1996: Perdition Wells
1997: Bear Paw

Frontier Steel has managed to push its way up my current list of to-be-read books chiefly because I read a couple of pages and liked the way Carter writes. He has me hooked. It sounds like your traditional western novel with a small-town saloon, a ranch named Circle S, a pretty girl on horseback, cowhands, bushwhackers, and gunslingers, miles of cattle drag, and a range boss who hates Indians, even half-breeds.

In case I’ve tickled your curiosity, about Carter’s writing style, here’s the opening paragraph.

“He was almost a courtly man the way he tipped his hat and softly spoke, the way he smiled easily and laughed noiselessly with his blue-steel eyes, and this was part of the competence a man acquired on the frontier where other men were sensitive to slight and quick to react to insult.”

So who is Nevada Carter? Any answers?

Note: For earlier posts on Book Buys, see under Labels.

BOOK REVIEW

The End of Time by Wallace West (1933)

This week Todd Mason is the generous host of Friday’s Forgotten Books in place of Patti Abbott. Check out the entries at his blog Sweet Freedom and the previous FFB posts at Patti’s blog Pattinase.

“By millions of millions the creatures of earth slow and drop when their time-sense is mysteriously paralyzed.” 

A few remained standing like statues.

Dr. Frank Manthis, a brilliant chemical researcher, June Manthis, his lovely daughter, and Jack Baron, a young enterprising radio engineer and protégé of the chemist, are presumably the only people alive in New York and in the rest of the world.

Everyone else is in suspended animation, as it were. Something, or someone, has paralysed their sense of time as they stand rooted where they are or fall to the ground—“like characters from The Sleeping Beauty.”

“There is no doubt of it! Time will come to an end at six o'clock this morning.”

The bespectacled chemist discovers the mysterious phenomenon—of one’s perception of time slowing down before it stands still—while figuring out a chemical formula. He finds that both he and June are affected. 

The discovery prompts Dr. Manthis to inject himself, June and Jack Baron with the drug, hashish, by neutralising its deadly effects but retaining its time-expanding effects. Thus, the trio manages to remain normal but is unable to help the people of New York because there’s not enough of the drug and not enough time.

“There's nothing we can do for them now,” he said. “But we must learn all we can. Let’s go down and watch the city die.”

It doesn’t take Dr. Manthis very long to realise that only interference with the thought-waves could paralyse time-sense on such a terrifying scale. He suspects that someone inside or outside the known universe is breaking into the human thought process so as to turn humankind into zombies.

The chemist, the radio engineer and his girl embark on a do-or-die mission to trace the source of the short waves which, they find, is in India and intercept them in a desperate bid to render the waves powerless so as to reawaken the people.

“…if someone is broadcasting such a devilish wave from an earthly station we may have a chance to stop it.”

The task, however, is not easy as the three saviours have to fight a sinister looking Russian, a hashish addict, and end his evil designs to conquer the world. 

The End of Time is quite a readable story if you overlook the fact that the theme, of time slowing down and stopping altogether, is a fairly common one. Wallace West makes two interesting observations in the story: one is Kant’s axiom that “time is purely subjective” and that “it exists in the mind only” and the other is the reference to ganja, the Indian word for hashish, the users of which “develop homicidal mania” and “run amuck” as they do in India. I quite liked that bit.

The author
American sf writer Wallace West first wrote this story for Astounding Stories, March 1933. He also contributed stories to Weird Tales. West initially wrote short fiction and reworked those into novels, many of which had 'time' as their theme. He also novelised at least four motion pictures and authored some non-fiction as well.

One of his more popular books is The Bird of Time (1959) comprising four of his short stories which had previously appeared in Astounding Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. It relates the adventures of Yahna, a Martian bird-woman, and Bill Newsome, an Earthman, and the conflict between their worlds. 

Bibliography (incomplete)

Novelised versions of films
1. Alice in Wonderland, a novelised version of the motion picture Alice in Wonderland, 1934
2. Jimmie Allen in the Sky Parade, 1936, a novelised version of Sky Parade starring Jimmie Allen
3. Betty Boop in Snow-White, 1934
4. Paramount newsreel men with Admiral Byrd in Little America: the story of Little America with pictures by Paramount newsreel cameramen and the story of their adventures, 1934 

Novels
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, 1936
Thirteen Hours by Air, 1936
The Bird of Time, 1959
Lords of Atlantis, 1960
The Memory Bank, 1962
River of Time, 1963
The Time-lockers, 1964
The Everlasting Exiles, 1967
Outposts in Space, 1969

Click this link for a complete list of Wallace West’s books.

FILM REVIEW

Greed (1924)

Greed is my contribution to Tuesday’s Overlooked/Forgotten films and television over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to check out the other fascinating reviews over there.

Marcus (Jean Hersholt) to McTeague (Gibson Gowland): There's no water... within a hundred miles o' here! We...are...dead...men! 

© www.public.wsu.edu

American novelist Frank Norris (left) was only 32 when he died, apparently, of a ruptured appendix. During the course of his young life, however, Norris wrote several novels that mostly depicted the dark and insensitive side of human nature, of greed and corruption and suffering, and their often tragic outcome.

Greed, a black-and-white silent film made by noted actor-director-producer Erich Oswald Stroheim, is one of many and more popular remakes of McTeague: A Story of San Francisco written by Norris in 1899.

Recently, I downloaded this and two other books by Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California and The Pit: A Story of Chicago, and had commenced reading McTeague when I found the movie playing on TCM last Saturday. Unfortunately, I caught only the last half-hour of the film, which isn’t the best way to watch a movie. So admittedly, this cannot be said to be a review of a film I have seen. I also missed watching the rerun later that evening. Nonetheless, Greed is an overlooked film and long forgotten too.

Having read a fairly long synopsis of the ebook, I soon realised that McTeague and Greed were one and the same story even though I have read only the initial few pages of the book and seen only the last part of the film. I must, therefore, depend on IMDb to tell you the story.

McTeague (English actor Gibson Gowland, a big man with thick wavy hair and bushy eyebrows and often cast as a thug) is a dentist in San Francisco. He marries Trina (Zasu Pitts) whose greed for money is matched by her reluctance to spend it. She wins a $5,000 lottery which is what Greed is about. She saves the money and hoards what her husband makes. In walks Marcus (Jean Hersholt, Danish by birth) who is spurned by Trina and avenges his humiliation by exposing McTeague as a dentist without a license. Forced to shut down his practice, McTeague takes up a job as a labourer, and he and Trina move into a dirty rat hole. When McTeague finds out that his wife has been hoarding the money, he kills her and runs away into Death Valley with the bag of gold. Marcus follows him. 

Gibson Gowland (left) and Jean Hersholt

“I want that money,” he said, pausing in front of her.
“What money?” cried Trina.
“I want that money. You got it —that five thousand dollars. I want every nickel of it! You understand?”
— From the book, McTeague 

This is where I come in.

McTeague, whom Norris describes as “a young giant, carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches from the ground,” is riding a well-packed mule through Death Valley, a hot, vast, merciless desert land. Marcus, who is after the bounty, follows him on horseback: he stops every few minutes to look into the blurry horizon and drink the last few drops of water from his canteen. As the scorching sun beats down, his horse collapses and dies. Marcus trudges on foot and soon catches up with McTeague. Gun levelled, he tells the dentist to hand over the gold. As the men argue, the mule bolts with the saddlebag of gold coins. Marcus fires with his revolver and brings down the animal. He also puts a bullet through McTeague’s water canteen. The two men fight and big man McTeague hammers Marcus to death with his own gun. But as he tries to get off the ground, he finds himself handcuffed to the dead man with no key in sight. 

McTeague looks around him, at miles and miles of barren land stretching between him, the dead man, the dead mule, the bullet-riddled canteen, and the torn bag of gold coins, and eternity—a dead man alive.

Greed is a silent film with subtitles. The section of the black-and-white classic that I saw was tinged with yellow, which could have been due to either the blazing sun or a bad print. If there is no speech, there is very little action. The fight scene between McTeague and Marcus, who look like they have been working the sewers, is short but decisive. The dentist’s killing of the suitor is crude, yet convincing. The cinematography, in the final scene, is ordinary as the bone-tired men first make their way through Death Valley and then confront each other in the middle of nowhere. What is extraordinary is Erich Oswald Stroheim’s portrayal of man’s avarice and the lengths he will go to possess wealth.

Vintage Pictures

Divided nation, divided books

The Partition of India by the British in August 1947 did more than create the two sovereign nations of India and Pakistan, displace millions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on either side of the newly-drawn border, and result in one of the world's largest refugee crisis leading to violence and slaughter by people who once lived together. It also divided the libraries in the new dominions. In the above photograph, published by Life magazine on August 18, 1947, a curator at the Imperial Secretariat Library (now Central Secretariat Library) in Calcutta, West Bengal, tries to divide some 1.50 lakh books into equal parts for each of the two countries.

BOOK REVIEW

The Continental Classics, Volume XIV, and 

The Vampire by Jan Neruda

These two literary works are my contribution to this Friday’s Forgotten Books edition over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Don’t forget to read the fine mix of reviews of forgotten books by other bloggers over there.

“There is but one vast treasure-house of Eastern lore, and from its miraculous riches every bard and rhymer, every recounter of things marvelous and glad and sad, has drawn to his heart's content since the days of Babylon. No one can say how old these stories are. They are primeval. Some of them are as old as man. Some of them go back to those days when kindly spirits walked the earth among mortals, wondering gently at the new creature, with his fancies and his whims, and now and then touching man's work to unravel some knot of fate or to bring an unexpected blessing to some simple, good person. Of these tales of fairyland and its ministering visitants there is a web all round the world, and every wise child should believe them until he grows old and hard and incredulous.”
— Charles Johnston in his introduction to the section on Oriental Mystery Stories in The Continental Classics, Volume XIV.

Some of the world's best-known, and untold, stories are found in literary compendiums such as the twenty-volume The Continental Classics and the ten-volume The Best of the World's Classics. Written and translated in lucid prose, the stories cut across peoples and countries and races and continents, and cover nearly every literary category there is — from mystery and adventure, fantasy and horror, romance and satire to tragedy and philosophy.

Many of these folktales and fairytales are undated and have been passed down the centuries for readers like you and me to savour and want more.

One example of the wide and varied reach of literary anthologies is The Continental Classics, Volume XIV, Spanish, Italian and Oriental Tales, a 370-page assorted collection of early mystery stories from Europe and Asia.

These are divided into three parts: Italian and Spanish Mystery Stories, Oriental Mystery Stories, and Ancient Latin and Greek Mystery Stories.

The Spanish and Italian section includes stories by Italo Mario Palmarini, Camillo Boito, Antonio Fogazzaro, and Pedro de Alarcón among others. I have been reading about these unheard-of writers on the internet.

For instance, Camillo Boito (1836-1914) was an Italian architect and engineer, first and foremost. He was also an art critic and historian, and a novelist. He wrote many short stories that included a psychological thriller titled A Christmas Eve, “a tale of incestuous obsession and necrophilia” which is apparently similar to Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe. In 1882, he came out with his most famous work, Senso, a short novel about  “sexual decadence.” A few of his tales have been shot into film. 

Spanish novelist Pedro de Alarcón (1833-1891) was the author of El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874) which tells the story of village life in his native region of Andalusia, in southern Spain. Apart from another short novel, El capitán Veneno (Captain Poison, 1881), Alarcón also wrote four full-length novels, three travel books, and short stories. 

An illustration with the Arabic story
The Craft of the Three Sharpers

Coming back to The Continental Classics, Volume XIV, I was delighted to discover five traditional Sanskrit tales that included ‘The Brahman Who Lost His Treasure’ from a book called the Ocean of the Rivers of Stories, written some eight centuries ago. It tells the story of King Prasenajit of Sravasti who helps a miser recover his stolen wealth. The rich merchants of the place bestow all kinds of presents on the man they think is a virtuous Brahman (belonging to the highest of the four social classes of India). He hides his treasure at the foot of the medicinal nagabala tree till one day he finds that it has been stolen. Distraught over losing his wealth, the man decides to commit suicide. The king comes to his rescue by nailing the culprit who had used the roots of the tree to cure his headaches. 

Most Indian stories of old times are philosophical in nature. When the merchants learn that the miser is going to starve himself to death, one of them says, “Brahman, why do you long to die for the loss of your wealth? Wealth, like an unseasonable cloud, suddenly comes and goes.”

I am reproducing below the table of contents to give you a fair idea of the kind of stories you can expect in The Continental Classics, Volume XIV. You’ll find this and most of the other volumes at Project Gutenberg.

Part I: Italian and Spanish Mystery Stories

J.M. Palmarini — Shadows
Camillo Boito — The Gray Spot
Giovanni Verga — The Stories of the Castle of Trezza
Antonio Fogazzaro — The Imp in the Mirror
Luigi Capuana — The Deposition
Pedro de Alarcón — The Nail
Alfredo Oriani — The Moscow Theater Plot

Part II: Oriental Mystery Stories (with an introduction by Charles Johnston)

The Power of Eloquence (Japanese)
The Dishonest Goldsmith and the Ingenious Painter (Turkish)
The Craft of the Three Sharpers (Arabic)
The Cheerful Workman (Arabic)
The Robber and the Woman (Arabic)
The Wonderful Stone (Chinese)
The Weaver Who Became a Leach (Arabic)
Visakha (Tibetan)
Told by the Constable (Arabic)
The Unjust Sentence (Chinese)
The Scar on the Throat (Arabic)
Devasmita (Sanskrit)
The Sharpers and the Money-lender (Arabic)
The Withered Hand (Turkish)
The Melancholist and the Sharper (Arabic)
Lakshadatta and Labdhadatta (Sanskrit)
The Cunning Crone (Arabic)
Judgment of a Solomon (Chinese)
The Sultan and His Three Sons (Arabic)
Tale of a Demon (Sanskrit)
The Jar of Olives and the Boy Kazi (Arabic)
Another Solomon (Chinese)
Calamity Ahmad and Habzalom Bazazah (Arabic)
A Man-Hating Maiden (Sanskrit)
Told by the Constable (Arabic)
The Clever Thief (Tibetan)
The King Who Made Mats (Persian)
The Brahman Who Lost His Treasure (Sanskrit)
The Duel of the Two Sharpers (Arabic)
The Lady and the Kazi (Persian)
Mahaushadha (Tibetan)
Avicenna and the Observant Young Man (Turkish)

Part III: Ancient Latin and Greek Mystery Stories

Herodotus —
The Thief Versus King Rhampsinitus
The Oracle Its Test by Croesus
The Oracle Its Repulse of the Persians
The Oracle Behind the Scenes

Lucius Apuleius —
The Adventure of the Three Robbers

Pliny, the Younger —
Letter to Sura

Scroll down for The Vampire by Jan Neruda or click here.

The Vampire by Jan Neruda

“The air was as clear as a diamond, so soft, so caressing, that one’s whole soul swung out upon it into the distance.”

There is no vampire in The Vampire, a six-page undated short story by Jan Neruda (1834-1891), the Czech journalist, writer and poet of the 19th century. The ‘vampire’ is a young Greek artist or a creature in human form, with supernatural powers. He has an uncanny ability: sketching corpses. In other words, he sketches the doomed beforehand and completes it the day they die, as if prophesying their death.

Jan Vilímek/Wikimedia Commons

The Vampire, which is and isn’t a fantasy tale, is about six people who go on an excursion from Constantinople to the island of Prinkipo, in modern-day Turkey. They include a Polish family of four consisting of a man and his wife, their beautiful but ailing daughter and her handsome husband, and the narrator and his (or her) companion. On the way they meet the mysterious Greek artist who, later, sketches them on the beach from afar.

Back in their hotel, the Pole and the narrator ask the innkeeper about the identity of the artist and are told, “We call him the Vampire” because “he sketches only corpses” and “he never makes a mistake.”

The artist certainly doesn’t make a mistake when he sketches the girl with her eyes closed and a wreath on her brow.

I am assuming the translation is true to the original in the Czech language in which case the story reads quite well and manages to hold your interest, though it could have been longer.

A word about Jan Neruda
Jan Neruda was born in Prague, Bohemia. He was the son of a grocer who lived in the Malá Strana (Lesser Quarter) district of Prague. He studied philosophy and philology (the humanistic study of language and literature) and worked as a teacher until 1860. Thereafter, he became a freelance journalist and writer. He was a leading light of Czech Realism and promoted the idea of rebirth of Czech patriotism.

Neruda’s most accalimed work is Povídky Malostranské (Tales of the Little Side), a collection of short stories which “takes the reader to the Lesser Quarter, to its streets and yards, shops, churches, houses, and restaurants” and known for their “satirical depiction of the petty bourgeois of Prague.”

His bibliography
Hrbitovní kvítí (Cemetery Flowers), 1857
Knihy veršu (Books of Verses), 1867
Zpevy pátecní (Friday Songs), 1869
Povídky malostranské (Tales of the Little Quarter), 1877, translated into English for the first time in 1957 by mystery writer Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters).
Písne kosmické (Cosmic Songs), 1878
Balady a romance (Ballads and Romances), 1878-83
Prosté motivy (Plain Themes/Simple Motifs), 1883
The Vampire, a short story

I’m looking for the translated version of Tales of the Little Quarter.

Interesting facts
The Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (real name: Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto) took “Neruda” as his pseudonym.

Jan Neruda once said, “Men are jealous of every woman, even when they don’t have the slightest interest in her themselves.”

In his first spaceflight in May 2009, American geophysicist and astronaut Andrew J. Feustel took a copy of Cosmic Songs with him.

The Jan Neruda Grammar School in Prague is, obviously, named after the Czech intellect.

You can read more about Jan Neruda here and here. The above profile has been culled out from these two sites.