This week I went to Laughlin Nevada for the Laughlin River Run.  On the 5 hour flight out, I watched The Devil Wears Prada for the second time.  I wasn’t really into the movie so much that I wanted to watch it a second time, but I couldn’t sleep and well that’s how it goes.

Glen Close is decent in the movie as a complete hard ass trying to teach a younger girl fresh out of Columbia Law School how to become a hard ass dressed like a runway model.

I’m sure its a great movie for smart women aspiring to be runway models trying to work as actuaries running the numbers for life insurance quotes.

Yeah, I don’t think so either.  The premise is weak but like a movie made for the Oxygen network, this is a feel bad so you can feel good later type of movie.

So get ready to be jealous, pissed off, annoyed, and the jubilant when the star character manages to have an affair sleeping around but still manages to keep her boy friend at the end anyway.

I recently watched a classic movie with Heddy Lamar titled Ecstasy (in English) or Ektase I think in German.  (The film was created in Czechoslavakia and Austria and released in French and German.  The version I watched was German, with English subtitles.)

Heddy Lamar is credited with being the first nude woman in film due to shots from this movie.  That’s a bit of a misnomer as there were many silent movies that featured nude women, some very graphic.  However, this is viewed in a way that we might view a box office quality movie today as compared to a x rated or porn movie today.

Heddy gets naked on purpose but runs around naked in the movie by accident.  The lesson here is one of common sense in skinny dipping.  If you are going to go horse back riding, and then decide to go swimming, try and remember to pack a swimming suit in your saddle bags.  Absent that if you choose to go skinny dipping, don’t hang your clothes on your horse and leave the horse unhitched to a tree or something.

Heddy leaves her clothes on her horse and her horse runs away.  She then has to chase the horse through the woods and over the hills until she comes across a handsome young engineer that helps to catch her horse and ultimately helps her as she twists her ankle at the last minute (after running miles through the woods, fields and hills).

That all has nothing to do with the plot line, which is pretty good and even might be considered a bit of a mix between Ayn Rand  and Shakespeare (absent all the great dialogue but full of the plot twists).

Heddy marries a rich older man only to discover that he is frigid.  She leaves him and sues for divorce.  While awaiting her divorce she meets the engineer during her naked episode, eventually falls in love and discovers passion and sex.

He then unwittingly lets her husband know and things get interesting from that point on.  The movie struck me due mostly to the filming.  The perspectives, shots and quality of the picture are distinctly apparent throughout the movie.  Some older movies from the thirties that are considered classics have a film quality that has not stood the test of time, but this movie looks beautiful today regardless of the state of Lamar’s dress or undress.  Instead of making me want to seek drug treatment while watching a terribly fake looking set, this movie makes me think that the movie from a camera and film quality perspective could have been filmed last year (in black and white).

I just finished watching a movie called ‘Marnie’ by Alfred Hitchcock starring a very young Sean Connery that now reminds me of a very young Billy Zane.  In fact, I promise to gather together a picture or two from the movie and offer them up as a comparison in a future article.

UPDATE – here’s a quick video/ slide show comparing them

The movie is about a man (Sean Connery) who falls in love and marries a compulsive thief and lyer.  He is aware of her compulsive nature from the start and works to try and unravel the reasons behind her psychosis one step at a time.

The movie is full of fantastic yet subtle plot twists that only Hitchcock can bring to life on film.  It also has some great camera angles and shots.  The opening scene in particular draws you right into the film and it never lets you go after that.

This movie is one of the classic examples of Hitchcock’s ‘Blond’.  He often portrays ice cold blond heroines in his movie.  In this one, Sean Connery is continuously trying to crack the ice cold veneer almost as if he is going through an apprentice course for his later work as the 007 charmer.  I won’t say whether or not he ultimately succeeds.

One thing about the movie that struck me a little on the down side is the fantastic scenes with rather poor looking back drops.  I intend to watch the movie again as there is a distinct mix of scenes.  Some are very natural and real and others are very likely outdoor studio sets with back drop canopies in the background that has a surreal way of mixing real scenery (like brick buildings) with completely fake looking harbors and boats for example.  Yet in other scenes for example there is a fox hunt on horse back that is shot very well. 

Ultimately, for a fifties movie this movie was also very interesting for its dive into psychology and psychosis.  Almost sixty years later we almost take for granted things like psychiatry and even psychoanalysis (rumored to be the sport of dolphins), but in this movie it still has the feel of something rather new and unexplored.  Today, we’d probably be more interested in a suspense movie about a corrupt insurance company failing to grant a patient a medicare advantage as opposed to diving into the root causes of a psychosis in the way that this movie dives.

In that regard its a bit of a time capsule into the views on mental health and the public appetite for understanding this new concept.  To put that in perspective, this movie was made about the same time that L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics which is heavily reliant on the concept of psychoanalysis.  He took a science fiction approach to the topic then and later morphed it into something of a religion.  Hitchcock could have easily made a religion out of almost any topic he chose, but instead he chose to focus on entertaining us and that is exactly the result achieved when you watch ‘Marnie’.