Friday, April 1, 2011

April Fools Day Blogathon: R.I.P. Farley Granger

Before I start my purposes here are twofold, I mean with the whole blogathon idea: it's an effort to try to jumpstart things around here, since in March we only had 6 entries. I just need to sit down and start writing. I even wrote down a bunch of ideas and it has taken me a week to get to them, hence the blogathon idea. And the other part, some who are friends with me on Facebook, know that at the best of times my job isn't exactly demanding. And at it's worse, say a stormy Friday where you are the only person in your group to be here, stuck at the front desk, it becomes pretty dead and boring. So I felt this was the perfect time, in a sense, to play catch up.

Like I said, most of this stuff is older. Certain things I still wanted to pay tribute to such as:

Farley Granger (1925-2011)

For one thing, Farley Granger has an amazing name. For the other he was in a lot of things, in both television and movies over his career but to me, and I suppose a lot of people, two of his most prominent roles have to be in two Alfred Hitchcock movies. One being Rope, where he plays one of a pair of upper class, educated students who (spoiler?) try to get away with the perfect murder. Jimmy Stewart plays their professor who slowly starts to realize what his students have done, and matches wits with them. This was a pretty interesting experiment for Hitchcock, actually because he originally wanted to try to film the whole movie in one take. But he couldn't do it because of technical limitations, i.e. the film would run out. So he did it in a series of takes, lasting for several minutes. When watching you can look closely and see where the cuts were made.




I love how Hitchcock was so big at the time that he could just put his own face on his movie posters.

His other big role for Hitchcock was in Strangers On A Train, in 1951, where he played Guy Haines alongside Guy Walker who plays Bruno Antony. Just like the title says, they meet on a train and decide to get rid of each other's significant others. And, as you might imagine, the plan starts to unravel pretty quickly.




-K



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2 comments:

  1. Run KMPApril 5, 2011 at 2:38 PM

    I haven't seen a ton of Hitchcock films but I have seen both of those. A couple of things:

    1. It's funny you bring up "Strangers on a Train" because the last episode of "Modern Family" used a similar scheme to break some difficult pieces of advice to significant others. Interesting timing.

    2. It's also funny that "Throw Momma From the Train" used that exact plot line. How can writers and producers in Hollywood be so lazy sometimes? I mean, it's one thing to pay homage to a certain film or copy a few scenes here and there, but the whole freaking plot? I wonder if they had to get permission from Hitchcock's estate to do that.

    -M

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  2. Run KMPApril 8, 2011 at 8:05 AM

    1. Again, I forgot to mention that "Modern Family" episode! But they just reran it, like you mentioned.

    2. I think that Billy Crystal always acknowledged that "Throw Momma From The Train" was basically his comedic homage/redoing of "Strangers On A Train". Who came up with that idea is anyone's guess.

    3. Hitchcock rules it. You should watch more.

    -K

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