Wednesdays December 7th, 14th, and 28th | 12 Movies
Neighborhoods, across the world, tend to have their own identity or “feel” based on the people who live there. But our neighbors are not all the same – and often test the limits of residential conformity. Though they can be like-minded and reliable friends, neighbors can also be meddlesome busybodies, peeping toms, bored housewives, desperate exhibitionists, rowdy partiers or even extramarital lovers. In any case, neighbors have served as inspiration for a host of films and television series. This month TCM screens several movies that take advantage of the tension between private and communal life, proving that neighbors play more than a peripheral role in cinema.
The first cluster of films, screening on December 7, are actually not set in the suburbs. They depict the challenges of family life in the city and focus on urban neighborhood flirtation, spousal surrogacy and romance. It kicks off with the slapstick marriage farce, Good Neighbor Sam (1964), directed by David Swift. Appropriately, it stars Jack Lemmon – known for his anxious middle-class everyman persona – as Sam Bissell, a hard-working San Francisco advertising executive who is a reputed “family man.” Sam seems unable to reach the top of his firm but isn’t bothered. He’s content with his family life. In a surreptitious turn of events, Sam’s reputation actually earns him a promotion at work when an extremely important client takes a liking to him for his family values. When Sam goes home to celebrate with his wife, he is introduced to their new, recently divorced neighbor, Janet (Romy Schneider). Though Janet is happy with her marital split, she is stressed that she won’t inherit her late grandfather’s estate because of a legal stipulation that mandates she be married to receive the funds. Sam agrees to thwart Janet’s cousins (Anne Seymour and Charles Lane) who are also eligible for the inheritance, by impersonating Janet’s ex who they never met. Hilariously awkward chaos ensues as a result of their charade and Schneider, better known for her European films, shines in one of her only Hollywood roles.
It is often argued that Lemmon should have been cast in the lead role of The Seven Year Itch (1955), but director Billy Wilder makes use of Tom Ewell (the lead in the play version) as Richard Sherman, one of the many Manhattan businessmen who send their families away for the summer so they can escape the heat. It also allows the husbands a few months to scratch their “seven year itch” and dabble in affairs -- though Richard repeatedly insists, “Not me. Not me.” But Richard nevertheless dreams of women who are not his wife. At first Richard’s indiscretions are just in his head. But then reality seemingly intrudes in the form of a new upstairs neighbor played by Marilyn Monroe, who takes over the film as soon as she appears onscreen. Despite the Hays Codes putting the filmmakers in what Wilder called a “straight-jacket,” we still get the iconic scene when Monroe briefly stands over a subway grate to experience the updraft and her pleated white halter neck dress blows her skirt up in the breeze. Is this beautiful neighbor real or just the wishful fantasy of a sex addled man? After all, she never gets a name; she is simply called The Girl in the credits (though Richard does satirically remark, “Maybe it’s Marilyn Monroe”).
Wong kar-Wai’s masterful film, In the Mood for Love (2000), set in 1962 British Hong Kong, follows Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a pair of lonely neighbors whose spouses work and often leave them alone. Although Chow and Su are initially friendly to each as only need be, they grow closer as they realize their spouses are actually having an affair. They develop their own halting romance, a connection with each other amid the paradoxical isolation of the city. The film has a dream-like beauty, saturated with bold color and texture. Wong’s lingering camera moves slowly and carefully, guided by his regular cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. As a lead couple Maggie Cheung (in her figure-hugging cheongsam dresses) and Leung (with his slicked back hair and brooding eyebrows) have heart pounding chemistry. The magnetism between these neighbors has become iconic in cinematic history. In the Mood for Love is often listed as one of the greatest films of all time and a major work in Asian cinema.
The second cluster of films, screening on December 14, charts the rise of suburban life in the United States. George Stevens’ madcap movie, The More the Merrier (1943), taps into the World War II housing shortage. Set in Washington, it follows Connie Milligan (Jean Arthur) who agrees to rent her apartment to wealthy retiree Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn) and soldier Joe Carter (Joel McCrea). Although Connie is engaged to the unexciting Charles Pendergast (Richard Gaines), she becomes fond of Joe. Dingle is aware of the attraction and attempts to play matchmaker – but instead causes problems for the entire apartment. The More the Merrier was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Writing. Coburn won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. (The film was remade in 1966 as Walk Don’t Run, starring Cary Grant, Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton. The setting was changed to Tokyo which had experienced housing shortages due to the 1964 Summer Olympics.)
Mass migration to suburban areas was a defining feature of American life after the war. Before World War II, only 13% of Americans lived in the suburbs. Nowadays, however, suburbia is home for more than half of the U.S. population and has become, in our cultural imagination, a symbol of the American dream. The cult classic The Swimmer (1968) written and directed by Eleanor and Frank Perry is based on the 1964 short story of the same name by John Cheever and offers a surreal look into the dreams and dissolution of suburban life. It begins on a sunny day in an affluent suburb in Connecticut when Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster), a fit and tanned middle-aged man, drops by a pool party held by old friends. As they drink and share stories, Ned realizes that there is a series of backyard swimming pools that could form a “river” back to his house and he could “swim his way home.” Ned’s behavior confuses his neighbors who seem to know worrisome things about his past which he seems to have forgotten. As Ned goes on his odyssey to get back home, we realize that the neighbors at each pool, however cruel and opportunistic, are more reliable than our protagonist who controls our point of view. Shot in a series of vignettes, with each pool being unlike the last, The Swimmer is impressively textured. One dreamy, light glinting vignette features Ned with his children’s childhood babysitter (Janet Landgard) who admits she had a crush on him when she was a teenager. Another horrific vignette is set in a public pool that builds claustrophobia with close-up shots of wet faces and bodies swimming around, splashing water on the camera. The contrasting elements in these vignettes allegorize the competing fantasies we have about the suburbs. The Swimmer also marks comedian Joan Rivers’ acting debut.
The last cluster of films, screening on December 28, focus on horrific and horrifying neighbors. In Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972), a separated conjoined twin Dominique Blanchion (Margot Kidder) is suspected of having committed murder by Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a newspaper reporter in Staten Island who saw the victim try and alert a neighbor by writing “help” in his own blood on a window. The screenplay was inspired by the Soviet conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova. Kidder plays the roles of both Dominique and her twin, Danielle Breton. In order to accomplish the image of both twins conjoined onscreen, De Palma had Kidder photographed seated in two different positions, and then joined the images together via optical editing. The film has been praised for its narrative and visual references to films by Alfred Hitchcock and was scored by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann. It prominently features De Palma’s own signature split-screen compositions (which was popularized by his subsequent film, Carrie, 1976). Horror critic Robin Wood wrote that Sisters was “one of the great American films of the 70s” and praised it for its commentary on the oppression of women in their private and public lives.
Though “Neighborhood Watch” organizations were not established in the suburbs until the 1960s, neighbors always looked out for – or at – each other. What could be thought of as a precursor to Hitchcock’s classic film about a peeping tom, Rear Window (1954), The Window (1949), directed by Ted Tetzlaff is about Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll), a lying boy who suspects that his neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Kellerson (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) murdered a drunken sailor in their apartment. No one believes Tommy when he tells them what he has seen, assuming this is yet another one of his tall tales. When Mr. and Mrs. Kellerson find out that Tommy knows about the murder, they plot to kill him. A long-time cinematographer who worked on Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), Tetzlaff used the film to explore what are now classic horror elements. Critic Dennis Schwartz points out the setting of the film, a grimy New York Lower East Side neighborhood, is contrasted with the burgeoning American suburbs of the 1940s. He wrote: “The city slum is pictured as not an easy place to raise a child. This film noir thriller exploits the meaning of the American dream to find utopia in the suburbs.”
Also set in New York, Hitchcock’s camera in Rear Window is firmly planted in a Greenwich Village apartment where L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), a wheelchair bound photographer, voyeuristically looks out of his rear window onto the courtyard and into his neighbors’ homes to pass the time. When he thinks he’s witnessed his neighbor Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) murder his wife, Jefferies’s girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), who he hasn’t been attracted to as of late, tries to gain his attention by helping him solve the crime. Rear Window was thought to be a risky film. Hitchcock cut ties with his former producer David O. Selznick, who he believed meddled too much in his movies. As a sly act of revenge, he fashioned Thorwald on Selznick, styling the character with the producer’s same glasses and curly gray hair. The film was also risky because the camera never leaves the apartment and rarely leaves Jefferies’s point of view; producers were not convinced that the shots would be compelling enough to audiences. However, it was a hit and has remained an enduring classic. In his 1954 review of the film, François Truffaut suggested that the film was a “parable” for filmmaking: “The courtyard is the world, the photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera’s lenses.” Critic Laura Mulvey recast the schema in the 1970s, arguing that the courtyard is the movie screen, Jefferies stands in for its audience, and the binoculars are the director’s controlling gaze. By that logic, we all might be nosy neighbors.
