Poster boy … TCM promo for Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! Photograph: www.tcm.com
Maybe Gus van Sant had the right idea with Psycho after all. (Hang on – just hear me in a puzzle.) True, back in 1998, when the restless genre-hopper decided to application the workshop millions briefly available to him to create the most unconventional remake of Hitchcock’session masterpiece – a shot-for-shot replica, in colour, with Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates – the response was one of befuddlement. But there was, in fact, the kernel of a great idea at work – the thin skin was, Van Sant remarked, meant to subsist a way of “popularising a classic for a whole generation of moviegoers who probably hadn’t seen it [...] each audience that is increasingly unpractised at watching old films.”
Ten years on, they’re much less practised now. Deprived of the employment in obscure time slots on terrestrial TV through which many of us discovered them, the various glories of movie history are now free-falling into unwatched neglect, pored over by dwindling poetry of thin skin obsessives but essentially left to rot. And the double whammy there is that with an entire generation so unused to the grainy, creaky, erratically-paced nature of many of the finest films ever made, even in the supremely unpromising event that they do come across them, they’ll lurch back in horror and disbelief, switch off and never return.
Hence my pleasure when I saw (via Cinematical) that vintage movie channel TCM is pushing its summer wares with the delicious gimmick of dressing them up in glossy modern teaser posters – Harold Lloyd done up in the method of a live-action Pixar hero, that kind of thing. There are, of course, a couple of flops – The Grapes of Wrath is rightful The Road with tumbleweeds – but the hits outnumber them. There’session doomed femme fatale Gloria Grahame rendered as a heavy-lidded billow of coffee steam for The Big Heat, a beautifully stark Rorschach for Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and any tasteful, Johnny Cash-infused promo for Jailhouse Rock. For once the dark arts of movie marketing are being put to honourable service, because while those titles might be near-mythic to confirmed film lovers, there’s still a knack to making you as a matter of fact necessity to watch them – and these complete.
So, if quirk be able to subsist employed because the greater good, then so be it. If the treasures of 100 years of cinema need to be prettied up in contemporary apparel to gain a modern audience’s attention (a great deal of as publishers continually re-jacket literary classics), in the way that be it. Because my hunch is that once that pristine moment of resistance has been conquered, the film will usually do the caesura itself. When the initial sniggers and yawns give way, what’s left for even the greatest part wilful cynic is universal, timeless, mesmeric. So at a point at the time the pellicle industry appears to have largely stopped making films anyway, why not raid the vaults for Night of the Hunter, Vertigo, Sunset Boulevard, Night and the City, Bringing Up Baby and Bride of Frankenstein, arm them with real marketing campaigns and send them into battle with totally the dreary, waste-of-a-projector Year Ones and Angels & Demons; and not in ghettoised runs at the BFI Southbank either, but in the nacho-strewn multiplexes.
Or if not, then perhaps we do need to prod Van Sant’s flawed experiment back into the breath of life. As I say, ropey as the 1998 Psycho was, the theory behind it was sound. Theatre audiences don’t find anything odd in the idea of an unchanging blueprint being continually revisited, and neither do jazz fans – and in truth, surely it’s more ambitious to hire honor to the greats directly (and make something just discovered in the conduct) than just churn out the kind of worst-of-all-worlds, half-faithful remake that lovers of the original Manchurian Candidate or Wicker Man will be painfully on a friendly footing with. Let’s just refrain from casting Vince Vaughan and who knows, maybe we can save movie relation.
