classic double bill

The Rialto Centre for the Performing Arts in collaboration with Turner Classic Movies decided to celebrate women Oscar legends with a series of movies across Saturday and Sunday. While I was tempted to try more, I decided to go on with the first double bill: Suspicion and It Happened One Night.

The former is worth the big screen if only for the brief sequence where Cary Grant takes a glass of milk up to Joan Fontaine (shooting trivia: there's a light bulb in the glass, which explains why it sticks out of the screen and in your head). There are touches of Hitchcock's trademarks throughout the movie, but this has been recorded as one of his 'uncertain' movies: lack of decision on the title, the plot (altered significantly from the source novel) and a decisive ending. While Strangers on a Train suffered from a similar indecisiveness of endings, it managed to pull through thanks to an assurance that guided the rest of the production.

The latter is just a pleasure on the big screen (my reaction was ably supported by the applause at the end). This film is ample proof for the assertion that Mahesh Bhatt is aware of input/output programming fundamentals. One of the important things you learn when you copy one file to another is that it's faster and more efficient to do it in chunks. Mr Bhatt did exactly that with this film and his musical blockbuster Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin. The sophistication and the well-scripted allusions to the walls of Jericho did not make it. The fact that the heroine is already married to begin with would also not have worked in the Bollywood framework of life. And then 105 minutes is too short by Bollywood standards, so let's put in some songs. And then we need to construct situations for these songs. Add some loud comedy to the mix. And voila! Another assembly-line Bhatt classic.