100 Hot Men and a Dame: #94 Farley Granger

94. Farley Granger

Occupation: Actor

Nationality: American

Peak of Hotness: The Late 40's/Early 50's

Best Known For: His work with the legendary Alfred Hitchcock early in his career: Rope and Strangers on a Train

Joining me once again to discuss this rarely discussed actor from the Golden Age is my friend JD from Valley Dreamin' (and from his Twitter). Enjoy!

Dame James: When did you first encounter Farley and, if it wasn't love at first sight, when did you fall in love with him?

JD: I believe I first saw him in Rope, and it was more or less love at first sight. He was so adorable and troubled and oh my god, his lips. It didn't hurt that I thought he was legitimately great in it. Then I found out he ACTUALLY was gay and Google Image searched and, well. You know me. BUT ANYWAY. He, and not Hitch, was my primary motivation for seeing Strangers on a Train afterwards! I needed more.

DJ: Rope is where it all began for me, too. I don't think I quite knew what I was getting myself into when I sat down to watch that movie. A ninety minute long take with Farley as the nervous, sensitive, passive (aka the bottom) half of a homicidal homosexual couple? As they say in baseball, touchdown! Even as a 15 year old I knew it was a beautiful thing.

I can't say that I saw Strangers on a Train for Farley--Hitch is da man--but he was certainly a highlight of the film. Or, should I say, his short tennis shorts were a highlight. I know I briefly discussed him in my entry about Andy Roddick, but it bares repeating here: so goddamn hot! And, once again, he plays a (debatable) homosexual involved in a very homoerotic situation. I think it's one of the rare times when Golden Age Hollywood let a known homosexual actually play a (heavily watered-down) homosexual. Do you think this is what ultimately killed his Hollywood career?

JD: Yeah, probably. He lasted quite a bit but his career really is retroactively defined by the two Hitch collabos, isn't it? It's much more than that. I think he might be best in Nick Ray's superb They Live By Night. He could really play emotionally insecure and damaged to a T - which I knooow you like, James. Also, he was totally shirtless in it, I VIVIDLY remember that.

DJ: Why do I not remember the shirtlessness? Has it finally started to happen? Has my memory started to go? Can I not recall important moments such as hot guys taking their shirts off? What has become of me?!

But I do love emotional damaged boys--hell, it even has its own label on my blog!--and Granger is so good and, consequently, attractive in They Live By Night for that very fact. Pretty people with emotional issues gives me a hard-on!

JD: Have you seen Side Street, with They Live By Night co-star Cathy O'Donnell and directed by Anthony Mann? It's SUCH a good film that I never hear anything about, and Farley's such a driving force behind the quality. (Although Jean Hagen doing some of my favorite limited screentime-acting ever doesn't hurt.) I really just wanna see more with him but there seems to be so few things that aren't hidden in the dust of obscurity, sadly. I really need to see Senso though. Though when I get sad about that because I'm lazy, I just Google image search and swoon. HIS LIPS. HIS LIPS.
 

And I really do think, though, the main factor as to why I love him is, in fact, his actual guy-lovin' and how he never really hid it. That had to have taken some balls, and even if it gave his career a short shelf life, it's always a fantastic thing knowing that someone just didn't submit to the studios for a false image.

DJ: I have not seen Side Street, but now I fully intend to track it down (Farley, Cathy AND Jean Hagen? I'm so in!). It's such a shame that, like you said, most of his work seems to be "hidden in the dust of obscurity."  Then again, many actors would kill to be remembered for just one Hitchcock classic, let alone two, so he's lucky in that respect.

I don't think I realized he was quite so open about his sexuality when I selected him for this list, but now that I do know, it definitely works to his advantage. Granted, I'm no gay rights activist by any means, but I have mad respect for old timey actors who didn't play games with their sexuality. They were fucking whoever they wanted and they didn't care. Farley is the first of a few guys on this list who broke the mold in this manner, and I couldn't be prouder.

 

What do you think of Farley? Is he a Golden Age actor that does it for you? And what do you think about gay or bisexual actors back in the day who refused to pretend they were straight?

30 Day Film Challenge: Day 22

Day 22: Your Favorite Horror Film

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

It's not the scariest film I've ever seen, but it is among the most well-made films of the genre. Plus, it features Anthony Perkins playing against type, freaking the fuck out of the audience with every stammer and twitch. And there's a reason the shower scene has become as infamous as it is. (Side note: the shrieking violins from this scene is the ring tone for when my parents call me).

30 Day Film Challenge: Day 11

Day 11: A Film by Your Favorite Director

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

This isn't my favorite Hitchcock film; it probably wouldn't even make my Top 5. That, however, has more to do with the fact that The Master has so many incredible masterpieces in his filmography than because The 39 Steps is a "lesser" Hitchcock. Like many of his films, this took me a couple of viewings to fully "get," but I absolutely adore this sleek, sexy spy adventure.

The Five Films That Made Me a Critic

A few weeks ago, the hosts of the newly revamped At the Movies, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and Christy Lemire, took a break from reviewing the latest flicks and spent the half hour discussing the five films that made them want to become a critic. The show was a riot, mostly because Christy insisted on picking obvious films (The Wizard of Oz, The Breakfast Club) and was almost embarrassed by her one excursion outside of Hollywood (Nights of Cabiria) while Ignatiy picked relatively obscure films, even from iconic directors like Jean-Luc Godard and D.W. Griffith. But, afterwards, the exercise stuck with me and I thought it would be fun to talk about here.

It Happened One Night The one that started it all was one of those happy, random moments that you can only describe as divine intervention. For some reason, I had been researching the greatest movies of all time and saw that this 1934 comedy had appeared on multiple lists. I remember being curious that a comedy--a romantic comedy, at that--was so widely beloved when, at that time, I perceived that dramas = quality. I decided that I had to see what all the fuss was about, so I went out and rented it. Having just been previously obsessed with old TV shows like I Love Lucy and The Jeffersons, watching old stuff wasn't anything unusual for me. Seeing It Happened One Night for the first time, however, truly changed my life. I adored the film so much so I watched it twice in two days. Having such a positive experience with Capra & company, I decided to start exploring other older films to see what they offered. The rest, as they say, is history.

Gone With the Wind When I first saw Gone With the Wind in junior high at my mother insistence, I had no clue that it would someday end up as my favorite film ever. I enjoyed the film but it was in no way life changing. Cut to a couple years later when I decide to start reading the novel on the spur of the moment. I start slowly but eventually I can't put the damn thing down. Then, one day during Spring Break, I'm tearing through the last couple hundred pages, crying like a baby the entire time even though I knew exactly what was coming. My love for the novel led me back to the movie and it instantly became my favorite. To this date, there are very few movies in my life I think I've seen more times than this nearly four-hour beast (Spice World and Aladdin quickly come to mind). If It Happened One Night ignited my passion for movies, Gone With the Wind cemented it.

Breathless I first saw Breathless in one of those undergraduate film survey courses that non-film major students bitch about because they are shocked we are studying 50 year old foreign films instead of Titanic and Adam Sandler's filmography. Breathless wasn't the first French New Wave film I had ever seen--I had seen and loved The 400 Blows twice by this point--but it was the one that ignited my passion for the movement. Watching the film was literally a revelatory moment before. Never before had I seen such an engaging film done in such an atypical shooting style. Breathless was the first film that opened my mind to the idea that films were much more than its story. A scant, nearly non-existent story could still make for a fun, fast, loose, cool film with the proper director setting the right mood through such simple things as non-linear editing and costuming.

Rear Window It took me many years to come to this conclusion, but Rear Window is easily the best film Alfred Hitchcock ever made. I never really got what this film was all about until my third viewing, which happened in my very first film course. Over the years, I literally saw it in every single film course I had in college and I loved it more and more every time. Even as I was getting slightly bored with my then-favorite Hitchcock Psycho, Rear Window offered something new and fascinating every time I saw it. The main reason I chose Rear Window is simply because this film proved to me that sometimes you need to watch a film multiple times to truly get what the filmmaker was attempting and that the best films are the ones that stand up to repeated viewings.

Kill Bill Volume 1 I spoke a little about my history with Kill Bill Volume 1 before and, looking back, I really see it as a turning point in my movie watching. Normally I would have been put off by Tarantino's gore fest, but I saw something unique and special in all the violence and gallons of blood. I'm still proud that, at 16, I was able to look beyond my own limited tastes and appreciate something out of the ordinary. It was a high point in the early stage of my cinephilia.

What about you? What were the films that turned you into a movie lover?

It's Not Easy Being a Muse

Poor Nicky, getting attacked by those angry looking birds like he was an extra in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Whoever said being Tom Ford's muse was all sunshine and rainbows (and sexy makeout times) obviously has no idea what they're talking about. On a positive note, at least this isn't happening to him (totally NSFW, by the way).

I Am Terrified for the Future of Filmmaking

I am not a film major, but this past semester I decided to take a course about film genres to (attempt to) keep my sanity amid my accounting and business classes. If I had known then what I know now, I would have stayed far, far away from this class. Let me just start by stating my overall thesis for this blog post: If the people in my film genre class are any indication as to what films in 10-15 years are going to be like, December 21, 2012 can not come quick enough. A nuclear apocalypse would be less painful than the shit movies I'm going to have to sit through from these people.

I must add right here that I enjoyed the class and loved the professor. I had had her before in an earlier introductory film class and thought she was amazing. She actually showed foreign movies, much to the dismay of the idiots in the class, and introduced me to Breathless so I will forever be grateful to her. What drove me crazy about the class was the students. I have been in business classes for so long, I forgot how irritating those couple of kids who have an opinion about everything and feel the need to express it fourteen times a class were. And it always seemed these stereotypical fanboys had opinions during weeks when we discussed genres I didn't care about. During horror week, we had a 30 minute long discussion about Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies after briefly mentioning The Evil Dead. And, my God, you couldn't shut them up during fantasy week when Lord of the Rings came up. But when melodrama week came up, they were quieter than Taylor Momsen at a Celibacy Club meeting (Not to toot my own horn, but the professor was impressed that week that I had seen Broken Blossoms, Terms of Endearment and In the Mood for Love outside of a film class). As if that wasn't bad enough, it felt like for the most part none of them had a seen a film made before The Godfather but a majority of the class had seen The Neverending Story.

What really set me off about the stupidity of these future filmmakers were our final projects. The assignment was to take a film and discuss it relative to genre, whether it's an argument why it falls in one particular genre, why it's a hybrid of two genres or the persona of one of the film's stars. We had the choice to do a paper or a presentation and, since I obviously never read the papers, I only have the presentations to comment on. And boy do I have a lot to say about them.

The first one that really drove me crazy was a presentation on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. For a brief second, I actually thought that this might be an interesting presentation because who doesn't love hearing about a Hitchcock film? As the presentation wore on, however, it quickly became clear that the girl probably only chose the film because she didn't have to do much research to find article and books about it. With the number of factual errors in her presentation, she obviously didn't give a shit about the film or Alfred Hitchcock (which is sad because he's only the greatest director ever and far more fascinating than anyone working today). For instance, the girl at one point claimed that Juno and the Paycock was Hitchcock's first film. Now, I don't have the chronology of his entire filmography memorized, but I knew that sounded fishy as soon as it came out of her mouth. Sure enough, the bitch got it wrong. Juno and the Paycock was his 12th film, not his 1st. Seriously bitch, go to IMDb and verify this shit. It's not that fucking hard. As if that wasn't bad enough, she then referred to American Psycho, the 2000 film based on Bret Easton Ellis' novel and starring Christian Bale, as a sequel and/or remake of Psycho. When she said this, I wanted to get out of my seat, go to the front of the classroom and punch her in the face like she's that bitch from Jersey Shore. How stupid can you possibly be? I mean, where on Earth is she getting this information from? Did she just assume that since they both have the word psycho in them they must be related?

Oh, and she was only the tip of the iceberg. There was this other dirty hippie bitch that drove me absolutely nuts even before she started talking. Earlier in the year, while discussing Holocaust films, she came out of nowhere and started talking about Persepolis, which she outright admitted that she had never seen and obviously knew nothing about it. So we had to take a two minute detour from the lecture to get her back on track and finally shut the fuck up. She decided to discuss City of God, which hurt right away since I'm a massive Meirelles fanboy. I tried to be objective at first, but some of the first words out of her mouth made me hate her even more: "I'm talking about City of God which is like ALL in Portuguese." Now, out of context, this may not seem so bad, but the way she emphasized "all" it made it sound like we should give her a fat fucking medal for willingly watching a foreign language movie. Yes, bitch, you are so amazing and we should throw you a fucking parade for your valor and intelligence. Give me a fucking break.

Now I have to talk about the guy who couldn't follow directions to save his life. In the first place, the professor sent at least three e-mails to all the presenters telling them that they needed to bring their presentations on memory sticks because there was no time to switch between her computer and someone else's. I don't know if he didn't get these e-mails, didn't read them carefully or is just a complete dumbass, but he came to class with his laptop and seemed completely clueless and dumbstruck when the professor asked if he had his presentation on a memory stick. I could tell the professor wanted to strangle him--hell I wanted to strangle him--but she had to be nice and quickly disconnect her computer and connect his to the project her. Next his presentation started and it was so awful I would have jumped out the window if we weren't on the first floor. First of all, he decided to talk about Superman, but instead of focusing on one of the films like the assignment asked, he went on and on about Superman's origins in comic books. Uh, yes, that's completely relevant to a film genre class. Then he couldn't get the (unnecessary) sound to work on one of his stupid slides. The professor had to keep reminding him that he only had 10 minutes and couldn't spend the time fixing the slide but he decided to ignore her and kept on fooling around with the sound on this one goddamn slide.

I know this may seem inconsequential and petty on my part, but this whole class just bothered me. Judging by the students, films are going to be even more blockbuster-heavy and dumber than the dreck that gets released every summer. If you can't even get basic facts right in a simple presentation or have such a limited knowledge of films you don't know much about pre-1980 films, what the hell are you going to do when you're a director on a film set? Not anything I want to see, that's what.

I'll leave you with one concluding remark from the last presentation of the day: Casablanca is apparently now a film noir.

(Oh, and if anyone's interested, I'd be glad to post my paper about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and how its a horror and melodrama film hybrid. My prof said it was brilliant!)