The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks if the Cubs should try to sign Alex Bregman on a short-term deal
It’s another Wednesday evening here at BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re so glad to see all of you here, safe and sound. Please come in and join us. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. We still have a few tables available. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last night I asked you if you thought the Cubs should sign left-hander Justin Steele to a contract extension. The vast majority of you were in favor of it, with 56 percent thinking that five years and $74 million would be an offer that Steele would accept. Another 29 percent think that the Cubs should extend Steele, but they think that it would cost more money and/or years than that.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. The BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic is really taking off right now. But you’re free to skip ahead if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
Tonight we’re featuring saxophonist Wayne Shorter live in Sweden in 2014. He’s joined by Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on the bass and Brian Blade plays the drums.
This is “Lotus.”
You voted in the BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic and this one was a close one. But in the end, Notorious edged out Shadow of a Doubt by a margin of 52 to 48 percent. That was a tough call and I’m warning you, the votes are just going to get harder as we go along.
Tonight we feature the 21-seed Frenzy, which upset The Lady Vanishes in the first round, taking on the 5-seed Strangers on a Train. Since, as Hitchcock always said “Murder can be fun,” we’ve got two sordid tales of psychopathic murder. Which one is the most depraved? Which is the most fun? Or more importantly, which one is the better film?
Strangers on a Train (1951). Starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman and Robert Walker.
Alfred Hitchcock entered a dry spell after the success of Notorious in 1946. We may consider 1948’s Rope a classic today, but it was a critical and box office failure at the time. The other films he made in this period—The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn and Stage Fright—are rarely mentioned with Hitchcock’s best works, although Stage Fright does have its fans. In any case, all four of those films were box office disappointments.
But in Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock returned to his tried-and-true formula of a man unjustly accused of murder. (Hitchcock couldn’t imagine anything worse than being falsely accused of a crime.) He also found a first-time author in Patricia Highsmith who was even more obsessed with the psychology of a psychopath than he was. Strangers on a Train kicked off a 12-year period where Hitchcock made most of his greatest films. Strangers on a Train is a tight crime thriller that fully deserves to be lumped in with those other classics.
Much like Highsmith’s later, more famous creation Tom Ripley, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) is a charismatic and conniving psychopath who comes up with a plan for the perfect murder. Or murders, technically. Two strangers swap murders they want done—“criss-cross” as he says—and so they would have a alibi when their target was killed. He meets famous tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train to Washington, DC and works his way into his confidence by commenting on things he’s read about Haines in the gossip magazines. Bruno, much like Tom Ripley to Dickie Greenleaf, admires the life this handsome and successful tennis player leads. There’s also a strong hint that Bruno is attracted to Guy, although the very heterosexual Guy seems uncomfortatble with the vibe.
Haines is in love with Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a prominent senator. The two want to get married but unfortunately, Guy is already married to Miriam (Kasey Rogers) a girl from his hometown. Miriam is also pregnant with another man’s child, but she’s refusing to give Guy a divorce now that it looks like Guy is going to be coming into a ton of money in the near future. Bruno suggests that he kill Miriam and then Guy kill Bruno’s father, whom Bruno hates and wants dead.
Granger’s Guy is another weak-willed man caught up in murder, much like Phillip that he played in Rope. Guy isn’t quite that weakling that Phillip is, but he does avoid a confrontation with Bruno on the train, humoring him along until he can politely be rid of him.
Bruno takes Guy’s politeness as consent and goes on to brutally murder Miriam. Unfortunately for Guy, he was seen violently arguing with Miriam in public just before the killing and he told Anne over the phone that he wanted to strangle Miriam. He doesn’t have an alibi for the killing and immediately becomes the lead suspect. On top of that, Bruno begins to blackmail Guy to get him to murder his father as they hadn’t agreed (although Bruno claims they did).
Robert Walker had been institutionalized for mental illness before making this film and would be dead shortly after the film was released after suffering a psychiatric incident. It’s hard to not read Walker’s personal life into what he put into Bruno’s disturbed psyche. But Walker’s stellar performance puts him up there with Joseph Cotten and Claude Rains as Hitchcock’s greatest villains. Bruno is the kind of bad guy that keeps you up nights.
Hitchcock told François Truffaut that he didn’t think Granger was right for the part of Guy, explaining that he wanted William Holden to play the part. But writing fifty years later in his “Great Films” series, Roger Ebert argued Granger was perfect in the role. I tend to agree more with Ebert here.
There’s a lot of duality going on in Strangers on a Train. Not only is Bruno kind of an evil doppelgänger of Guy, but Patricia Hitchcock gets the one substantial role in one of her father’s films as Anne’s little sister Barbara. In one sense, she’s the person who blurts out what everyone, including her big sister, are afraid to say. In the other, she is made up to look as much like Rogers’ Miriam as possible. Walker lets us know that the sheer thrill that Bruno got by killing Miriam is re-lived every time he sees Barbara.
Strangers on a Train is also Hitchcock’s best-looking black-and-white film and I’m even including Psycho in that, although I admit that’s a close call. The whole film looks great, but two scenes stand out among the best that Hitchcock ever shot. The murder of Miriam is beautifully shown in the reflection of her broken glasses that had fallen on the ground. It’s the kind of scene that Hitchcock would frame an entire film to get to make.
The other scene is the climactic showdown on the runaway carousel. Hitchcock used a lot of tricks to get that scene to work, but one part that he didn’t use any camera tricks on was the carousel operator crawling under the spinning wheel. Hitchcock said the carousel operator volunteered to do the shot and the director said he was terrified the entire time that the man would be killed on camera. He vowed to never allow anything that dangerous on his set again. Still, the entire scene is among Hitchcock’s best climaxes.
When I was re-watching this film, my wife exclaimed “This is the same plot as Throw Momma from the Train.” Yes, Danny DeVito decided that Strangers on a Train would make a good comedy. Whether it does or not is up for you do decide.
Strangers on a Train marks the beginning of the golden age for Hitchcock as he had hit after hit from 1951 to 1962. Sometimes this film gets forgotten in light of the bigger (and frankly, mostly in color) classics that come after it, but Strangers on a Train can hold its own with any film Hitchcock ever made.
Here’s the original trailer for Strangers on a Train.
Frenzy (1972). Starring Jon Finch, Alec McCowen and Barry Foster.
After a couple of less-successful espionage thrillers in the late-sixties in Torn Curtain and Topaz, Hitchcock returned to the topic of murder in the seventies with Frenzy. It’s also easily the most graphic Hitchcock film—yes, even more graphic than Psycho, which, if you watch carefully, probably isn’t as graphic as you remember.
In the “real-life” case that Frenzy is based on, the “wrong man” accused of murdering his wife and child was actually executed before police discovered that the family was living next door to a serial killer. Luckily for Richard in this film, the death penalty had been abolished in the United Kingdom by 1972.
Here’s what I wrote the first time about Frenzy.
Many people have called Frenzy Hitchcock’s last great film. (Those who don’t like it as much tend to rest that laurel on The Birds.) It’s another “wrong man” story from Hitch, this one loosely based on a real-life case. Finch plays Richard Blaney, an ex-RAF officer who is down on his luck. He’s divorced, unemployed, broke and he has a bad temper. He’s angry at his lot on life.
What Blaney isn’t is a serial killer. Yet he gets mistaken for “The Necktie Killer,” a rapist and serial killer terrorizing London. The real killer (and this isn’t much of a spoiler) is Blaney’s friend Bob Rusk (Foster). Blaney needs to impossibly prove his own innocence while the detective who arrested him, Chief Inspector Timothy Oxford (McCowen) begins to have his own doubts that he got the right man.
Frenzy is the only R-rated film that Hitchcock made in his entire career and Hitchcock really wanted to push the envelope now that he was freed from the concerns of the Production Office and the British Board of Film Censors. The rape and murder scene is raw and graphic. Although Hitchcock did tone down the scene in editing, it’s still brutal. This is Hitchcock with the guardrails off. Roger Ebert called it “Psycho without the shower curtain.”
But unlike Psycho, where the laughs are few, Hitchcock made sure to lighten the murders with humor in Frenzy. There a scene where Rusk is struggling with a body that he had placed in a potato sack and the victim’s foot keeps hitting him in the face. The body later falls out of the back of a truck on lands on the highway in front of a police car. There’s also the humorous subplot of Inspector Oxford’s wife (Vivien Merchant) who has taken up gourmet cooking and is constantly making him exotic (for England in the seventies) and unappetizing foods like fish stew and pigs feet. (Although the drink she makes her husband’s co-worker is the exotic “margarita.”) But it’s through these uncomfortable “gourmet” meals that Oxford realizes Blaney’s innocence. In fact, Mrs. Oxford figures it out first.
The cast of Frenzy are all quite good, although certainly none of them turn in an iconic performance like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Anna Massey is terrific as Blaney’s barmaid girlfriend and the only one who believes in him from beginning to end. Barbara Leigh-Hunt is Brenda, Blaney’s ex-wife and she aptly pulls off the very difficult murder scene with Foster.
It’s redundant to keep talking about the ways that Hitchcock masterfully sets up shots in these write-ups, but one piece of camera work in Frenzy deserves special mention. The camera follows Rusk and his victim of a set of stairs and to an apartment door. After the door closes, the camera reverses direction and backs out down the steps and back into the street. Having seen the first murder scene already, we know what we are backing away from.
Hitchcock was also back in his element in London. He certainly makes the location come alive in a way that he maybe hadn’t done since at least Vertigo and maybe since Shadow of a Doubt. It helps that Hitchcock shot much of the film in and around the Covent Garden Fruit and Vegetable Market, where Hitch spent much of his childhood hanging around with his greengrocer father. (One old man broke through security to tell Hitchcock “I knew your father!”) The film also famously starts at London Bridge and the Thames River. Hitchcock is clearly “home” here.
Frenzy is Hitchcock’s second-to-last film and is almost always cited as the best film of his late-period works. It’s very much a throwback to the films Hitchcock made in the forties and fifties. An innocent man is accused of a heinous crime and must clear his name. The graphic nature of Frenzy just shows what those movies would be like had Hitchcock not had to deal with the censors.
Here’s the trailer for Frenzy, which is really maybe the best trailer in Hitchcock’s career. His dark sense of humor is on full display here.
So now it’s time to vote.
You have until Monday to vote. Both films are playing on Criterion and are available to rent.
Up next we have the first of what I’m calling “The Big Four” with 1959’s North By Northwest. It faces off against The Birds (1963).
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
Third baseman Alex Bregman was supposed to be the second-best position player on the free agent market this winter. Bregman was hoping to sign a deal for over $200 million, although something more in the six-year, $160 million range was always more likely. In fact, that’s about what the Astros were rumored to have offered Bregman—six years and $156 million.
Bregman is no longer the MVP candidate he was in the late-teens, but he’s been worth between 4 and 5 bWAR every year over the past three years. While his offense has slowed down over that time, his defense at third base has been as good as ever and he won his first Gold Glove this past year. And it’s not like his offense has been bad—Bregman hit 26 home runs this past year and had a 118 OPS+. His main issue this past year was that his walk numbers dropped in 2024, hurting his on-base percentage. But that could just have been a one-year fluke rather than a trend. Normally when a ballplayer ages, his batting average drops, not his walk totals. Bregman’s .260 batting average last year was well in line with what he’s done over the past three years.
The Cubs probably have little interest in signing Bregman to a long-term deal. But Bruce Levine brought this up yesterday.
“What if he is this year’s version of Bellinger?”@MLBBruceLevine discusses a potential Alex Bregman signing pic.twitter.com/hhOkFPMv68
— Marquee Sports Network (@WatchMarquee) January 8, 2025
So what Levine is proposing is a deal similar to what Cody Bellinger signed last year. A three-year deal with an opt-out after one year that would allow Bregman to go back on the market next year if things go well and would give him some security if it doesn’t. It’s what his agent Scott Boras calls a “pillow contract.”
The Cubs are currently without an established third baseman. Yes, top prospect Matt Shaw is probably penciled in as the Opening Day third baseman, but that’s still a risky proposition. Signing Bregman would probably make the Cubs better in 2025.
Of course, it seems unlikely that Bregman will settle for a short-term deal with opt-outs. But if he would, would you want the Cubs to sign him?
The upside is certainly there. Bregman puts in a season with a WAR in the 4.5 to 5.4 range like he did in 2022 and 2023 and leads the Cubs to the playoffs. Maybe even the World Series. Then he leaves after one season and presumably Matt Shaw or someone else takes over third base in 2026. It would especially be a good idea if Shaw doesn’t turn out to be as good as we all think he’s going to be.
The downside is what we saw with Cody Bellinger. Bregman has a decent but not great year and decides to not opt out. Then you’ve got Bregman with a big and tough to move contract.
If he gets desperate enough to sign it, should the Cubs sign Alex Bregman to a short-term deal similar to what Cody Bellinger signed last offseason?
Thank you all for stopping by this evening. We hope all of you driving in from the Los Angeles area are safe. Please get home safely. Stay warm out there. Recycle an cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join Sara Sanchez tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.