The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks if Robert Suarez is worth the price.
It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come in out of the cold. There’s no cover charge this evening. Let us check your coat. 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 week I asked you about the possibility of the Cubs signing free agent third baseman to a short-term “pillow contract.” With the caveat that it’s unlikely that Bergman settles for such a deal (although it’s becoming more likely every day that he doesn’t sign), 58 percent of you were in favor of it.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. The BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic is now getting into what I’m calling “the big four,” or the four Alfred Hitchcock films that seemingly everyone has seen. But as always, you’re free to skip ahead if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
Tonight we have a tune from vocalist Andromeda Turre’s most recent album, “Geosphere.” This is from 2024.
You voted in the BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic in our second-round matchup between Strangers on a Train (1951) and Frenzy (1972) and Strangers on a Train advanced on to the next round.
Tonight we have an epic matchup between North By Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963). These are two great films. The decisions are just going to get tougher from here on in as what I’m calling “The Big Four” enter the competition.
North by Northwest (1959). Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason.
The top-four seeded Hitchcock films are considered to be among the greatest films of all time. All four were ranked in the top 50 of the most-recent (2022) BFI Sight and Sound Poll of the greatest films of all time. North by Northwest is not only arguably the best Hitchcock film when it comes to pure entertainment value, one can justifiably claim that it’s one of the most entertaining films of all time. I could just leave my essay at that, or I could spend 50 pages trying to explain why North by Northwest is such a crowd pleaser. So forgive me if this piece fails to capture everything that makes this picture so beloved.
North by Northwest is in many ways the ultimate Hitchcock thriller. North by Northwest is both the culmination and spiritual remakes of both The 39 Steps and Saboteur. What makes North by Northwest stand out from those films is that Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, to quote This is Spinal Tap, took everything in North by Northwest up to eleven.
To be clear, North by Northwest plays as much as a Hitchcock satire as it does as a Hitchcock film. It takes in all the classic Hitchcock elements and push them to ridiculous limits. You’ve got a charismatic everyman played by Cary Grant, although who really believes Cary Grant as an everyman? Then the film has one of Hitchcock’s icy cold blonde love interests, in this case played by Eva Marie Saint. Next Hitchcock throws in a rich and sophisticated villain in James Mason contrast with that everyman in Grant. Of course, Grant’s everyman Roger Thornhill gets caught up in an espionage plot that he doesn’t understand. It’s also got a ridiculous MacGuffin that puts the entire thing in motion—the identity of Roger Kaplan, a man who isn’t real.
I’m assuming that everyone who has followed along with this film tournament this long has already seen North by Northwest. I can understand if you haven’t seen Saboteur or Shadow of a Doubt or maybe even Strangers on a Train, but I can’t believe anyone who has spent this amount of time reading about Hitchcock movies hasn’t seen the top four films in our tournament. But it’s not a bad idea to re-watch them because all of them are worth multiple viewings.
Everything we expect out of a Hitchcock film is in North by Northwest. Plot wise, there’s action, romance and a lot more humor than we normally get out of a Hitchcock movie. There’s the incredible Bernard Herrmann score that elevates the film throughout. The film is also shot in beautiful VistaVision and Hitchcock’s eye and editing skills are on full display. Heck, I’ll even mention the ground-breaking opening credits by Saul Bass.
Hitchcock loved including famous landmarks in his films—the British Museum in Blackmail, the Royal Albert Hall in both The Man Who Knew Too Much films, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur are just three examples. For years, he’d become fixated on a film that would involve Mount Rushmore and in particular, Abraham Lincoln’s nose. When the film that he had been contracted to make for MGM, The Wreck of the Mary Deare, fell apart, he decided to go back to that Lincoln’s nose idea. Screenwriter Lehman, who had been hired to write the Mary Deare story on Herrmann’s recommendation, decided to pull out all the stops and make the ultimate Hitchcock film. (Lehman would later work with Hitchcock again on Family Plot, Hitchcock’s final film and another one that combined action with a large dose of winking humor.)
The overall plot of North by Northwest makes little sense when you break it down and it is to Hitchcock’s credit that he keeps the action going to the point where we don’t really have time to notice some of the absurdities. Cary Grant reportedly told Hitchcock a third of the way through filming that “I still can’t make heads or tails out of it,” unwittingly uttering a line of his character’s dialog from later in the movie.
“In advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. Only an expedient exaggeration” explains Grant’s respectable ad executive early in the film. That’s what Lehman does throughout the film—expediently exaggerate everything. Not only did Lehman put this climax at Mt. Rushmore, he threw in visits to the United Nations, Grand Central Station, the 20th Century train, LaSalle Street Station and Midway Airport.
But the most famous scene is set in an Indiana corn field and shot outside of Bakersfield, California. To understand Hitchcock, you need to understand silent pictures. The corn field scene is an example of that. It’s almost ten minutes of essentially silent filmmaking. There’s a brief bit of dialogue about four minutes in and some music at the very end, but otherwise it’s a silent scene with the only sound of the plane and the cars to interrupt the action. It’s one of the best 9 1⁄2 minutes of filmmaking ever.
If you rewatch the film, pay attention to the way that Hitchcock edits the scene. The cuts from the plane to Grant intentionally slow down the scene so that the audience can follow the action, which Hitchcock said would be too fast otherwise. But you also see Grant’s changing expressions tell the story as well. It’s all silent filmmaking techniques.
There are so many other great elements of North by Northwest. The final scene at Mt. Rushmore is a re-imagining of the scene at the Statue of Liberty from Saboteur, but it’s better done here and Hitchcock adds in a cheeky coda to it. There’s also the clever scene where Thornhill escapes James Mason’s Van Damme through disrupting an auction, which again, echoes a scene from The 39 Steps.
If Notorious is Hitchcock’s dream cast, North by Northwest isn’t far behind. Besides the three leads who are all terrific, Leo G. Carroll aptly plays the spymaster behind all of it, Martin Landau is Van Damme’s stylish but thuggish right-hand man Leonard and Jessie Royce Landis is terrific in a small comedic role as Thornhill’s mother.
North by Northwest is so darn entertaining that you barely notice how preposterous the whole thing is, even for a spy picture.
Here’s a trailer from a re-release of North by Northwest from a few years ago. There are some copies of the original trailer on YouTube, but the picture quality is so degraded that I didn’t think they did the movie justice. But you can look them up if you’re curious. They’re watchable.
North by Northwest was Hitchcock’s only film for MGM.
The Birds (1963). Starring Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette.
Here’s what I wrote about The Birds last time.
I believe that everyone who is following along with our little tournament has seen The Birds. If you haven’t, it can be summed up as birds decided to violently attack a small town on the California coast. Why? The birds don’t need no reason. They just want you dead.
The Birds has been called Hitchcock’s monster movie. In that sense, its influence is immense. If you substitute zombies for birds, you have Night of the Living Dead. If you substitute a shark for the birds, you have Jaws. What Hitchcock’s genius does here is to turn something that normally isn’t considered terrifying—common birds—and turn them into a nightmare.
The Birds is unique among Hitchcock’s oeuvres in its ambiguity and in a sense, its nihilism. The film is nature taking its revenge. As I mentioned, there’s no reason that the birds decide to go on the attack. There’s a suggestion that the main character Melanie Daniels (Hedren) is the cause of all this, but if so, there’s no reason given as to why she would be. Unlike Psycho or Frenzy, here there is no psychological explanation for the bird’s violence. In fact, there’s one character whose sole purpose is to explain that birds just don’t behave like this. And spoiler if you haven’t seen it, but there’s no ending. The film just stops. Hitchcock wouldn’t even put a “The End” at the end of the film, as was the custom at the time. Universal did insist upon putting a card that said “A Universal Picture” at the end so audience would know it was time to leave and not that the film broke or something.
Technically, this was by far Hitchcock’s most-difficult film to shoot. Thirty-some odd years before CGI would make a film like this far easier, Hitchcock had to use a combination of trained birds, mechanical birds, cardboard cutouts and blue screen superimposed footage of wild birds. The final shot of the film was about seven or eight different shots edited together and you’d never know it. Yes, the special effects don’t always look real to modern audiences, but it was cutting edge stuff at the time. Hitchcock brought the legendary Ub Iwerks over from Disney as a consultant with a brand new process he had developed to make the blue screen work look as realistic as possible.
Hitchcock hated shooting on location—he always said the light was never right and you had to dub in the voices later because of external noise. But you’d be shocked at how little of The Birds was actually shot in and around Bodega Bay because it looks like it was shot there. There were a lot of establishing shots of Bodega Bay and then the actors were mostly matted into the shot later. (Cathy’s birthday party is the biggest scene that was actually shot on location in Bodega Bay.) Not only that, but a lot of the backgrounds you see in the film are actually high-quality scene paintings. While you can often tell the actors are being matted onto a background, it is very easy to miss that often those backgrounds are actually scene paintings. Hitchcock wanted a beautiful, peaceful small town to get torn apart by the angry birds and he got it.
I still insist that Vertigo is Hitchcock’s most visually-stunning film, but The Birds comes in second.
Hitchcock brought in an untrained model that he’d seen on a television commercial in Hedren to play the lead. He told François Truffaut that he liked her because although he had to teach her everything, she also had no bad habits to unlearn. And of course, there are other less savory things that went on between Hitchcock and Hedren that you can look up yourself. Certainly Hedren was too unknowledgeable to stick up for herself on set. Hedren was so traumatized and exhausted after shooting the bird attack scene in the attic that she was hospitalized for a week. (Some shots near the end of the film are actually of Hedren’s body double.) Sometimes Hedren is fantastic in The Birds. Sometimes she seems like a 32-year-old woman who has never acted before. As much as I hate Marnie, she’s much better in that film. But she’s not bad here, just uneven.
Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner is the weak spot of the film. His performance is not bad, although Hitchcock claimed Taylor had a tendency to overact that caused repeated takes until Hitch got one he liked. But the main problem is Taylor’s character is woefully underwritten.
On the other hand, Jessica Tandy as Mitch’s mother and Suzanne Pleshette as Annie, the town school teacher and former girlfriend of Mitch’s, are much better. Throw in Victoria Cartwright as Mitch’s 11-year-old sister Cathy and this really is a picture where the women shine the brightest.
Hitchcock eschewed a traditional musical score in The Birds in favor of some electronic sounds from an early version of a keyboard synthesizer. But the real score is the way he uses the sounds of the birds.
The Birds is another one of Hitchcock’s films that wasn’t universally loved (or understood) when it came out but has grown in stature over the decades. And its influence on future monster films is immense.
The actual trailer for The Birds was just five minutes of Alfred Hitchcock telling bird jokes. So here’s a scene from the film when the birds attack Bodega Bay.
So now it’s time to vote. You have until Wednesday to vote
I hope you caught The Birds when it was on Netflix last month, because now it’s only available for rent. North by Northwest is on the Criterion Channel and also available for rent.
Next up is Rear Window (1954) taking on Suspicion (1941).
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
According to multiple sources, including this article by Dennis Lim in The Athletic, (sub. req.) the Padres are taking offers for their closer Robert Suarez. Suarez was an All-Star last season and saved 36 games in 42 opportunities and finished with an ERA of 2.77. Suarez is a hard-throwing right-hander whose four-seam fastball averaged 99.1 miles per hour last season. He also has very good control, walking just 16 batters in 65 innings. Suarez is also only due to make $10 million this upcoming season. That’s clearly someone who would fit in nicely in the ninth inning in Chicago.
So why would the Padres even entertain trading a quality closer like Suarez? For one, Suarez has had a very odd career and that’s affecting his value, Despite pitching just three years in the majors, Suarez will turn 34 before Opening Day. He pitched in the Venezuelan leagues until he was 24, when he signed with a Mexican League team. There he was spotted by Softbank of Nippon Professional Baseball and he spent five mostly successful years as a reliever in Japan before signing with the Padres in 2022. And apparently the terms of the deal Suarez signed with the Padres allows him to opt out and reach free agency after this upcoming season—which he is very likely to do unless he gets injured.
On top of that, Suarez was much, much better in the first half of last season than the second half, where his ERA blew up with a 4.28 in the second half. The Padres even considered removing him from the closer’s job. He was very good in the playoffs, however, going 2 for 2 in save opportunities and allowing just one baserunner over 3.1 innings.
Despite these negatives, Suarez probably won’t come cheap. The only reasons the Padres are considering dealing him are to cut their payroll by $10 million and to get something for him before he leaves in free agency. But there are other players they could deal to cut payroll. Dylan Cease, Luis Arraez and Jake Cronenworth are specifically mentioned in Lin’s article as other possibilities. (And yes, we know most of you would like the Cubs to trade for Cease too. That’s a topic for another night.)
It doesn’t sound like the Padres are too motivated to deal Suarez, so they’d have to get a deal they liked. Cubs top prospect Matt Shaw is untouchable and so probably is Cade Horton, but other players among the Cubs top then prospects would be in play for Suarez. I’d bet the Padres would like Owen Caissie back, although that might be too much for the Cubs. Maybe if the Padres plan to deal Arraez or Cronenworth, they’d be interested in someone like James Triantos. It’s also possible they’d want a package of major league pitchers instead that would include Javier Assad, Jordan Wicks, Porter Hodge or Ben Brown. (Not all of them. Some of them.)
So what’s your opinion of the Cubs trying to trade for Robert Suarez?
Thank you so much for stopping by this evening. We hope you’ve had a good time. Please stay warm out there. Get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow night for more BCB After Dark.