Thursday Movie Picks - Museum

Written as part of the weekly blogathon series hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come along for the ride by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

I have always loved museums. There's so much to see and so much to learn, and I love learning. Trying to pick movies for this week, though, proved to be a bit harder than I expected. Despite the fact that museums are GREAT settings for a movie (so much to see, and such pretty, interesting settings!), there aren't a lot of movies about, or at least set largely in, museums. That said, there are some with very memorable scenes set in museums, so that's what I based my picking around.

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Poor John "Scottie" Ferguson. After a terrible accident on the job left him with horrible acrophobia and vertigo, he's let go from the police force, and he's having trouble getting over his fear. But an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, hires him to do some private investigating work: Trail his wife, Madeleine, who has been increasingly moody and obsessed with death (mostly her own). This leads to some memorable, mostly silent trips around San Francisco, including to the Legion of Honor Art Museum. A bit of a flop on release, it has since been named the greatest film ever made (in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll), and it's kinda hard to argue with that. This is one of Hitchcock's most beguiling films, with gorgeous cinematography and a hypnotic score by Bernard Herrmann (my pick for his best work). Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak give performances for the ages as the leads - particularly Novak, whose part is extraordinarily difficult and whose performance is hugely underrated. I got to see this on a 35mm print a couple of years ago and GOOD LORD is it gorgeous on the big screen. A haunting masterwork of obsession and PTSD, and a great mystery. I love everything about this movie, perhaps especially Barbara Bel Geddes's devoted Midge.

Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980) In the opening sequence of this, perhaps De Palma's most overt Hitchcock homage in a career full of them, the great Angie Dickinson goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and follows/is followed by a mysterious stranger. Being a sexually frustrated housewife, she ends up in a cab with him and they have sex. But on her way home, while in the elevator, her throat gets slashed by a mysterious blonde woman, who is seen by high class escort Nancy Allen, who then becomes the killer's next target as well as the police's prime suspect. This sequence, largely without dialogue, is utterly mesmerizing and absolutely fantastic. If nothing else in the film quite lives up to it, at least it is a very well-done thriller, with some great cinematography and a winning performance by Nancy Allen. But it's Angie Dickinson's performance that you'll come away remembering. GOD she's good.

Ocean's 8 (Gary Ross, 2018) Debbie Ocean has just gotten out of jail, and has spent her entire sentence coming up with the perfect job: Stealing a priceless diamond off the neck of an attendee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual gala. It's a film of modest pleasures, which is something of a disappointment after the starpowered fireworks of the George Clooney and Brad Pitt-led, Steven Soderbergh-directed Ocean's trilogy. But it is pleasurable all the same, mostly thanks to the chemistry of the ensemble cast, led by Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett, and with standout supporting performances by Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, and Awkwafina.