Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, dir. Peter Weir)

“My only worry was whether an audience would accept such an outrageous idea [of filming a mystery without a solution]. Personally, I always found it the most satisfying and fascinating aspect of the film. I usually find endings disappointing: they’re totally unnatural. You are creating life on the screen, and life doesn’t have endings. It’s always moving on to something else and there are always unexplained elements.

What I attempted, somewhere towards the middle of the film, was gently to shift emphasis off the mystery element which had been building in the first half and to develop the oppressive atmosphere of something which has no solution: to bring out a tension and claustrophobia in the locations and the relationships. We worked very hard at creating an hallucinatory mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotise the audience away from the possibility of solutions.”

-Weir, quoted in Sight & Sound interview (1976)

Ramon Novarro & Norma Shearer in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927, dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

Julie Harris & Richard Johnson in The Haunting (1963, dir. Robert Wise)

“It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”

- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, and Raymond Burr in Pitfall (1948, dir. André de Toth) (via Alain Silver’s Film Noir)

“Life is a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too, you know. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody born here lately who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life. So why do you hide it? Truth, honesty, that’s my key [to] filmmaking.”

-André de Toth, quoted in A Personal Journey through American Movies with Martin Scorsese (1995)

Louise Brooks & Gustav Diessl in Pandora’s Box (1929, dir. G.W. Pabst) (via)

“For all actors know that truly natural acting is rejected by the audience. Although people are better equipped to judge acting than any other art, the hypocrisy of ‘sincerity’ prevents them from admitting that they too are always acting some part of their own invention. To be a successful actor, then, it is necessary to add some eccentricities and mystery to naturalness so that the audience can admire and puzzle over something different from itself.”

-Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (photo via Kobal Collection, c. 1929)

Marian Marsh in publicity still for Svengali (1931, dir. Archie Mayo)

Sylvia Sidney in Dead End (1937, dir. William Wyler), a crime drama set in the grim, crowded tenements of East New York.

William Wyler, Humphrey Bogart, & Claire Trevor on the set of Dead End (1937, dir. William Wyler)

“What we remember is the gangster, the man who in a sentimental moment returns to the old home. He wants to see his mother and his girl: sentiment is mixed with pride -he’s travelled places; he shows his shirtsleeve - ‘Look - silk, twenty bucks.’ And in two memorable scenes sentimentality turns savage in him. His mother slaps his face (‘just stay away and leave us alone and die’), his girl is diseased and on the streets.

This is the finest performance Bogart has ever given - the ruthless sentimentalist who has melodramatized himself from the start up against the truth, and the fine flexible direction supplies a background of beetle-ridden staircases and mud and mist.”

-Graham Greene, Night and Day (1937)

Alain Delon in Purple Noon (1960, dir. René Clément), the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (via)

“Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive or self-destructive attitude. What was tragedy for one man was not for another, if he could assume the right attitude toward it.

Curiously Tom had never felt guilt, never let it seriously trouble him. In this, Tom realized that he was odd. Most people would have experienced insomnia, bad dreams, especially after committing a murder such as that of Dickie Greenleaf, but Tom had not.”

-Patricia Highsmith, The Boy Who Followed Ripley

Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968, dir. Norman Jewison)