ALFRED HITCHCOCK

INTRODUCTION

CAREER

FILMOGRAPHY



So just what is it about Alfred Hitchcock that makes a person want to seek out everything he touched? Why is he a personal hero? Why, indeed, do I keep a beloved photograph of him posted above my desk at work, watching over the premises with an oddly sad, haunted gaze? Why is he so highly regarded as a filmmaker when he was limited essentially to a single genre? Why is he my favorite director by a longshot?

The only real way to answer questions like this is to see VERTIGO or REAR WINDOW or NOTORIOUS. But I can do my best to explain.

Alfred Hitchcock was a second-generation entry to his form, but one who virtually defined it. This is due in large part to his astounding technical proficiency. The rare director who knew intricacies of everything from lighting and set design to lenses and sound mixing, he never struggled to excite himself with a creation, constantly seeking new ways to tell a story. To call his sense of invention "restless" does not begin to describe it.

The most important part of Hitchcock's work, however, regardless of his insightful ideas about "pure cinema" and realism and performing in general, is the breadth of his storytelling. It is popular today to subscribe to an idea that plot and character are mutually exclusive, that a true artiste does not need to entertain in order to enlighten. Nuts to all that. Hitchcock blurred the line between art and commerce and dismissed the need for it. Beauty and truth and bravura genius all exist in his films, but within the framework of gripping, relentless fascination that marks everything audiences love. He was a true populist.

The "quintessential" Hitchcock film is probably THE 39 STEPS, his first genre-smashing classic and still one of the most brilliantly acted, shot and edited suspense films ever made. It sounds lightweight -- Robert Donat must prove his own innocence after a spy is killed in his apartment, and travels across Europe to find her murderer -- but its every frame is infused with urgency and restrained terror. It says numerous things in the most minimal fashion... about guilt, responsibility, war, human relationships, humanity itself. In Donat's brief connections with people and nightmarish situations sits a kind of life. What's more, it's a powerful vein running through every single Hitchcock film, including the bad ones.

I love a lot of directors, but not one of them remains so impulsively engaging even in the most seemingly benign moments. Some believe it is a result of Hitchcock's consistent repetition of established themes, such as the falsely accused man on the run from the law (STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE 39 STEPS, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, YOUNG AND INNOCENT, THE WRONG MAN, FRENZY, SPELLBOUND, THE LODGER, I CONFESS, TO CATCH A THIEF) or even more often, the thwarting of independence by obsession, authority or cruelty. In my opinion, every film says something very different; it's just that the important parts are all in the details. Hitchcock had the most finely-tuned scripts of anybody in the business. A gifted writer himself, he insisted on working with the best screenwriters available, from Thornton Wilder to John Steinbeck to Dorothy Parker to Ben Hecht.

Visually, he fully deserves his accolades as a maverick, but the true nature of his achievments have gone largely unnoticed. It's popular to repeat the cliché that his films were shot in his head before filming even began, but the knowledge that STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, for example, was done with barely even a complete script thwarts that theory, and witness the unmistakable instances of rhyming, of intentional storytelling through implication, of 'criss-crossing' and doubles. Even more remarkably, NOTORIOUS was created under similarly chaotic and spontaneous conditions yet it seems like a studied, precise piece of work. The quick-witted, inventive nature of Hitchcock's work defies the logic that the widespread interpretations are mere accident. Stanley Kubrick once said that no review ever told him anything about his films that he didn't already know, and it's obvious that Hitchcock must have had even more potent feelings in that regard. His subtleties were not designed to be hidden... just discovered with time, to add excitement on, say, the 500th viewing of REAR WINDOW.

What's perhaps most intriguing (and enduring) about Hitchcock is his work with actors, typically the biggest stars of the time, many of which (Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman) gave their greatest performances under his watch, precisely because of his unique, quiet, and realistic approach to his characters. One reason his films have aged so well is their ability to juggle sympathies and to uncover the human in everyone, from the killers in ROPE and PSYCHO and STRANGERS to the haunted women of REBECCA, NOTORIOUS, and SABOTAGE. Indeed, with all respect to George Cukor, the passage of time has revealed Hitchcock to be perhaps the ultimate women's director; the women of his films are often their true heroes... and it was Hitchcock himself who elected to lift Grace Kelly's brilliantly independent woman of REAR WINDOW out of a treatment in which she waited on James Stewart hand and foot and was expected to "prove herself" to him in the end. The lack of humanity in the studio era of Hollywood has frankly been overstated, but no one broke through the boundaries more than Hitchcock, and arguably, Bergman in NOTORIOUS, Joan Fontaine in REBCCA, Janet Leigh in PSYCHO, the deeply conflicted Eva Marie Saint in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, Theresa Wright and Patricia Collinge in SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and Anny Ondra in BLACKMAIL are the most vivid and devastating characterizations in his films. And it all worked because of Hitchcock's sense of daring, his insistence on the importance of actors to absorb the viewer into the story.

That's not to say he doesn't put his people through hell, and the audience is not often spared from similar conditions. It's a fact of life that storytellers are darkly masochistic people who crave the inflicting of misery on the faceless; that's what makes it so much fun, and fun is in the end what it's about... but these films are so much more than fun. Not that it matters if you see them once, you'll still carry a good memory always, but they are hypnotic, obsessively detailed, and in some cases simply life-affirming, more often simply haunting. There are probably few people who've seen VERTIGO who don't remember its vision of the romantic, shattered and irreparable, the destruction vivid and harrowing. Hitchcock's people are trapped in their world forever. The DVD format, in which any moment of a film can be accessed immediately, is supremely appropriate for Hitchcock's own small universe, in which no one ever escapes. In an instant Joan Fontaine is back in an intact Manderley tormented by Mrs. Danvers, Janet Leigh's Marion Crane is spending her last moments of contemplative guilt tortured with the unmistakable and inescapable doom of her visceral, sexually-charged killing, and Theresa Wright is discovering that a man she has trusted as long as she's lived is a psychopath, and the rug of her entire world is pulled from under her. Over and over and over again, to infinity, on a shiny disc. It's true what Anthony Perkins says in PSYCHO, especially in Hitchcock's world, and it may be the most important line in his movies. "I think we're all in our private trap."

Hitchcock didn't make ghost stories, but the lingering fear of the past is present everywhere. If we look at his four best films, perhaps VERTIGO, REAR WINDOW, NOTORIOUS, and REBECCA, only the first and the last are really about death. But the other two bring to mind Judith Anderson's taunting question in REBECCA: "Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?" In REAR WINDOW, the fear of being seen is felt with miserable clarity by three people who are learning what a thrill it is to watch other lives from a distance. And what is living? NOTORIOUS wonders aloud if a life lived for the advantage of anyone else is truly worth it. NOTORIOUS is a filmed dream, a fairytale, and a voyeuristic romance, but in the end it is a ghost story because the people in it have stopped living. All of them are haunted. You might think of Ingrid Bergman's Alicia as the precursor to Kim Novak's two roles in VERTIGO -- both are playing parts to serve someone else's goal, and both are imprisoned. But Novak does not escape, not least because her knight in shining armor is in love with her own corpse, with her dying breath itself. She finds herself where Joan Fontaine finds herself... in the shadow of the dead.

Maybe all it amounted to was an English schoolboy's mischief, as the wink that closes his final film suggests. If so, it was a grand joke, one that has fucked up the minds and lives of millions of people who are all the better for it, myself and hopefully you included.

If you are not a fan of Hitchcock already, you really ought to be. It goes like this: THE 39 STEPS, THE LADY VANISHES, REBECCA, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, NOTORIOUS, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PSYCHO. Pick one, go from there, see the rest. Some capsule information on all 53 of his films is below. I've seen all but six of them and I've made comments about the basic plots and my own (mostly delighted) opinions. In the future I may add information and commentary on Hitchcock's short films and television shows.

Hitchcock made films in England until coming to Hollywood in 1940; his only actual British-produced movie afterward was 1972's FRENZY. The Hollywood films are the most popular and studied, and indeed probably his golden age in general, but I am extremely partial to his British sound films; the run of six outstanding suspense thrillers starting with the 1934 MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is possibly the biggest roll of his career; at the very least it ties with the 1950s. His early work in this period is his most pure and exciting, while the American films are much more artistic and extravagant. This doesn't show that Hitchcock did not improve over time, which he did, peaking late in life, but that he always was one of the most gifted directors working -- and that nearly all of his work has aged with stunning grace.


WEBLOG ARCHIVE
Wages of Fear review
random notes on Schulz biography
Bergman
Radio Days review
finished watchng Alfred Hitchcock Presents S1 DVD
Kill Bill Vol. 1 review
Saving Private Ryan review
Hotel Rwanda review
L'Age d'Or review
remakes
oscars
defined by tastes
The Killing
weird Hitchcock merchandise
Get Smart
top ten of the week
Robert Altman obit
God Delusion
A Defense #2
premature Zodiac comment
A Defense #1
Joseph Stefano obit
Woody Allen on Scoop
Sullivan's Travels DVD
Black Narcissus
Last Gang in Town
Double Indemnity DVD
website plans
Bicycle Thieves
Sabrina + Amistad + Shadows & Fog reviews
year in movies
a bit more about Alfred Hitchcock Presents
self-remakes
Broadway Danny Rose review
Close Encounters
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season One
I Saw the Whole Thing
Hitchcock DVDs
The Machinist review
12 Monkeys review
Ghost and Mrs. Muir review
Days of Wine and Roses review
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory rant
Waltzes from Vienna
Fantasia review
Francois Truffaut
Boys from Brazil review
Snow White DVD
Millennium
Douglas Adams on the Oscars
Citizen Kane review
Patrick McGilligan review
Incredibles pre-release comments
Dawn of the Dead DVD review
scholarly PHP
big DVD release day
site stuff
brian's back?
academy award anger

---

A SHORT GUIDE TO HITCHCOCK'S CAREER
COMPLETE HITCHCOCK FILMOGRAPHY