ALFRED HITCHCOCK: A CAREER

INTRODUCTION

HITCHCOCK FILMOGRAPHY

Alfred Hitchcock's reputation as the Master of Suspense, honorable though it may be, does him little justice. Not merely a technical craftsman, he understood more than anyone else the way that movies work, and the psychological possibilities inherent in the artform. Claims that any other filmmaker has ever been on a higher intellectual and emotional plane are as close to ludicrous as mere matters of opinion can ever be. He grew up in the cinema, he is the cinema, and for that reason, to my mind, he will never be reasonably disputed as the greatest artist to work in the medium.

One reason Hitchcock has remained among the most popular film directors is his choice of themes: sex and psychology -- fear. No doubt, these are the favorite themes of most of us. The fear manifests itself through the intense identification with leading characters in Hitchcock's work, undoubtedly its most definining characteristic. We follow turbulent days in the life of either a man on the run, _always_ wrongly accused, or even more often, a woman alone, a woman who must rely on herself to beat the odds. Running ever deeper is the intense sexuality of Hitchcock's movies, perhaps the most unapologetically sensual ever to come out of Hollywood. Though a general skepticism about love (and particularly marriage) runs through nearly all of his films, in a canon that excludes the supernatural in every case except one (THE BIRDS), sex is the magic. As such, once in Hollywood, Hitchcock loved to use stars, and he relished offbeat casting, so that only in his films might you see Cary Grant as a scheming asshole or Ingrid Bergman as an acid-tongued slut or Jimmy Stewart as a necrophiliac or Sean Connery as a rapist. Invariably, despite his reputation as anything but an "actor's director," the actors he worked with gave their greatest performances in his films.

Jesuit-raised and paranoid, especially about authority figures, Hitchcock began making films at age 24, after a number of years as a title designer and screenwriter. Most of the movies he worked on prior to his directorial debut are currently out of circulation. Of particular interest, if available, are THE BLACKGUARD (featuring some highly ambitious Hitchcock production design), ALWAYS TELL YOUR WIFE (co-directed by Hitchcock when the original director fell ill), and NUMBER THIRTEEN (a project assigned to Hitchcock but never completed).

THE PLEASURE GARDEN and THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE, Hitchcock's first two films, were made in Germany and influenced by the heavyweights of the cinema renaissance in that country, particularly F.W. Murnau, whose THE LAST LAUGH was always named as a favorite. PLEASURE GARDEN was a tentative project and a box office failure; today, it sits undistributed in an obscure British film vault, occasionally shown on television. This is somewhat tragic, given that Hitchcock's first movie would be a crucial one to a full appreciation of his body of work. More troubling is the fact that his immediate follow-up, THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE, is completely lost, with apparently no copies still in existence.

Generally, Hitchcock's silent films are mediocre from a neutral standpoint (though, inevitably, they have much greater appeal for scholars and buffs of his work), which some may find strange given his lifelong championing of silents as the only "pure" cinema. In fact, the relative quality of the early efforts is not surprising, considering that the silent films capture a great artist in his formative years. As a contract director, first for Michael Balcon, then for British International Pictures, Hitchcock could hardly work from inspiration. Instead, he was cutting his teeth, and his gradual maturity happened to coincide with the introduction of sound.

In one case, however, even in this early phase and with so many constraints, Hitchcock pulled together a brilliant film. The director himself felt that THE LODGER, his third picture and his first made in Britain, was his first fully satisfying effort, and it remains by any set of standards a wonderful and exciting movie. For his part, Hitchcock probably had no intentions at this point to become a director of thrillers, but this is his first effort in the genre, and his only silent suspense film. Ivor Novello portrays a mysterious stranger who may or may not be Jack the Ripper boarding in a house with a vulnerable family. Hitchcock's visual techniques are breathtaking even at this stage, and while THE LODGER lacks the depth of his great works, a glimpse at it now certainly allows one to sense the potential of the young master.

THE LODGER also gave Hitchcock his first taste of commercial success and critical acclaim; it was a film following in the footsteps much more of Lang, Murnau, and Pabst than of the sunnier, more emotional Hollywood silents. The follow-ups, DOWNHILL and EASY VIRTUE, retained the expressionistic style but played with more conventional storylines. In the case of EASY VIRTUE, the result was an intriguing but hollow film; however, Hitchcock's unique touches can be sensed not just in the visual and technical aspects but also in the storytelling themes -- the faint suggestion of lesbianism, the cynicism about romance, and the oppressiveness of the heroine's surroundings.

Certainly, Hitchcock's most surprising silent film is THE RING, a low-key effort about an ambitious boxer and the woman he loves. The story is not particularly compelling, but the pacing and direction are flawless, attaining a professionalism generally absent from early British films. Even more than THE LODGER, THE RING makes the case that it was always a foregone conclusion that the director would end up in Hollywood.

THE FARMER'S WIFE, CHAMPAGNE, and THE MANXMAN close the silent era with a whimper. The best of these is the last, a well-executed but overlong melodrama about a woman torn between two close friends, but many prefer THE FARMER'S WIFE, an extremely bloated comedy with many fascinating visual sequences. Nevertheless, THE LODGER and THE RING are the only two Hitchcock silents that really display his knack for great storytelling, and only THE LODGER really feels like his work.

To be frank, nothing in Hitchcock's silent canon compares with his (and Britain's) first sound picture, the astonishing BLACKMAIL, a movie that reaches confidently toward some level of genius. It is a dark and morally uncompromising tale of a police captain's girlfriend who is lured to a man's apartment, where he attempts to rape her before she stabs him to death; unfortunately, a bum notices her leaving his apartment. The tension is sustained magnificently to the finish, the emotions of Anny Ondra become our own, and the devilish use of sound is as good as anything in films today. The climax is nearly unbearable, the bleak ending a haunting fall into the abyss. BLACKMAIL serves undeniably as the model for Hitchcock's later British masterpieces: gritty, dark, economical, and wicked. As cinematic experiments go, it is near the top of the heap.

Alfred Hitchcock had now made two suspense pictures, which were his two most popular to date, but he does not appear to have considered himself a "genre" director at this point. His studio certainly did not. His next six films include two straightforward theater adaptations, a whodunit, a black comedy, an "old dark house" quickie, and a musical. The most significant of these is surely MURDER!, a sure-handed and striking mystery that is closer than the others to Hitchcock's later work, but not by much; he was not one for the kind of story that rigidly follows the structure of murder / trial / investigation.

Sean O'Casey's JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK and John Galsworthy's THE SKIN GAME, two popular plays filmed (in the midst of an industry-wide epidemic of such projects following the acquisition of sound) in relatively bare fashion by Hitchcock, are interesting for the way they chart his progression with picture and sound in just two years. While fun to watch for those who admire the director, JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK is a tired antique, with excellent performances but little cinematic vitality. THE SKIN GAME is more of the same, but is significant for the intensity of several scenes (the auction sequence is an exceptionally well-mounted fusion of image and noise) and the very professional use of long takes, though few other aspects of the production warrant the word "professional." On both films, Hitchcock's budget was nonexistent. He claims he did not make THE SKIN GAME by choice, but no such excuse exists for JUNO, one of his own favorite plays.

Though RICH AND STRANGE is superficially one of the director's least characteristic films, it is also one of his best early efforts, and perhaps the only case in which his favored themes did not hide behind a gripping suspense tale. The movie concerns a bored couple who take a vacation using borrowed inheritance money and find themselves each straying to other lovers before they must suddenly fight for survival. A very "modern" and dramatically sophisticated (and lethally funny) story, it is Hitchcock at his most personal and direct, though it is no more straightforward than VERTIGO. Full of telling moments and fascinating detail, it's an outstanding film, but one that was unfortunately a bit of a flop, which may have been among Hitchcock's greatest disappointments, and one of his major turning points.

Quickly filmed some time before RICH AND STRANGE but released immediately thereafter, NUMBER SEVENTEEN is Hitchcock's biggest mess and perhaps his weakest and most clichéd film. Running just barely an hour, it begins and ends quite well, with a congregation of strangers in a deserted old house and a wonderful (but rather frivolous) chase scene, but is otherwise intolerably confusing and ragged. Soon, he found himself at his lowest point, filming a musical about Strauss. At some point during the filming of WALTZES FROM VIENNA, unable to manage the logistics of a crowd scene, Hitchcock got frustrated and made a decision to change his focus.

It would be a simplification to assume that the production problems of WALTZES and NUMBER SEVENTEEN led directly to Hitchcock's overhaul of his career. Certainly the budgetary constraints and lack of project control were a part of what drove him to ditch British International and join Gaumont Pictures, but RICH AND STRANGE may have played the largest role of all in shifting Hitchcock's attention. More than any other, this had been a film that toyed with his own beloved ideas and philosophies, and it had failed to find an audience. Hitchcock's major hits were still BLACKMAIL and THE LODGER, both suspense films. From 1934 on, with a single exception, all of his output would belong ostensibly in that category, but in fact, they defy any real form of genre, not simply by fusing comedy and romance with the thrills -- something any director worth his salt would do anyway -- but by injecting personality, sophistication and darkly observed realism to create what can only rightly be called a genre of his own, the "Hitchcockian" film, the thriller that is emotional and disturbing even as it remains a delicious night out at the movies.

The project that laid the groundwork for the rest of Hitchcock's career was the magnificent THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Charming, sexy, and breathless, it's a composite of all the best elements of his great films. The almost subliminal connection with the audience begins with the couple who are the center of the picture, played by Leslie Banks and Edna Best with good nature and dark humor in a tantalizingly realistic marriage far from the idealized romances of Hollywood. The stability offered by a good relationship is really what THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is about, as that stability -- along with that of the world itself, as expressed in a chilling and prophetic comparison to the Ferdinand assassination -- is threatened when their daughter is kidnapped because of information imparted to them by a dying man. With the astonishing elegance of the sequence in which his whispered words invade us, the golden age of Hitchcock begins. "Don't breathe a word... don't breathe a word... to anyone!"

The potential of that film was realized by the impossibly grand follow-up, THE 39 STEPS. Age has not diminished this wrong-man-on-the-run movie's power to leave an audience spellbound. It is a work of pure, forceful excitement and energy, with a timeless appeal across boundaries of age and sex that lives on today beyond nearly all other films of the '30s. It also functions as a chilling portrait of Europe between the two wars, with a kind of pregnancy behind every moment. That feature carries over to Hitchcock's next two films, both of them among his darkest, SECRET AGENT and SABOTAGE. Although these two masterful efforts continue in the 39 STEPS suspence vein and the three form a kind of trilogy, the latter two did not enjoy the same mass popularity, perhaps because their more ominous overtones were less skillfully hidden. Today, however, SECRET AGENT and, even more so, SABOTAGE (confusingly enough, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's _The Secret Agent_), can be seen as remarkable films far ahead of their time, full of anti-heroes, impending doom and haunting questions about war, pacifism, and nationalism.

YOUNG AND INNOCENT and THE LADY VANISHES were both major hits, but they continue in the same tradition; the difference may simply be, again, that Hitchcock confines the darkness in YOUNG AND INNOCENT to the peripheral landscapes and people surrounding his characters. At first glance, it may seem like a superficial 39 STEPS, but in fact, there is a beauty and charm and even menace unique in the Hitchcock canon. And that film is simply a trial run for the knockout, THE LADY VANISHES, a film that reels its audience in with bright, wicked humor before plunging them in the horrors of prewar Europe, an anticipation of radical changes in tone in PSYCHO, among others.

The widespread success of THE 39 STEPS and THE LADY VANISHES prompted various Hollywood studios to bid for Hitchcock's affections. Some were seeking greater stature for their British wings, others wanted him to transfer operations to America. After a lengthy series of negotiations, Hitchcock signed not to a studio but to independent producer David O. Selznick, the pioneer mogul formerly of RKO (KING KONG) and MGM (DAVID COPPERFIELD), then hard at work on his masterpiece, GONE WITH THE WIND. Selznick and Hitchcock's collaboration would prove a complicated, healthy, maddening, bizarre, and above all, highly fruitful one.

Before he set off for Hollywood to film his first project for Selznick, Hitchcock fulfilled an old contract obligation to Erich Pommer by filming the quickie JAMAICA INN. An expensive failure (and one that left the author of the source novel, Daphne Du Maurier, highly displeased), the film was among Hitchcock's most superficial. Though gripping and fun, it has no resonance. Its sloppiness cast doubt in the States about whether he would be capable of mounting a major Hollywood picture. Such worries were wholly without merit, though there was a shade of truth to them: Once he went to America, Alfred Hitchcock's films were never the same quick, boisterous, cheap, loud crowd pleasers he had made in the U.K.; for the next few decades, his work would become increasingly ambitious.

REBECCA was, to put it mildly, a step in an entirely new directon for Hitchcock. Another Du Maurier adaptation, this one following Joan Fontaine (in a truly earth-shattering performance) as the naive new wife of a widower with a dark secret, the film was envisioned by producer Selznick as a lavish, opulent costume drama; Hitchcock preferred to see it as a more disturbing tale of a woman drowning in alienation. Though Selznick favored a close, to-the-letter adaptation of the popular novel, Hitchcock ironically came closer to its spirit by pushing for a psychological thriller and a more radical take on the material.

This conflict led to much bitterness and squabbling between the two men, but undeniably produced a better film than either of them could have made separately. Hitchcock's first treatment of REBECCA was written in the style of his British films and was, by all accounts, appallingly vulgar and cheap. In a world without Hitchcock, Selznick might well have handed the project to his personal favorite, George Cukor, and the result would have been free of the dark underpinnings it received. Hitchcock may have broken some of Selznick's perfectionism with his then-unthordox methods of radical cutting and photography, but it would seem that Selznick had the larger effect: Hitchcock learned from the producer and their first project together of the power of romanticism to drive home even farther the thematic obsessions of his work.

In the end, REBECCA was a critical and commercial smash (and the winner of a Best Picture Oscar, a completely unexpected turn for someone who had been churning out material like NUMBER SEVENTEEN just eight years earlier), which would have been unprecedented if not for the nearly identical reception to GONE WITH THE WIND a year earlier. In this case, Selznick was not the only key player; the bloody clashes before, during, and after production were the mark of a true fusion of talent. Selznick had his most adventurous film to date, in all the least obvious ways, and Hitchcock had something that no one who'd followed his early career could have anticipated: A sumptuous, romantic, impeccably rich and involved drama in which all of his typical chaos was buried behind layers of Hollywood glamour... and was all the more effective for it. The lessons Hitchcock took from REBECCA were rarely absent from his work thereafter.

Early on, however, the benefits of such a departure were perhaps not immediately apparent, and Hitchcock's next two films are as far from REBECCA as JAMAICA INN. Selznick went on hiatus in the early '40s and rented Hitchcock out to other studios. The first film under this arrangement was FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT for Walter Wanger and United Artists, a sort of American SECRET AGENT haunted by the increasingly grim crisis in Europe and verging, at the finale, on propaganda. Although it was among his greatest efforts and was critically acclaimed, Selznick -- and a few other members of the Hollywood consortium -- considered it a mess. Even more problematic was the comedy quickie MR. & MRS. SMITH, a top-notch showcase for Carole Lombard, but a film that many considered undistinguished at the time; although Hitchcock's name was now known widely enough to be used in RKO's press material for SMITH, it did not go unnoticed that neither of his subsequent projects could be considered true follow-ups to REBECCA.

With SUSPICION, another film for RKO, Hitchcock sought to quiet such barbs, but he landed in an even more embarrassing situation during the shooting. He had the stars -- Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine -- and the dreamlike atmosphere in the REBECCA manner, as well as a story with genuine dramatic potential; the only thing missing was a script. The film does reflect a Hitchcock twist on Tinseltown convention -- Cary Grant plays the debt-ridden deadbeat husband of Joan Fontaine, who suspects he is plotting to kill her -- but is more of a compromise than FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT or his next two films, SABOTEUR and SHADOW OF A DOUBT. Revisions were being rushed through so late in the process that the ending, largely for censorship reasons, was unknown until almost the end of the shoot. Although the movie was a hit and a very good film, it suffers from precisely the problem that made its process so murky: The ending, a Code-imposed compromise, is abrupt and dramatically shaky. SUSPICION did prove two things: That Hitchcock could manage a slick and popular Hollywood picture on his own, and that Selznick's influence on him had been more pronounced than most had perhaps suspected. Of his own accord, Hitchcock here was leaning toward the theatrics of REBECCA instead of the down-to-earth grit of his early films.

World War II changed everything in Hollywood for a time, including Hitchcock's work, and certainly the clarity of politics. Similar to FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT but less restrained (and derived obviously from THE 39 STEPS), SABOTEUR is the most "British-like" of his U.S. efforts, despite being by many accounts the first truly American Hitchcock movie. Cowritten by Dorothy Parker, it is a tale of a solider (Robert Cummings) wrongly accused of sabotage on the run from virtually everyone; the beautifully simple leftist screed, made for Universal, is eccentric and empowering in the best of ways. The era is so ingrained into the production one can almost smell it. Such populist, boisterous entertainment did well with audiences but left such observers as David O. Selznick with essentially the opposite impression that SUSPICION had given. Since neither film had been turned in on schedule, the director's reputation as an unkempt immigrant was still very much alive.

With SHADOW OF A DOUBT, starring Joseph Cotten, about the discovery of a serial killer's identity by his adoring neice, Hitchcock created an American masterpiece that could scarcely be a vision shared with any other filmmaker. It is his most expansive and sophisticated film to this point, and it is, by a surprisingly wide margin, his darkest, a title it would retain until the late '50s. This peerless achievement targets small town America, deconstructing its illusions one by one, resulting in a disturbing hybrid of romantic mystery and unforgiving chronicle of betrayal and loss of faith. It's also incredibly uncompromising in its examination of incest; in future films Hitchcock would tackle other taboo subjects such as rape, sexual obsession, and homosexuality, all with ever-increasing vigor.

Following SHADOW, Hitchcock became embroiled in his personal obligations for the war effort; he made two propaganda shorts for the Free French, "Bon Voyage" and "Aventure Malagache," and he later assisted in the filming and editing of concentration camp footage after the Liberation. In 1944, he created a film for 20th Century Fox that was more seeped in the contemporary crises of the world than any other he made. Yet, somehow, LIFEBOAT remains timeless, a cross-section of humanity -- including a Nazi -- trying to coexist aboard the title vessel at the height of the war. Ostensibly scripted by John Steinbeck (who actually just offered a treatment), LIFEBOAT is a staggering, sad, world-weary treatise about human nature; the visual and emotional opportunities afforded in the single confined set are as rich and detailed as those of any other Hollywood film. The movie's achievements are humbling, all the more so six decades later.

David O. Selznick finally returned to the fold in 1944, with Hitchcock still on board. After completing SINCE YOU WENT AWAY and I'LL BE SEEING YOU, Selznick set his attentions on perhaps his most ambitious project, a psychological thriller based on the surreal tale "The House of Dr. Edwardes," considered ideal Hitchcock material. He found the director full of enthusiasm, and the pair engaged ideas in an energetic spirit of one-upmanship, with the film quickly growing larger and larger in stature. Selznick wanted a film that would be "the film" about his new pet subject, psychoanalysis, and a foolproof vehicle for his new recruit, Gregory Peck. Hitchcock just wanted Ingrid Bergman in glasses, but as Selznick's glee for the story's potential overflowed, the director became enamored with his most outlandish idea of all -- hiring Salvador Dali to create a dream sequence. Selznick couldn't relate to this notion but was more than happy to have Hitchcock as interested as he was.

SPELLBOUND, the result, is one of the messiest Hitchcock films, with the clash of Selznick and Hitchcock principles even more evident than in REBECCA, and here not nearly so seamless. It's a slick, sometimes almost lifelessly pretty and ornate film stacked with appallingly eccentric ideas, some of them coming across more clearly than others, many of them more competently executed in Hitchcock's 1964 refinement of the same idea, MARNIE. The movie concerns the new head of a mental institution, who turns out to be an escaped asylum patient himself; unfortunately, one of the doctors at the hospital has fallen for him and now is on the rollercoaster with him. The story is full of possibilities, but Selznick's dignified approach clashes with the surrealism and playfulness that should be inherent. Only the Dali dream sequence really matches the feel of faint insanity, but it feels out of place and is placed in the film in such a fashion as to be dull, obvious, and all too coherent, feeling like anything but a dream.

The major failing of the film lies in Ben Hecht's script, undoubtedly as a result of Selznick's interference; the female protagonist, a psychiatrist, is sadly underwritten, her lines and ideas frequently clichéd even as they are determined not to be. Most disappointing about this is that Ingrid Bergman's performance in the role is outstanding; bespectacled and looking beautifully androgynous, she embodies this role in fully convincing, exciting top form. Gregory Peck is less able, equally injust given that Hecht, Selznick, and Hitchcock did a much better job fleshing out his character.

For all its problems, SPELLBOUND undeniably works; it's a fascinating curio and a hugely exciting film that simply isn't what it could have been. If nothing else, it proves Hitchcock virtually incapable of bad or even mediocre filmmaking. The quickest of comparisons with his previous three films, however, reveals that it lacks his distinctive personality even as it inherits his ingenuity.

Hitchcock's greatest triumph of Hollywood filmmaking came next; NOTORIOUS was initially another Selznick project, but it was sold -- with stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in the package -- to RKO during production. It is among three of Hitchcock's films for which no superlative feels remotely sufficient. Approaching it from any conceivable angle reveals something alarmingly close to absolute cinematic perfection. The romantic thriller has a setup to die for: Bergman, the son of a Nazi spy, is employed by the U.S. government to marry secluded German official Claude Rains and report on his activities. The assignment is reluctantly given to her by cynical American agent Grant (in the finest, darkest performance of his illustrious career), who has fallen for her. At various times, NOTORIOUS approaches German expressionist horror, a fairy tale, and a kind of muted smut. In all three forms and many others, it excels. Hitchcock mounts the tension like never before, but in this case it's just one of many parts of his emotional palette. The exhiliration of NOTORIOUS marks Hitchcock's full transformation to a Hollywood filmmaker; it goes farther than his British films ever could with both grandiose beauty and intense complexity. The lessons of REBECCA, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, and SHADOW OF A DOUBT all came together here, and Hitchcock would never again have to prove his capability of turning the system into his tool.

The heights reached by NOTORIOUS set THE PARADINE CASE up as a disappointment almost by default. The last Hitchcock-Selznick collaboration was cowritten by Selznick and taken up somewhat reluctantly by the director, who used it as a platform to experiment with two of his favorite gimmicks, enclosed sets and long takes. The film was taken out of his hands after shooting was completed, with nearly an hour chopped off. As it exists today, THE PARADINE CASE is an incoherent mess that suffers from poor casting, particularly of Gregory Peck in the lead. It seems clear that it was far removed from the director's personal stamp; from this point onward, he always produced his own films.

It was with a degree of new-beginnings idealism that Hitchcock set up his own production company, Transatlantic Pictures, in the late '40s. Although his first project as an independent producer was a thriller, it was a highly unorthodox one, and the follow-up saw him venture outside of the genre for the first time in over a decade. The director obviously felt comfortable now playing a one-on-one game with Hollywood. Unfortunately, ROPE, his first color film, did mediocre business; the intense, single-set, "real-time" murder chronicle (made to appear seamless, without any obvious cutting) was far ahead of its time and met with ambivalence despite the presence of James Stewart. Although the film skillfully wove the spectacle with deeper philosophical ideas regarding everything from Nazism to homosexuality, it also marked the beginning of the end of Hitchcock's happy relationship with U.S. film critics, who seemed incapable of accepting the director's fusion of genres or his determination to appeal to multiple contingents.

Critics were all the more baffled by UNDER CAPRICORN; despite their expressed boredom with Hitchcock thrillers, they could not be bothered to accept a Hitchcock costume film that ventured toward the lush, romantic, macabre territory later explored by Roger Corman with considerably less restraint. This unique pastiche is as close as RICH & STRANGE to an unfiltered view of Hitchcock's fascinations, cinematic and otherwise, at a time when he felt (almost) commercially invulnerable. With aching performances by Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten, the film stands up as a minor classic today, but at the time was dismissed because of both its lack of genre elements and the somewhat valid criticism that it broke no new ground for Hitchcock, with the story similar to REBECCA and the technique borrowed from ROPE. However, Hitchcock's use of color has improved substantially by the time of his second Technicolor project, and this is another reason the movie has aged so well. Indeed, it can be seen as a refinement and a hybrid of many of his earlier projects, with Hitchcock now putting behind him forever the suave, detached straight Hollywood costume glamour by getting it all out of his system at once.

UNDER CAPRICORN performed so terribly once in release that Transatlantic Pictures' assets were quickly reclaimed by the bank. Hitchcock made a four-picture deal with Warner Bros. and found himself suddenly cut off from his blanket of success, with three commercial disappointments in a row. It was at this precedent that Hitchcock made the first of two weak attempts to consciously make "a Hitchcock picture." Though the failure of ROPE and UNDER CAPRICORN can easily be placed on their experimental nature, STAGE FRIGHT remains as tired and clichéd today as it was in 1950. The first product of what ironically would turn out to be the Master's most fertile period comes off as a sudden clamoring for security in many ways. It was filmed in England and is almost suggestive of what might have happened if Hitchcock had never left and continued to turn out a LADY VANISHES-style picture every year. Individual virtuous fragments of STAGE FRIGHT -- the strange moments with the wonderful supporting cast, Marlene Dietrich's typically bizarre musical number, the many references to theatrical life -- are offset by the terrible screenplay and the turgid casting of Jane Wyman and Michael Wilding. Though he seems to have deliberately placed everything as subordinate to the film's commercial potential, Hitchcock's "run for cover" was another flop.

The rebirth came quickly and resulted in an overall career renaissance, as it had with THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH in 1934. It was in the '50s that Hitchcock's ideas about the relevance of cinema as audience communication and about the very possibilities of the form would come to fruition. For Warner Bros., his peak period began with the wrenching STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, a film so unnerving it nearly crosses some kind of psychological line, foretelling PSYCHO (which, of course, would cross all of those lines repeatedly).

STRANGERS opens with the meeting of its title, between a famous tennis player -- embroiled in a very public spat over his romance with a congressman's daughter -- and a disturbed, overambitious greaseball with murder on his mind. What follows is a series of scenes with the rawest exhibition of cinematic power in memory: A sexually-charged murder at a fairground in which the audience takes the role of equal parts victim and predator. An unbearable sequence of cross-cutting between a game of tennis and a lighter stuck in a sewer grate. And at the finale, the thrilling, orgasmic final battle aboard a malfunctioning merry-go-round. The film is among the few that may actually require a period of recovery on first viewing.

The film was massive enough to give Hitchcock once again the independence to travel down more eccentric roads. I CONFESS was an extremely dark, brooding thriller drenched in Catholic themes, almost suffocatingly bleak and serious, marked by its pitch-black photography and the atypical presence of a Method Actor (Montgomery Clift) in the lead. This moderate hit -- later refined in the more balanced THE WRONG MAN -- was swiftly followed by an experiment in color and 3D, DIAL M FOR MURDER, another filmed play in a confined setting, fusing ROPE and LIFEBOAT sensibilities. Though incredibly tense, the film suffers from miscasting, its two male leads (Ray Milland and Robert Cummings) easily upstaged by the marvelous Grace Kelly, an actress with whom Hitchcock identified so intensely that she was featured in his next two films.

The first of these (and the first product of Hitchcock's lucrative deal with Paramount Pictures), REAR WINDOW, was unprecedented. It can be proclaimed with little doubt as the defining project of Hitchcock's career, so bare and seamless is its use of the cinema as a self-reflexive medium, so transparent is its use (and, at times, accusation) of the audience as a participant in the story. James Stewart is a photographer, naturally, confined in his Greenwich Village apartment by a broken leg (his impotence?), nursed by no-nonsense Thelma Ritter and uncompromising, openly sexual Grace Kelly. All three are soon caught up in the drama of what appears to be a murder just across the street, glimpsed through a pair of binoculars. Never before or since has something this involving, immediate been crafted on celluloid: It tears away at the edges of the screen until the fantasy and reality seem to merge. It is the apex of Hitchcock and Hollywood, the thematic and visual possibilities utilized fully, a film that bursts out of its confined setting to engulf the world we live in, the room we sit in when we see it. And it contains perhaps the all-time greatest moment in the movies, when Raymond Burr -- the suspicious character -- realizes he is being watched and looks directly into the camera, at Jimmy Stewart and at the viewer. You have been spotted, and there will be no mercy.

After redefining the art as we know it, Hitchcock took a vacation and decided to film it; nothing so ambitious could be followed adequately, so he did not try, instead offering a trilogy of location films: the frothy TO CATCH A THIEF, which exposes bare essentials of cinematic button-pushing in another way, full of remarkably vivid carnality along the French Riviera. THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, a hugely underrated black comedy, takes Hitchcock to a homey little town in New England, where a dead body lights up a rather glib controversy. Finally, Hitchcock's remake of his own THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is, although inferior to the original, a bright and tense thriller featuring a fine performance by Doris Day, who -- in the ultimate Hitchcock Hollywood moment -- sings "Que Sera Sera" while Jimmy Stewart searches for their son's kidnappers. In the musical sequence, Hitchcock does go farther than anyone else ever bothered in using the obligatory element of glamour to aid his story.

But glamour would never again be a part of his career, except in an ironic fashion. Hitchcock's last ten films -- with the exception of 1966's TORN CURTAIN, a vain attempt at recovering his power as a creator of hit star vehicles -- can now be seen as a sharp turnaround, suddenly embroiled in darkness and hyperrealism. The trend begins with THE WRONG MAN, the last Warner Bros. project for the director, a highly unusual and atypically emotional documentary-style film based on the true story of Manny Baestro, a jazz musician falsely accused of armed robbery in New York. THE WRONG MAN inherits the bleak nature and Catholic overtones of I CONFESS, this time with a more sophisticated storyline, a more varied atmosphere, and even better acting, with stunning turns by Henry Fonda as the accused and Vera Miles as his long-suffering wife.

It was in VERTIGO, however, that it all came together. In this sumptuous, romantic masterpiece, James Stewart (again playing the impotent male, this time a former cop afraid of heights and forever regretful of a life he failed to save) on the trail of a delusional woman with whom he falls in love. The surreal, engrossing movie opens in the form of a ghost story and slowly reveals itself to be a chronicle of a different sort of ghosts. Making no concessions to commercialism -- indeed, it's uncompromising up to its final shot -- this wildly erotic, intensely emotional, and intimately personal film brings all of the deepest elements of Hitchcock's prior films into one very dreamlike psychological thriller. It is an assured triumph, the best film ever to come out of the studio system and possibly the finest bit of cinematic craft ever released.

Sadly, it was a box office failure at the time, a rejection of Hollywood values that was perhaps all too devoted to that cause. NORTH BY NORTHWEST took the opposite tactic, conquering and ridiculing big-movie clichés (including those invented by Hitchcock in THE 39 STEPS and SABOTEUR) through overkill. Hyperactive sensory overload, this story of Cary Grant mistaken for a spy and accidentally led into the spectacular cross country thriller of all time is a coy bit of self-referencing comedy but also another nightmare on film, dizzying and humbling in its pitting of the everyman against mammoth, sometimes incomprehensible situations. It is not a mockery of the audience -- the viewer is, in fact, a cheerful passenger -- but a wry comment on everything expected of movies and moviemaking, everything which VERTIGO never copped to. Nevertheless, NORTH BY NORTHWEST is a film nearly as brilliant through its use of conventional facilities (it was Hitchcock's only film made for MGM) to make its statements about the crushing of individualism while serving as undeniable, supercharged entertainment.

But PSYCHO would take another route. The most famous thriller ever made is a powerful investigation of the mind of the viewer, suggesting parallels between the innocent, naive criminal (the everyman or, in this case, everywoman) and the seasoned psychopath. It undercuts all expectations both by disposing of its leading lady and structuring its first act as a red herring (though, of course, it is really much more than that, with all of the separate elements commenting on one another), by wielding a knife that cuts through the screen and into the viewer (an idea that Hitchcock was attempting as far back as SECRET AGENT), and by foregoing every shred of conventional Hollywood technique by using a TV crew, no big-name performers, and cheap television techniques. The low budget production values add to the tension, as does the nondescript black & white photography (Paramount, for whom this was Hitchcock's last project, thought the director had lost his mind) and the subtle, utterly believable performances by Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. The film obeys no rules whatsoever about structure or commercial appeal, yet it retains Hollywood convention in the sense that it is utterly compelling throughout. It retains its vitality today precisely because of its minimalism; the ways it finds to toy with the nervous audience member remain effective not just for those who see the film for the first time today but for those who have seen it hundreds of times and can recite its script (a phenomenal one, by Joseph Stefano) from memory.

Hitchcock took an unprecedented three-year hiatus to prepare his first movie for Universal, his final and permanent home. THE BIRDS is the lone Hitchcock film to deal with the supernatural and is, in some ways, yet another reactionary move against all American film conventions. The terror in the ordinary was never before (or again) so gloriously realized on a movie screen, with common birds attacking citizens all over the world until it becomes their own. Today, it remains one of the most frightening films in existence and owes much of its depth to the pains Hitchcock takes to remind everyone of their involvement: A bird in one sequence hits the screen and cracks it. Superficially, it's the side of a phone booth, but anyone who knows Hitchcock knows the truth. Later, a woman looks squarely into the camera accusing those watching of "causing" the attacks. As Bill Krohn has eloquently pointed out, by simply going to see the film, the audience has indeed caused the attacks, and therefore the audience more than ever here becomes the heroine. THE BIRDS is offset only by its lack of climax; Hitchcock's somewhat lifeless attempt, a senseless rape of Tippi Hedren by a room full of birds, is a valiant but hopeless stab at offering total orgasm of tension and conflict in this sometimes nearly intolerably visceral film. It does, however, feature one of the greatest endings of any major film.

After THE BIRDS, Hitchcock had a much more difficult time arranging projects to his satisfaction. At the time, his reputation was such that MARNIE and TOPAZ came off as weak shadows of past glories, but today TOPAZ feels like a beautifully realized political thriller that simply lacks an ending, and MARNIE is nearly flawless, one of the most resonant of all films and, like UNDER CAPRICORN, a project that almost completely defies genre. It is not really a thriller, a romance, or a mystery, but like VERTIGO, it can be quickly described as a filmed evocation of the logic of dreams. It's also a quiet achievement of one of Hitchcock's most consistent goals; nowhere else in cinema is such intense identification with a lead character achieved. We are so embroiled in Marnie's plight that when a thunderstorm intrudes in an office early in the film, it can be inferred that we feel exactly what she is feeling, thanks to the abstract and stunning way with which it (and almost everything else in the film) is presented.

The director regained critical regard with the wild, over-the-top FRENZY, an amazingly witty and sometimes oppressively violent wrong-man thriller with excruciating scenes of rape and murder contrasted by pitch-black British humor. Despite the explicit nature of the film (with ample nudity and onscreen killing, following up the unforgettable gore of THE BIRDS), it is a throwback to Hitchcock's British period, recalling most vividly SABOTAGE, THE 39 STEPS, and the peerless BLACKMAIL. As Norman Lloyd said, it is the picture of a young man, and the sort of film Hitchcock would always have made, had the freedoms been available to him. One can only imagine what else he might have achieved if he'd had the time.

After a number of false starts, Hitchcock got his final picture off the ground in 1975. FAMILY PLOT is frothier than FRENZY but just as delightful, a mystery-comedy in the mold of YOUNG AND INNOCENT telling parallel stories of two couples -- the first is a pair of con artists, the second a pair of jewel thieves. As in THE PLEASURE GARDEN, his very first project as director, the two worlds converge and implode. And at the final sequence, Hitchcock summarizes a career of quietly breaking the fourth wall by having his leading lady openly wink at an audience, as glorious a goodbye as any filmmaker has given us.

In 1977, Hitchcock was preparing his 54th film, THE SHORT NIGHT, when he found he could no longer work and was forced to retire at age 76. This came mere months after a heart attack had interrupted the shoot of FAMILY PLOT, and just a few years after his wife had suffered a massive stroke. The director's departure from the Universal lot was a resigned and difficult one for him. In many ways it would seem that he was not ready to leave filmmaking behind; perhaps more significantly, it's hard to imagine that he ever would be, regardless of how long he'd lived. In April 1980, two years after being honored by the AFI and a few months after being knighted, he died at home; he was eighty years old.

Hitchcock himself enjoyed a happy marriage and continuous collaboration with Alma Reville, script supervisor and cowriter on many of his British films; the couple is said to have been "obsessed" with films and filmmaking, visiting movie houses several times a week, a pathology that may have led to the vague feeling, rampant in their work, that the only thing that's going to save us all is our own insanity. "We're all," Norman Bates said, "in our private trap."



INTRODUCTION / FILMOGRAPHY