Alfred Hitchcock.

I'll not indulge myself at the expense of [producers]. I don't have the
right kind of conceit. I want to please everyone, if I can. We live in
an industry.
                                               - Alfred Hitchcock (1)

All his adult life, English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was a professional crowdpleaser. No doubt this showed the influence of his mentor, fellow director Graham Cutts, whose films often emphasised theatrical spectacle. Astutely, Hitchcock kept in touch with critics and (selected) intellectuals, such as his communist friend Ivor Montagu. After hours, he attended both wrestling matches and symphony concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, and was a frequent visitor to art galleries. (He was trained in draughtsmanship.) Always, he had an eye for the big picture, while maintaining, in his wife Alma's words, 'the most completely balanced mind I have ever known'. (2) Not so, many of his characters: typically they found themselves plunged into bizarre situations that threatened to overwhelm them. The result for audiences might be suspenseful, or comic, or both. That suited Hitchcock, who, a touch sadistically, defined his role as 'to put the audience through it'. (3) Recently, a Lacanian scholar described 'Hitchcock's essential cinematic project' as 'staging the encounter with the Real'. (4)' That may be true, although, as a director of adventure thrillers (most with a romantic element), what particularly concerned Hitchcock was the human dimension. The character nicknamed Scottie (James Stewart) in Vertigo (1958) spends the film searching for 'the key'; the search is the essential thing. To have dwelt on implacable evil or the indifference of the universe would have been out of place. Hitchcock told an interviewer: 'I've never been interested in professional criminals. The audience can't identify with their lack of feeling.' (5) Each Hitchcock picture was a world, with its own distinctive tone and style--although such worlds invariably shared the 'person wronged' motif--and for the viewer, at least, the illusion while watching them was of a modest scale, of events metaphorically if not literally down-to-earth. (This was generally true, whether the film was a cross-country chase or was set in one room.) Perhaps such deceptiveness explains why Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for Best Director: pictures aren't supposed to feel this accessible! Still, he was twice 'compensated' by his peers in Hollywood (where he had moved at the end of the 1930s): first, in 1968, with the Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award for his body of work; and, second, in 1979, when he received an AFI Life Achievement Award.

Of course, quite as important to an appreciation of Hitchcock's films as any of the above is the sheer fact of his genius: it can be summed up by noting that he could carry an entire film in his head--both the form and the content, right down to individual shots--and would work quickly and efficiently, from the planning and storyboarding stages through to the actual filming and the publicity. In what follows, we'll inspect several of his best-known works and two or three of the lesser-known ones, including his boxing film The Ring (1927), (6) for which he also wrote the scenario, and his Ford Startime TV venture 'Incident at a Corner' (1960), in which he directed his new protege, the lovely Vera Miles.

KEY FILMS

The Ring

Like another fine boxing picture, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004)--indeed, like the world of professional sport itself --Hitchcock's silent The Ring deals in values. A sports ethic mattered to Hitchcock, and several of his pictures cite it, sometimes ironically: for example, defeated spy Vandamm (James Mason) complains in North by Northwest (1959), 'That wasn't very sporting of you.' The Ring climaxes with its title fight at the Royal Albert Hall between challenger Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) and title-holder Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) from Australia: although long-time opponents and rivals, they are able to show concern about the other's welfare after a knock-down, or are quick to acknowledge defeat. In one of Hitchcock's youthful short stories, 'Fedora' (1921), he had touched on the importance of accepting whatever hand fate deals you; we can't all be famous, the story implied. Nonetheless, according to the story, 'every person has a plot [...] and every plot is the same'. (7) If that suggests a corollary, 'No man is an island', the visuals of The Ring support it: the circular hall binds contenders and spectators, and the Stimmung (8) of the opening titles intimates that the occasion speaks to everyone (while showing a German influence on Hitchcock). The shot of a distant, lit-up boxing ring surrounded by darkened watchers (who may stand for the film's viewers) is riveting. Curiously, that effect is mirrored by the sunny climax of North by Northwest, in which hero Thornhill (Cary Grant) squints through a telescope at the towering Mount Rushmore National Memorial, and says, 'I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.' A fascination in studying Hitchcock movies is to notice their frequent resort to 'pure film' (3) and the power of the gaze to make their points; however, exactly whose gaze is thus represented remains contentious (as discussed later).

Basically, The Ring is a triangle drama. Two men, Jack and Bob, vie for The Girl (Lillian Hall-Davis), who marries Jack halfway through, yet is tempted away by the current champion, having known only the fairground life so far. Jack realises that he must prove himself, yet this itself puts the marriage at risk, as he must absent himself for lengthy training sessions. The Girl takes the opportunity to sample the 'flapper' lifestyle (like Alice, played by Anny Ondra, in Blackmail, 1929), and wavers as to her next move: some early Hitchcock suspense. But note: any female 'concupiscence' (hers) is balanced by male 'irresponsibility' (Bob's). Meanwhile, Hitchcock suggests that all plots move to one end--are part of the big picture--and again the point is made visually. At a party attended by The Girl, where the champagne has flowed freely, two girls do a wild dance, then retire to their respective 'corners' and are revived by their 'seconds'. Contrariwise, at the Albert Hall, champagne is poured over the boxers' heads to spur them on.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

'I think you'll find the real start of my career was The Man Who Knew Too Much,' Hitchcock would say of his 1934 film. (10) With it, he had found his metier: the fast-paced thriller whose special qualities were emotion, piquant details of character and place, and an inventiveness that rivalled that of the English metaphysical poets. The inventiveness wasn't by chance: many evenings, at Hitchcock's rooms in Cromwell Road, London (where he lived with Alma and their young daughter Patricia), he would engage with a 'brains trust' of such stimulating friends as Montagu, script supervisor Angus MacPhail and current screenplay writer Charles Bennett, (author of the original stage version of Blackmail). Food and drink would be served in an informal atmosphere (not to say permissive, allowing Hitch his off-colour jokes), a copy of William Wallace Cook's remarkable 1928 book Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots at hand. But the evening's focus would be the unfolding screenplay, and... ideas. According to Montagu, We would search for ideas in books, in plays, odd scenes in the street.' (11) No doubt, in the case of The Man Who Knew Too Much, about a London family on holiday in Switzerland whose young daughter is kidnapped by political assassins, Hitchcock had identified with the father while remembering some recent headlines from America (specifically, the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping case). And for the climactic shootout back in London between police and assassins, he drew on both historical record (the celebrated Sidney Street siege of 1911) and a couple of films he admired: Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922), whose climax was itself based on such a shootout (in Paris, a year earlier), and Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932).

But metaphysics? Poetry? Palpably, they're present--just as they are, again and again, in later Hitchcocks like Marnie (1964). In that film, red ink spilled on Marnie's (Tippi Hedren) white sleeve (result: panic) in effect signals a creaturely vulnerability that had been given grander expression thirty years previously in the 'Storm Cloud Cantata' scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much (and later in that film's masterly 1956 Hollywood remake, also by Hitchcock). The Albert Hall again features in the 1934 film: the mother of the kidnapped child, while sensing that an assassination is imminent, feels helpless to intervene; meanwhile, the cantata's lyrics, sung by a female soloist backed by a massed choir and full orchestra, refer to 'nameless fear/ And panic [that] overtook each flying creature of the wild'. (The dialogue had earlier mentioned Sarajevo, so nothing less than world war feels at stake.) Note, though, that Jill (Edna Best), the mother, gets to be fully active at the end. A crack rifle shot, she uses one of the police rifles to shoot the assassins' marksman. Call it poetic justice.

Rebecca

After The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock and his screenwriters (notably Bennett) created a succession of thrillers that further enhanced their director's international reputation. Both Bennett and Hitchcock were invited to work in Hollywood. Hitchcock's debut film there proved to be Rebecca (1940), from the 1938 modern Gothic novel by Daphne du Maurier. It was produced by David O Selznick who, after Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), was hoping to emulate that picture's triumph: sure enough, Rebecca won him his second successive Best Picture award (while Hitchcock was nominated for--but did not win--Best Director). Rebecca has always been admired by industry professionals, being polished in all departments (such as Franz Waxman's score, rich in leitmotifs), and arguably it gave dimensions to Hitchcock's filmmaking that he had not developed before, such as a keener understanding of what it means to say 'every person has the same plot'. As a feminist commentator on the novel suggests, the young second wife of Maxim de Winter 'not surprisingly views [her predecessor] Rebecca as a rival; what she refuses to perceive is that Rebecca is also her twin, and ultimately her alter ego'. (12)

By this argument, the real 'villain' of both novel and film is the overly patriarchal Maxim (Laurence Olivier) himself--feminists liken him to a symbolic Bluebeard (13)--because, in marrying his naive second wife, and in seeking to protect her from the 'truth' about Rebecca (who reportedly was a paragon of 'beauty, brains, and breeding'), he is guilty of 'killing' his new bride, as he had actually killed Rebecca in the novel (it's ambiguous in the film). That may be an unduly harsh verdict on Maxim--certainly, the film seeks to depict both him and his new bride with sympathy, drawing on excellent performances from Olivier and Joan Fontaine--and the brilliantly filmed 'confession' scene halfway through the film, which reverses everything, exemplifies the new richness in Hitchcock's work. Was the film an allegory of his own 'growing-up'?! More to the point, making it a good film for study, Rebecca can be read at least three ways: the popular, conventional way, as a 'straight' love story in which the good woman triumphs over the bad by winning a man's love; as a witty critique of the 'fascist' Maxim; or as du Maurier's satire on patriarchal England in which the free-thinking Rebecca (slandered by her husband) is the secret heroine, standing for a more fluid set of possibilities still distant. Much more could be said. Perhaps the single best text on Rebecca is The Daphne du Maurier Companion, edited by Helen Taylor, which includes thoughtful essays on both the novel and the film.

Shadow of a Doubt

From a stagnating (14) Cornish mansion (Rebecca) to a thriving Northern California town (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943), it took Hitchcock five films before he went on extended location in his new country. This time, a degree of individual stagnation figures at the start, where it prompts bored teenage girl Charlie (Teresa Wright) to summon her uncle, also called Charlie (Joseph Cotten), from Philadelphia to stay with her family. He is 'the one right person to save us', she says. What follows is another study of alter egos--and the revelation of a terrible secret.

Hitchcock was elated to obtain the services of noted playwright Thornton Wilder (Our Town) to script his film and to depict small-town values as the summum bonum of good citizenship. As if to emphasise the point, a two-man survey team visits the household, claiming that it typifies the average American family. When Uncle Charlie first arrives, his proud niece takes him on a tour of the town, including its leafy streets and its public square, around which much of the town's life revolves. In return, he presents her with a ring, his face clearly investing it with a spiritual value (associated with a recurring image of dancing couples, suggesting a lost ideal); young Charlie hadn't wanted a gift at all, but her own initial reaction likewise has a spiritual intensity. However, the ring also carries 'incestuous' connotations (an echo of Hitchcock's The Lodger, 1927, of which Shadow of a Doubt is an American variant), and a sense of threat hangs over young Charlie henceforward. She thus becomes another young woman who must 'grow up' in a hurry.

The working-out of this situation is artfully scripted (children's dialogue, for young Charlie's brother and sister, was provided by Sally Benson, who had written the novel Meet Me in St Louis). George Orwell once noted the often 'incestuous atmosphere' of happy endings of nineteenth-century novels; there is no such ending here, for Hitchcock, to his credit, could not ignore the 'big picture'. Externally, the Second World War was being fought with unrelenting savagery: it is hinted at in the film, although no more than that. But there is also an internal--psychological--dimension to the film typical of Hitchcock's post-Rebecca 'female Gothic' mode (which empowers the woman). In the end, although young Charlie shows her new maturity and ruthlessness (15) by turning on and repudiating her uncle, she will retain a spiritual bond with him, despite having guessed his evil secret.

Notorious

Here's a perfect film, whose polish and shape came after multiple drafts by Ben Hecht working from a 1921 Saturday Evening Post story about a young woman who, from patriotic motives, sleeps with a foreign agent to gather information--and who later runs up against the hostile mother of a nice American boy. Hitchcock relished 'fraught' situations, especially sexy ones, which arouse vicarious audience emotions and challenge our moral 'hypocrisy' (as in the so-called eleventh commandment, 'Thou shalt not be found out'). Spy stories suited him perfectly, and Notorious (1946)--much altered from the original--became the story of Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), sent to postwar Brazil to penetrate a nest of Nazis while her bemused American controller, Devlin (Cary Grant), who has fallen in love with her, stays mostly in the background until the suspenseful climax. (The hostile mother was now the icy mother of the chief Nazi, Alex Sebastian, played by the gentlemanly Claude Rains.)

Alicia has an initial reputation for 'loose living' (for reasons the film explains). Her situation recalls Rebecca inasmuch as, to quote feminist scholar Tania Modleski, 'the film [...] submit[s] her to a process of purification whereby she is purged of her excess sexuality in order to be rendered fit for her place in the patriarchal order'. (16) In other words, Maxim de Winter might have dictated the script! Nonetheless, Hitchcock himself is even-handed about his characters. There's psychological acumen in the portrait of Alicia, working to redeem herself in her own eyes, but in desperate need of being told by her 'dream man', Devlin, that she is loved. In turn, what stops Devlin from intervening until almost too late seems related to how he's a certain type of American male, of rather puritanical upbringing. Critic James Agee knew a real-life agent who had much the same 'cultivated, clipped puzzled-idealist brutality'. (17) (Modleski would insist, 'The fact is, Devlin has the full power of the [patriarchal] law behind him, as Alicia has not.' (18) But this seems to disregard the film's clear-eyed position on all its characters, including the mother-dominated Alex, who, as a person, is more sensitive and charming than anyone else.)

This is the film containing Hitchcock's most famous 'MacGuffm' ('what the spies are after'): uranium ore in wine bottles. The velvety black-and-white photography of Ted Tetzlaff brings out the script's many nuances.

Under Capricorn

By contrast, Under Capricorn (1949) isn't a perfect film, despite its Technicolor camerawork by the great Jack Cardiff (cinematographer of several Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classics): playwright James Bridie's attempt to adapt Helen Simpson's novel, set in Sydney in 1831, has structural faults and lethargic moments. And yet, with Bergman at its centre (playing Irish expatriate Lady Henrietta Flusky, in desperate need of saving--compare Shadow of a Doubt, et al.), and the familiar 'triangle' situation of many fine Hitchcock films, it deserves consideration as its director's purest statement about the importance of love--and redemption. (Lesley Brill feelingly defends it in his important 1988 book titled, significantly, The Hitchcock Romance. (19)) Just don't expect a thriller! The lethargic moments are actually part of the artful design, about characters trapped by an unfeeling legal process that goes 'on and on and on'. Which isn't to say that Hitchcock may not have miscalculated its effect on audiences. In equating rehabilitation with art (Lady Henrietta is told at one point, 'You're the first work of art I've ever done!'), the film itself risks artiness. It is full of art references, or art influences--for example, long shots of the Flusky villa are paintings (not photographed scale-models like the mansion in Rebecca). (20) The film's extended takes, sometimes moving over several levels (contra the 'ten-minute takes' in Rope, 1948, which stayed in one apartment), are eloquent and often set up an expressive 'cut'; but they may feel ponderous to audiences, who can miss the point. This is something that Hitchcock himself later acknowledged, appreciating that an advantage of his more usual montage technique was that it got the viewer actively involved. The fact is, just as music professionals sometimes appreciate certain compositions that the public overlooks, because it prefers more 'accessible' works by the same composer, so Under Capricorn may be a film that best rewards dedicated study--say, by media teachers and keen students. (One sequence to look at: the verandah scene that begins with a view of the villa bathed in afternoon sunlight. There's an audible stillness--one almost hears sunset approaching! Hitchcock has here caught a subtropical feel perfectly, doubtless reflecting his research into light and cloud effects for the skyline in Rope.)

Strangers on a Train

After several box office disappointments, Hitchcock bounced back with this 1951 adaptation of a novel by new writer Patricia Highsmith about a plan to 'exchange' murders. Working initially with Raymond Chandler, he decided that the novel's 'crisscross' theme might be represented visually by the game of tennis, so changed one protagonist from an architect to a rising professional tennis player, Guy Haines (Farley Granger); the other main protagonist, effectively Guy's alter ego, became an eccentric fan, Bruno Antony (Robert Walker). Even before the script and cast were finalised, an excited Hitchcock headed for Forest Hills to obtain on-court and crowd footage of the Davis Cup.

The film has been well discussed recently by Jonathan Goldberg in a monograph for the Queer Film Classics series (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012). Early on, he notes that both actors were gay (Granger in particular), which may fit with Hitchcock's avowal as early as 1938: 'I like an actor to play a part for which his personal experience in life has raised him.' (21) Strangers on a Train, following Highsmith, seems premised on the idea of a male bisexuality (as Rebecca premised its female counterpart)--the point being, though, that while the flamboyant Bruno appears a patent homosexual, Guy is almost certainly only a latent one (and Goldberg is careful to assert that 'there is no essential truth about homosexuality to be seen', (22) that is, either in Hitchcock's film or out of it). As nearly always in Hitchcock, the suggestiveness is all!

Most interesting of Goldberg's points is that Bruno may speak for an unbridled core in all of us--reflective of the claim in queer theory that 'at the core of each [person] is an entirely contingent, unsocialized, and determining force', (23) an offensive notion to those like the stuffy Senator Morton (Leo G Carroll) who have internalised the social contract and would deny 'a realm of meaninglessness' (24) underlying it. In fact, Hitchcock--as later in his TV show wraparounds, whose humour could be barbed--hints that we all to some extent deny the 'chaos world'. (25) At Forest Hills, Guy and his fiancee, Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), pause beneath the line from Rudyard Kipling, And treat those two impostors just the same'. (Note the recurrence of Hitchcock's favoured sports ethic.) Not incidentally, Strangers on a Train is great fun to watch.

Rear Window

Many people's favourite Hitchcock film (and why not?!), Rear Window (1954) effectively shows its male protagonist, roving photographer Jeff (James Stewart), 'feminised' by being confined to a Greenwich Village apartment with a broken leg; meanwhile, his beautiful fiancee, high-fashion model Lisa (Grace Kelly), threatens to feminise him further (in his eyes) by suggesting he take a desk job and settle down with her. In other words, which shall it be: keep his top job with (it's implied) Life magazine, or marry someone whom leading costume designer Edith Head said 'exhibited a rare combination of beauty, intelligence, and class' (26) (she was referring to Kelly)--that is, a benign Rebecca? Reportedly, this 'hard choice' situation was based on the short affair in 1946 of Ingrid Bergman with photographer Robert Capa (to which Hitchcock was privy). In the film, Jeff resists the 'perfect' Lisa (his description) as long as he can--projecting his conflicting emotions onto the people in the apartments opposite, even to the point of suspecting (wishing?) one of them a murderer--before allowing an increasingly suspenseful set of circumstances to dictate an outcome. It's worth noting that in all four of Stewart's films for Hitchcock--Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo--his characters undergo forms of humiliation, sexual or otherwise. Stewart was the ideal actor to suffer them gracefully (by and large), while also registering pain and anger.

But more than a perfect cast, Rear Window has many noteworthy qualities. Hitchcock said his batteries were well charged when making it. (27) It exemplifies Modleski's thesis about his films ('how men's fascination and identification with the feminine continually undermine their efforts to achieve masculine strength and autonomy' (28)). On Jeff's wall hangs a 'trophy' from his travels, provocative in its sexual symbolism; but his abasement has already begun with his broken leg (another symbol, if inadvertent on his part). However, as a scripted situation, it could have lacked life. Screenwriter John Michael Hayes once told me that this was precisely his criticism of some earlier Hitchcocks, such as The Paradine Case (1947): they were too cold. Accordingly, he determined to give Rear Window 'warmth'. An instance was his invention of Jeff's masseuse, the wiry Stella (Thelma Ritter), whose up-front remarks--like the one about General Motors--prompt an audience to laugh out loud and settle back to enjoy themselves, just as Hayes planned!

Vertigo

Not to be a man, to be the projection of another man's dream, what a feeling of humiliation, of vertigo!

- Jorge Luis Borges (29)

The symbolism--and the psychology--continue into Hitchcock's forty-fifth feature, voted in Sight & Sound's 2012 poll of international critics as the greatest film ever made. (30) Again, the Stewart character (here, suitably, named Scottie (31)) suffers a physical accident and must take leave from work, before encountering circumstances that set him, and the audience, fantasising big-time. Everything is upscale. Instead of a view from one apartment, the setting is the vertiginous city of San Francisco, including several of its best-known tourist spots; thus, the emphasis is again on looking (compare Jeff's spying on his neighbours), and, in theory, on 'pure film'. But the fantasy is distinctly Freudian and/or Jungian. Where Jeff was harassed by a father figure who intruded into a classic 'Oedipal gaze' situation, like the one that Freud analysed in his 1919 essay 'The Uncanny', Scottie encounters a nemesis figure who treats him as a child (to say more would give away a plot within the plot--but see the Borges quote above). And where Jeff's girlfriend was valorised with the name Lisa (and the song 'Mona Lisa' played on the film's diegetic soundtrack), Scottie finds himself falling in love with a woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak), who seems nothing less than an 'eternal feminine' figure as described by Jung: someone who 'embodies an experience [...] far older than that of the individual'. (32) (Regrettably, Modleski belittles such archetypes, calling men's fascination with the eternal feminine 'nothing but fascination with their own double'; nonetheless, the extended sequence in which ex-detective Scottie tails Madeleine, who leads him to his own home, has a Freudian inevitability, 'as Freud has shown that the uncanny [...] is precisely the "homelike," the familiar which has been made strange through repression'. (33))

Screenwriters for Hitchcock sought to value all aspects of their material (to 'miss nothing', as Henry James would say) while keeping grounded--if only for the sake of the audience. Where Hayes invented Stella in Rear Window to speak her mind amid some seemingly wild speculations by Jeff, the screenwriter of Vertigo, playwright Samuel Taylor, invented Scottie's artist friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) to balance the film's fantasising: Midge is down-to-earth, providing the film with a solid humanity that the increasingly out-of-control Scottie lacks. (He becomes, in Hitchcock's words, 'a maniac', (34) thereby foreshadowing Psycho, two years later.) Probably the best appreciation of Vertigo is one that sees how its various aspects constitute an organic, integrated whole--something first noted by Robin Wood in his groundbreaking book Hitchcock's Films Revisited. Practically, you could say that the film's 'spiralling' and 'suspension' motifs (both visual and musical) incorporate the superb photography of Robert Burks (whose use of soft-focus lenses at the Mission Dolores is exact), the profound score of Bernard Herrmann (notice his contribution to that same scene)... and much else! Meanwhile, Scottie's quest for 'the Real' proceeds to its ill-fated conclusion (as I discuss later).

North by Northwest

The sinister green of the North by Northwest opening title is Saul Bass' sardonic variant on the 'ghostly' green and the 'always-living' green that had been the keynote colours of Vertigo. Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman's comedy-thriller for MGM parodies the 'person wronged' motif of such overtly serious films as The Wrong Man (1957) and Vertigo (in which Scottie yelps, 'Why me?'). Ad-man Roger Thornhill is initially living his own 'ghostly' existence in New York City, but fate leads him after many adventures to a symbolic pine forest atop Mount Rushmore, in which he asserts, 'I never felt more alive'. Shortly afterwards, his defeated adversary, foreign agent Vandamm, complains at the police's 'unsporting' use of 'real bullets'--so fate, we gather, is on the side of both Thornhill and America. But of course Hitch's tongue was in his cheek, right? Well, yes and no. The basic formula was a Hitchcock favourite, that of stage melodrama (on which Sergei Eisenstein wrote a definitive essay, 'Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today') and its literary descendants (in works by Charles Dickens, H Rider Haggard, John Buchan and many others). This readily translated into American idioms, including that nation's own stage melodrama, and then the movies, where 'the chase' (if only on stage rollers) and spectacular finales were requisite. So, in a sense, Hitchcock was being accommodating, even as he drew on a preferred formula of his own, going back to Blackmail (its British Museum climax) and The 39 Steps (1935), the latter finale taken from the John Buchan's popular 'shocker' on which the film was based. Still, there is a hard edge about North by Northwest accompanying its human story--basically, Roger's affair with a platinum blonde named Eve (Eva Marie Saint)--that is more political than usual, and arguably still as pertinent today. By the time he arrives at Mount Rushmore, Roger is capable of criticising Teddy Roosevelt, which is another sign that he's no longer the 'boy' Eve had once chided.

Architecture is eloquent in North by Northwest (even the Mount Rushmore monument was the work of another megalomaniac, Gutzon Borglum). Finally, a word about the title: any allusion to Hamlet's madness, notes authorised Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor, was entirely accidental. (35)

Psycho and 'Incident at a Corner'

'A boy's best friend is his mother/ says Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)--the 'psycho' of his film's title--and he has a point, psychoanalytically speaking, which Hitchcock well appreciated (had done, in fact, ever since The Lodger) and which Modleski offers as a reason why his basically insecure males are often aggressive. When Psycho was released in 1960, according to its screenwriter, former composer Joseph Stefano, 'We were at the end of the repressive fifties and were glad they were over'. (36) Despite a middling-to-hostile reaction from the New York critics, the response of the public was something else. The author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Stephen Rebello, calls it a 'firestorm':

no one could have predicted how powerfully Psycho tapped into the American subconscious. Faintings. Walk-outs. Repeat visits. Boycotts. Angry phone calls and letters. Talk of banning the film rang from church pulpits and psychiatrists' offices. Never before had any director so worked the emotions of the audience like stops on an organ console. (37)

Even while Psycho was in post-production, Hitchcock was making 'Incident at a Corner' for his sponsor. (Ever wondered why there are so many Ford cars in Psycho?!) He still had his protege Vera Miles under contract, and if the script of Psycho had required that she look almost dowdy (as big sister to Janet Leigh), now she could come alive as Jane Medwick, fiancee of Patrick Lawrence (George Peppard), as the pair team together to confront California small-town gossip and vested interests (only hinted at in Shadow of a Doubt and Psycho) that have assailed the Medwick grandparents. Made in colour, for a one-hour format, the program is a television masterpiece, employing broad strokes of characterisation (for example, a scene in the school principal's office) alongside subtle directorial touches and an overall lucidity. Nowhere is the subtlety more to-the-point than in its depiction of teenager Ron Tawley (Warren Berlinger), whom Jane had been tutoring in geometry until events intervened; now Ron undergoes something of an 'identity crisis' (psychologist Erik Erikson's term), and the troubled boy becomes the program's 'observing consciousness' as events unfold--with potential parallels to Psycho (and perhaps Nicholas Ray's 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause).

The scene in which Jane, having gone upstairs to 'freshen up', hears a noise in the garden that leads to her discovering Ron there, is a turning point. (We can't help but think, at some level, about what the boy intended.) How Charlotte Armstrong's script (from her novella) ties this instance of youthful fallibility to another in the distant past is beautifully apt.

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES

'Staging the encounter with the Real'

This, one scholar claims, is 'Hitchcock's essential cinematic project', which 'holds us "spellbound"'. (38) (Possibly, it goes back to the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.) The formulation offers one thread through the Hitchcock labyrinth, including a clue to the jokey tone of the wraparounds of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV, which invariably hint that the chaos world is close by. The term 'Real' follows psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's usage: it simply means that which is ineffable, 'that resists and exceeds interpretation'. (39) It resembles what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the unknowable 'thing-in-itself' (and what his successor Arthur Schopenhauer equated with the blind cosmic 'Will'--with affinities, surely, to the unbridled core in all of us identified by some queer theorists: see the previous note on Strangers on a Train). Another Lacanian theorist, Slavoj Zizek, thinks that Psycho forces viewers 'to identify with the abyss beyond identification' (40)--and one senses what he means, especially as Hitchcock's following film, The Birds (1963), appears to support such a reading. (Indeed, Schopenhauer saw art's function as precisely to give a knowledge of the Will not ordinarily available, which seems to apply here.)

Feminist views and Hitchcock's attitude to women

If, at one level, Hitchcock's films adopt a traditional viewpoint that renders women object-like (noted by Laura Mulvey in her famous 1975 essay (41)), the films also show men as vulnerable in their own way and give voice to both female and male protagonists, often seeming to ultimately side with the women. Modleski notes Hitchcock's fairness, although that doesn't stop her criticising the operation of patriarchy in the films, including their built-in emphasis, via point-of-view shots, on the (alleged) 'controlling' male gaze. (Think of Jeff's constant looking in Rear Window). Yet even there, when he sends Lisa to obtain evidence from an apartment across the courtyard and she signals back to him, both Jeff and Stella (and the audience) simultaneously see the danger she is in. Emotionally, the film supports her (and 'punishes' Jeff). So, there's a risk, in declaring Hitchcock's films anti-women (or, for that matter, anti-gay or anti-Nazi), of 'shooting the messenger', because the films are constructed to reflect audience attitudes while respecting the qualities of the characters concerned. One scholar compares Henry James and Hitchcock. As James sought to 'address venerable questions about the human predicament', so Hitchcock 'merely plays with emancipated femininity, using it to expose the childishness and brutality of most men while reserving for himself transcendent knowledge of human nature'. (42)

Influence of German Expressionism, Soviet montage, French Symbolism

Think of Hitchcock as a Romantic-eclectic filmmaker, and you won't err. His keen sense of himself as an international artist, using film to transcend borders of both space and time, was a Romantic trait; another was his Symbolist bent. He reported: 'Very early, I was immensely struck by the Symbolists. For a time, I had Symbolist dreams.' (43) Presumably, he was referring to Symbolist painters--like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon--although, being able to read French (and German), he may also have had in mind various writers and poets, like the Symbolists' avowed precursor Charles Baudelaire (Hitchcock called him 'the French Poe' (44)) and the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (whose 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte prefigures Vertigo). By stressing interiority rather than appearance, the Symbolists helped pave the way for both Surrealism and Expressionism in the twentieth century--two other major influences on Hitchcock. His first two films were made in Germany and, on his return to London to film The Lodger, he adapted German techniques of style and design to make a nonetheless distinctly English version of the 'agitated town' story that had been told by director Robert Wiene in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), the definitive German Expressionist film. (A lecturer once informed me that the pointy angles painted on Caligari's sets may suggest 'a man bringing himself to judgement in his own mind'--including, presumably, the film spectator. Certainly, some Hitchcock films make the audience feel distinctly guilty!) As for Soviet cinema, Hitchcock probably first encountered it via screenings at the London Film Society, arranged by Montagu. Years later, writing in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1965 edition), he valorised the Russians:

Eisenstein, [Vsevolod] Pudovkin, and their contemporaries, in the late 1920s developed creative editing, or montage, as they called it, by way of the juxtaposition not just of sequences but also of individual shots or frames, to illustrate character, to convey ideas. (45)

The 'juxtaposition' method was adapted by Hitchcock for his own purposes, at both micro (frame or shot) and macro (sequence or story) levels, as in both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much--where it might merge, very effectively, with his Symbolist intent.

Composer Bernard Herrmann

Another Romantic-eclectic creator was Bernard Herrmann, who had scored Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) for Orson Welles, and whose work with Hitchcock from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Marnie marked a decade of 'the most celebrated [director-composer collaboration] in the history of cinema'. (46) As critic Richard Armstrong notes, that period in Hitchcock's career

now seems unthinkable without Hermann's singular orchestrations, with their atmospheric shifts from chamber delicacy to dissonant brass and percussion, their emphatic use of strings and their characteristic employment of ostinatos (insistently repeated patterns of notes). (47)

It was a true meeting of minds. Not that Herrmann exactly overrated Hitchcock's musical judgement (while acknowledging his cinematic genius): 'if Hitchcock were left by himself, he would play "In a Monastery Garden" behind all his pictures!' (48) For his part, Hitchcock graciously conceded that 'thirty-three per cent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music'. (49) And both men agreed that, after hearing the main titles of Psycho, the audience knows that something terrible will happen. (The film may owe something to German expressionist models, such as Karl Heinz Martin's From Morn to Midnight, filmed in 1920, in which a disgruntled small-town bank cashier steals 60,000 marks and heads for the city in search of frenzied excitement.) Film music authority Royal S Brown identifies how Herrmann's score suggests the deepest undercurrents in American life: A tension is created between the indefiniteness of the harmonic language [which makes Psycho so sad at times] and the exaggerated definiteness of the rhythmic idiom [...] suggesting primordial violence.' (50)

The 'Hitchcock touch'

This might be anything that an audience spots and tells itself, 'That's Hitchcock for you!' The inventive cockney director had employed his own publicist from the 1920s and knew that his public profile (including, literally, his rotund image) was a familiar one, and could profitably be used by the joker and rhetorician in him. His cameo appearances were one such resource (for instance, when he is pestered on a train by a small child in Blackmail). Or it might be any piece of obviously 'clever' filmmaking, such as the landlady's scream that becomes a train whistle in The 39 Steps. Conceivably, it might be an elaborate 'gag', such as when a villager, trying to cross a road in Foreign Correspondent (1940), is repeatedly frustrated by a stream of cars and motorcycles pursuing an assassin--but the real Hitchcock 'touch' here is the fact that the villager is carrying a jug brimming with milk! (The gag is repeated fifteen years later in 1955's To Catch a Thief, this time involving a washerwoman carrying a loaded basket.) North by Northwest is full of Hitchcock touches: think of when Roger is inopportunely photographed at the United Nations holding up a bloodied knife and must go on the run as 'the United Nations killer', or how he escapes from Prairie Stop, stealing an onlooker's van with a used refrigerator in the back (again, the touch is in the detail). The point is, Hitchcock never forgot his role as a crowd-pleaser.

https://clickv.ie/w/screen-ed/rear-window

BY KEN MOGG

Ken Mogg lives in Melbourne. His book The Alfred Hitchcock Story (1999, 2008) 'covers every film in Hitchcock's oeuvre in loving detail' (Bill Krohn. Senses of Cinema). He has written widely on Hitchcock matters, most recently a chapter for a forthcoming book on children and childhood in US TV series. Next comes a chapter on Hitchcock's espionage films, for a book from Pace University Press. <muffin@labyrinth.net.au>

Endnotes

(1) Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Charles Thomas Samuels, 'Alfred Hitchcock', in Encountering Directors, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1972, pp. 249-50.

(2) Alma Reville, 'When the Master of Suspense Bolts His Own Door at Night', The Straits Times, 7 August 1960.

(3) Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, HarperPerennial, New York, 1991, p. 174.

(4) Eric Savoy, 'The Touch of the Real: Circumscribing Vertigo', in Susan M Griffin & Alan Nadel (eds), The Men Who Knew Too Much: Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2012, p. 228.

(5) Hitchcock, quoted in Samuels, op. cit., p. 238.

(6) Some films mentioned in this article vary in DVD quality or may be hard to obtain. By far the best DVD of The Ring I have seen is a European StudioCanal release, which is part of a collection of early Hitchcocks (and thus possibly not available on its own).

(7) Alfred Hitchcock, 'Fedora', in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Volume 2, University of California Press, Oakland, 2015 [1921], p. 26.

(8) German for 'mood'; the film technique refers to a mode of lighting.

(9) Hitchcock's notion of 'pure cinema' sometimes verged on the Platonic. His purely technical definition to Peter Bogdanovich was: 'complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody'; see Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1963, <http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/alfred_hitcheock.htm>, accessed 10 July 2017.

(10) Hitchcock, quoted in Samuels, op. cit., p. 240.

(11) Ivor Montagu, quoted in Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, West Sussex, 2003, p. 158.

(12) Sally Beauman, 'Rebecca', in Helen Taylor (ed.), The Daphne du Maurier Companion, Virago, London, 2007, p. 56.

(13) Alison Light writes graphically of the second Mrs de Winter (Joan Fontaine) 'wandering in Bluebeard's Castle'; see Light, 'Hitchcock's Rebecca: A Woman's Film?', in Taylor, ibid., p. 300. See also, for example, Wendy Haslem, 'A Charade of Innocence and Vice': Hollywood Gothic Films of the 1940s, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrucken, Germany, 2009.

(14) 'Stagnating' in the sense that life has departed from it, leaving a sinister housekeeper and menfolk who seem 'impotent' and denatured (even the younger Frith, played by Edward Fielding, also employed at the lodge, seems elderly).

(15) Hitchcock: 'She is ruthless. She comes down those stairs wearing that ring [as a signal to her uncle] and thus tells him that he must leave or be executed.' Quoted in Samuels, op. cit., p. 238.

(16) Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, 2nd edn, Routledge, New York & London, 2005, p. 58.

(17) James Agee, Agee on Film, Peter Owen, London, 1963, p. 212.

(18) Modleski, op. cit., p. 67.

(19) Lesley Brill writes that, in the case of the 'fallen characters of Spellbound, Under Capricorn, and Marnie', 'love constitutes, for Hitchcock whose psyche remains religious [...], the way to truth and resurrection. It also constitutes the only possible awakening from the nightmare of history.' See Brill, The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1988, p. 280.

(20) The film's researchers gave special attention to visual matters. Flusky's residence, with its wide, turreted front, resembles work by ex-convict Francis Greenway. The panoramic views of Sydney and its harbour seem based on oils by Conrad Martens, painted soon after he arrived in the colony in 1835.

(21) Alfred Hitchcock, 'Some Aspects of Direction', in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Volume 1, Faber and Faber, London, 1995, p. 264. (Original published in National Board of Review Magazine 13, no. 7, October 1938, based on a radio talk.)

(22) Jonathan Goldberg, Strangers on a Train: A Queer Film Classic, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, 2012, p. 87.

(23) ibid., p. 90.

(24) ibid., p. 98.

(25) Author and critic Robin Wood makes extensive use of the notion of a chaos-world in his book on Hitchcock, originally published in 1965. For example, apropos of The Wrong Man (l957), he refers to Manny's (Henry Fonda) 'descent into ... a chaos world underlying the surface reality'; see Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, revised edn, Columbia University Press, New York, 2002, p. 84. Many artists, post-Nietzsche, refer to 'The Void', as Picasso did in 1932: 'Each time I take up a picture I have the sensation of throwing myself into the void.' See Timothy Hyman, The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century, Thames & Hudson, London, 2016, p. 10.

(26) Edith Head, quoted in Ken Mogg, The Alfred Hitchcock Story, revised edn, Titan Books, London, 2008, p. 131.

(27) Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Francois Truffaut, with Helen G Scott, Hitchcock, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1967, p. 163.

(28) Modleski, op. cit., p. 8.

(29) Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Circular Ruins', in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A Yates & James E Irby, trans. Irby, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970 [1941], p. 77.

(30) 'Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012', Sight & Sound, <http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012>, accessed 10 July 2017.

(31) Sir Kenneth Clark contends, 'The Scottish character [...] shows an extraordinary combination of realism and reckless sentiment'; see Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, BBC and John Murray, London, 1969, p. 258.

(32) Carl Jung, quoted in Mogg, p. 148. (Jung was invoking Goethe's Helen of Troy from Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy.)

(33) Modleski, op. cit., p. 94.

(34) I can't now recall where Hitchcock said this. But for a perceptive discussion of Scottie as 'maniac', see Richard A Gilmore, Doing Philosophy at the Movies, SUNY Press, New York, 2005, pp. 40-1. (Excerpt: 'He is a maniac in part because he is so vulnerable.')

(35) John Russell Taylor, Hitch: The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock, Faber & Faber, London, 1978, p. 248.

(36) Joseph Stefano, quoted in Walter Raubicheck & Walter Srebnick, Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago & Springfield, 2011, p. 21.

(37) Rebello, op. cit., p. 162.

(38) Savoy, op. cit.

(39) Jacques Lacan, quoted in Jeffrey Longacre, 'The Difference Between Crows and Blackbirds: Alfred Hitchcock and the Treason of Images', in Post Script, vol. 34, nos. 2&3, Winter/Spring & Summer 2015, p. 68.

(40) Slavoj Zizek, quoted in Stephen Tifft, 'Mrs Bates's Smile: Psycho and Psychoanalysis', in Jonathan Freedman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2015, p. 154, emphasis removed.

(41) Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, Autumn 1975, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 6-18.

(42) John Carlos Rowe, 'Caged Heat: Feminist Rebellion in In the Cage and Rear Window', in Griffin & Nadel (eds), op. cit., p. 186.

(43) Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Charlotte Chandler, It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, a Personal Biography, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2005, p. 19.

(44) Alfred Hitchcock, 'Why I Am Afraid of the Dark', in Gottlieb (ed.), 1995, op. cit., p. 144. (The original article, 'Pourquoi J'ai Peur la Nuit', appeared in Arts: Lettres, Spectacles, no. 777, June 1-7, 1960, pp. 1. 7.)

(45) Alfred Hitchcock, 'Film Production', in Gottlieb, 1995, pp. 222-3.

(46) Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock's Music, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2006, p. 186.

(47) Richard Armstrong, 'Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann', in Tracy Hopkins (ed.), The Rough Guide to Film: An A-Z of Directors and Their Movies, Rough Guides, London & New York, 2007, p. 231.

(48) Bernard Herrmann, quoted in Steven C Smith, A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1991, p. 362.

(49) Hitchcock, quoted in Mogg, op. cit., p. 157.

(50) Royal S Brown, quoted in Sullivan, op. cit., p. 253.

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Title Annotation:	FILMAKER PROFILE
Author:	Mogg, Ken
Publication:	Screen Education
Article Type:	Movie review
Date:	Oct 1, 2017
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