Visionaries and Their Visions:
Alfred Hitchcock
By Alex Hudson
March 10, 2003
Alfred Hitchcock is the closest cinema has to a God. Moviegoers and movie-makers routinely worship or steal from his altar. He has fervent believers who hold up his films like a bible, and he has harsh denouncers who find his films the stilted and empty work of a charlatan. But whether adored or loathed, viewed as God or fraud, Hitchcock's technical mastery is beyond reproach and the obsessions which dominated his films remain as compelling today as ever.
Hitchcock has been analyzed, overanalyzed, denounced, praised, parodied, and mimicked. More has been written about Alfred Hitchcock than probably any other director. His reign of masterpieces stand as landmarks of pure cinema; golden visions of potential realized. From the sublime beauty of Rear Window to the utter shock of Psycho to the taut thrills of Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock's canon wrote and established the language of the suspense thriller but more, they turned movie-going from excursion to experience.
Scar Someone And They Never Forget You
Roger Ebert is fond of saying that a great film has two memorable scenes and no bad ones. These memorable scenes are memorable because they're horrifying or shocking, or more than anything they defy expectation. Memorable scenes in movies burn the memory of themselves into our minds.
The shower scene in Psycho. The last scene in The Birds. The chase atop Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. We not only remember these scenes, we can re-imagine them in vivid detail. They are cinematic memories so powerful, they refuse to be forgotten. But Hitchcock's films are more than just a collection of memorable scenes. Hitchcock infused his films with themes that were not only dramatic but that revealed the innermost fears of his being.
Mistaken Identity
The ultimate fear of the artist is to be proven a fraud. To be exposed. To be discovered as having nothing to say, or worse, to say what you want to say and have it be embarrassing or obvious or pedestrian. To be found out.
A man is mistaken for another man, a criminal. The mistaken man is pursued. He goes on the run. Hitchcock made this film over a half dozen times, first mastering the formula with The 39 Steps and later with North By Northwest. In between, with varying success, Hitchcock repeated the premise for The Wrong Man, Saboteur, and Young and Innocent.
When Hitchcock was a boy, his father sent him to the local police station with a letter. Unbeknownst to him, the letter asked the policeman to lock Alfred up in a cell for ten minutes. The policeman read the letter and did so. Done to teach young Alfred "not to be a bad boy," the event so petrified Hitchcock that he never forgot it and all the fears invoked from that traumatic experience - fear of confinement and authority - would haunt Hitchcock and his films for the rest of his life. Loss of anonymity, more than any other fear, fueled Hitchcock's work. To have the spotlight shone upon you, and reveal not just the inner you, but a deviant inner you, underlies the panic-stricken crux of these films.
One Room
Rear Window, Dial M For Murder and Rope all take place, for the better part, in one room. The entirety of Lifeboat takes place on a lifeboat. If being exposed was Hitchcock's primary fear, being confined was a close second.
Hitchcock's excuse to make Rope was so that he could shoot the film exclusively in real time using only long takes. Indeed, Rope is composed of ten eight minute (the length of each reel of film) segments with subtle cuts between them. But more important than the gimmicky experiment in technique is the claustrophobic feeling of confinement.
Four years prior to Rope, Hitchcock made Lifeboat with the similar gimmick of having the entire film occur in one place: a lifeboat. But Rope and Lifeboat are incomplete works that are only partially satisfying whereby the experimentation is better than the actual content in the films. Like his mistaken identity films, Hitchcock would repeat himself until he mastered the formula then he'd promptly move on, as if having purged the idea from his system.
Rear Window, the perfect crystallization of Hitchcock’s confinement theme, is inspired film-making; the pinnacle of Hitchcock’s virtuoso command of the camera. We find Scotty (James Stewart) wheelchair bound in his apartment - confined with nothing to do but watch his neighbors through his telescope. Like Scotty, the viewer is trapped in the room; we are dependent on Scotty’s spying to deliver us excitement. We watch Scotty watch, with his voyeurism serving as a blatant metaphor for our movie watching.
But more, our dependence on Scotty’s impropriety and our desire for him to see something dangerous, places us squarely in Hitchcock’s hands. Scotty sees a possible murder, and the thrill of mystery almost liberates us from our entrapment. Rear Window is less a metaphor for movie watching as it is a metaphor for watching Hitchcock movies. We are trapped in Hitchcock’s world of fears, and we had better hope for murder or misdeed to engross us, otherwise we’re just plain trapped.
Fears
If it isn’t clear by now, Hitchcock made films about his fears. Fear of discovery. Fear of authority. Fear of death. Fear of confinement. When he ran out of fears, he created a fear of birds.
More than any of his films, Psycho rains fears with the downpour of black and white blood splashing onto the screen with ferocious abandon. The critical scene in Psycho occurs early in the picture when Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, after stealing $40,000 from her boss, is awakened in her car by a California Highway Patrolman. The Patrolman - a menacing embodiment of authority - is shot from Marion's low angle within her car and her fear of capture reflects in his dark, shimmering sunglasses. But unlike all of Hitchcock's innocents-on-the-run, endlessly pursued by authority or pseudo-authority figures, the guilty Marion is cornered by authority and let go.
Darkness, My Friend
Hitchcock made nine silent films and 13 sound films in his native England. He transplanted to Hollywood to make Rebecca for David Selznick in 1940. The rest of the ‘40s were predominantly spent experimenting with films like Rope and Lifeboat, so by the early ‘50s Hitchcock had the technical mastery, resources and freedom to do basically whatever he wanted.
Psycho was the culmination of this hard-earned independence, bookending a dizzyingly productive decade that included Strangers on a Train, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window, To Catch A Thief, Vertigo, and North By Northwest. Classics all, they reveal the deft touch of a filmmaker willing to plunge into man’s darker side, and though these masterpieces are all well regarded today, each was an enormous risk at the time because of Hitchcock’s eagerness to explore uncharted waters.
Master of The Macabre
The complaint of Hitchcock’s critics was that his films were not personal enough, yet behind the macabre plots was almost always a gateway to Hitchcock’s fears and desires. His six decade-long career was spent exploring these same core fears with his ultimate skill being his ability to make us revel as much as repulse at the horrors.
Before Kevin Spacey lied to us in The Usual Suspects, Marlene Dietrich lied in Hitchcock's Stage Fright. Before Jodie Foster was trapped in Panic Room, Jimmy Stewart was confined in Rear Window. Before Will Smith ran for his life in Enemy of the State, Cary Grant ran through cornfields for his in North By Northwest. Alfred Hitchcock did everything before everyone, and he did it all better.
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