Hitchcock at 100
1999 marks the one-hundredth anniversary
He was known to his audiences as the “Master of Suspense” and what Hitchcock mastered was not only the art of making films but also the task of taming his own raging imagination.
Director of such works as Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock told his stories through intelligent plots witty dialogue and a spoonful of mystery and murder. In doing so, he inspired a new generation of filmmakers and revolutionized the thriller genre, making him a legend around the world.
His brilliance was sometimes too bright: He was hated as well as loved, oversimplified as well as over analyzed. Eccentric, demanding, inventive and impassioned.
A Brief Biography
Born As
: Alfred Joseph HitchcockBorn: August 13, 1899, Leytonstone, England
Died: April 28, 1980 from liver failure and heart problems
Education: St. Ignatius College, London; School of Engineering and Navigation (mechanics, electricity, acoustics, navigation); University of London (art)
The acknowledged master of the thriller genre he virtually invented, Alfred Hitchcock was also a brilliant technician who deftly blended sex, suspense and humor. He began his filmmaking career in 1919 in London. There he learned scripting, editing and art direction, and rose to assistant director in 1922. That year he directed an unfinished film, No. 13 or Mrs. Peabody . His first completed film as director was The Pleasure Garden (1925), an Anglo-German production filmed in Munich. This
experience help account for the Expressionistic character of his films, both in their visual schemes and thematic concerns. The Lodger (1926), his breakthrough film, was a prototypical example of the classic Hitchcock plot: an innocent protagonist is falsely accused of a crime and becomes involved in a web of intrigue.An early example of Hitchcock’s technical virtuosity was his creation of “subjective sound” for Blackmail (1929), his first sound film. In this story of a woman who stabs an artist to death when he tries to seduce her, Hitchcock emphasized the young woman’s anxiety by gradually distorting all but one word “knife” of a neighbor’s dialogue the morning after the killing. Here and in Murder (1930), Hitchcock first made explicit the link between sex and violence.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), a commercial and critical success, established a favorite pattern: an investigation of family relationships within a suspenseful story. The 39 Steps (1935) showcases a mature Hitchcock; it is a stylish and efficiently told chase film brimming with exciting incidents and memorable characters. Despite their merits, both Secret Agent (1936) and Sabotage (1936) exhibited flaws Hitchcock later acknowledged and learned from. According to his theory, suspense is developed by providing the audience with information denied endangered characters. But to be most effective and cathartic, no harm should come to the innocent as it does in both of those films. The Lady Vanishes (1938), on the other hand, is sleek, exemplary Hitchcock: fast-paced, witty, and magnificently entertaining.
Hitchcock’s last British film, Jamaica Inn (1939), and his first Hollywood effort, Rebecca (1940), were both handsomely mounted though somewhat uncharacteristic works based on novels by Daphne du Maurier. Despite its somewhat muddled narrative, Foreign Correspondent (1940) was the first Hollywood film in his recognizable style. Suspicion (1941), the story of a woman who thinks her husband is a murderer about to make her his next victim, was an exploration of family dynamics; its introduction of evil into the domestic arena foreshadowed Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock’s early Hollywood masterwork. One of his most disturbing films, Shadow was nominally the story of a young woman who learns that a favorite uncle is a murderer, but at heart it is a sobering look at the dark underpinnings of American middle-class life. Fully as horrifying as Uncle Charlie’s attempts to murder his niece was her mother’s tearful acknowledgment of her loss of identity in becoming a wife and mother. “You know how it is,” she says, “you sort of forget you’re you. You’re your husband’s wife.” In Hitchcock, evil manifests itself not only in acts of physical violence, but also in the form of psychological, institutionalized and systemic cruelty.
Hitchcock would return to the feminine sacrifice-of-identity theme several times, most immediately with the masterful Notorious (1946), a perverse love story about an FBI agent who must send the woman he loves into the arms of a Nazi in order to uncover an espionage ring. Other psychological dramas of the late 1940s were Spellbound (1945), The Paradine Case (1948), and Under Capricorn (1949). Both Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948) were interesting technical exercises: in the former, the object was to tell a film story within the confines of a small boat; in Rope, Hitchcock sought to make a film that appeared to be a single, unedited shot. Rope shared with the more effective Strangers on a Train (1951) a villain intent on committing the perfect murder as well as a strong homoerotic undercurrent.
During his most inspired period, from 1950 to 1960, Hitchcock produced a cycle of memorable films which included minor works such as I Confess (1953), the sophisticated thrillers Dial M for Murder (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955), a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and the black comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955). He also directed several top-drawer films like Strangers on a Train and the troubling early docudrama (1956), a searing critique of the American justice system.
His three unalloyed masterpieces of the period were investigations into the very nature of watching cinema. Rear Window (1954) made viewers voyeurs, then had them pay for their pleasure. In its story of a photographer who happens to witness a murder, Hitchcock provocatively probed the relationship between the watcher and the watched, involving, by extension, the view
er of the film. Vertigo (1958), as haunting a movie as Hollywood has ever produced, took the lost-feminine-identity theme of Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious and identified its cause as male fetishism.North by Northwest (1959) is perhaps Hitchcock’s most fully realized film. From a script by Ernest Lehman, with a score (as usual) by Bernard Herrmann, and starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, this quintessential chase movie is full of all the things for which we remember Alfred Hitchcock: ingenious shots, subtle male-female relationships, dramatic score, bright technicolor, inside jokes, witty symbolism and above all masterfully orchestrated suspense.
Psycho (1960) is famed for its shower murder sequence a classic model of shot selection and editing which was startling for its (apparent) nudity, graphic violence and its violation of the narrative convention that makes a protagonist invulnerable. Moreover, the progressive shots of eyes, beginning with an extreme close-up of the killer’s peeping eye and ending with the open eye of the murder victim, subtly implied the presence of a third eye the viewer’s.
Later films offered intriguing amplifications of his main themes. The Birds (1963) presented evil as an environmental fact of life. Marnie (1964), a psychoanalytical thriller along the lines of Spellbound showed how a violent, sexually tinged childhood episode turns a woman into a thief, once again associating criminality with violence and sex. Most notable about Torn Curtain (1966), an espionage story played against a cold war backdrop, was its extended fight-to-the death scene between the protagonist and a Communist agent in the kitchen of a farm house. In it Hitchcock reversed the
movie convention of quick, easy deaths and showed how difficult and how momentous the act of killing really is.Hitchcock’s disappointing Topaz (1969), an unwieldy, unfocused story set during the Cuban missile crisis, was devoid of his typical narrative economy and wit. He returned to England to produce Frenzy (1972), a tale much more in the Hitchcock vein, about an innocent man suspected of being a serial killer. His final film, Family Plot (1976), pitted two couples against one another: a pair of professional thieves versus a female psychic and her working-class lover. It was a fitting end to a body of work that demonstrated the eternal symmetry of good and evil.
VOCABULARY:
deftly искусно, ловко, проворно, расторопно
blend смешивать; изготовлять смесь
breakthrough достижение; открытие; прорыв
protagonist протагонист, главный герой
showcase показывать, демонстрировать
chase погоня, преследование
muddle путать; вносить беспорядок
foreshadow предвещать; служить предзнаменованием
dark
underpinning темная сторона
undercurrent скрытая тенденция
docudrama проф. “документальная драма”, телепьеса на документальной основе
sear сжигать, опалять
unalloyed чистый, неподдельный
voyeur соглядатай; чрезмерно любопытный человек
amplification развитие (предложения, мысли)
tinge слегка окрашивать
momentous исключительной важности
unwieldy громоздкий, тяжеловесный
pit стравливать
Hitchcock’s Wit
Hitchcock once said that he migrated to the US as a kind of cultural exchange, only nobody knows what was sent in return, because, said Hitch, “they are afraid to open it.”
On actors and actresses:
Ingrid Bergman, trying to make Hitchcock help her understand the motivation for the feelings of her character told Hitchcock: “I dont feel like that, I dont think I can give you that kind of emotion” and Hitchcock replied: “Ingrid – fake it.”
When an actress asked Hitchcock if her right or left profile was better, he told her, “My dear, you’re sitting on your best profile.”
To crew complaints that Tallulah Bankhead’s habit of not wearing underpants was creating camera angle problems in shooting Lifeboat: “I don’t know if this is a matter for the costume department or the hairdresser.”
“When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’ If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?’, I say, ‘Your salary.’”
“Disney has the best casting. If he doesn’t like an actor he just tears him up.”
On the relationship with his audiences:
To a woman who complained that the shower scene so frightened her daughter that the girl would no longer shower: “Then Madam, I suggest you have her dry cleaned.”
On why people were fond of his thrillers:
“they like to put their toe in the cold water of fear.”
“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.”
“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”
On murder on TV:
“Seeing a murder on television can help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.”
“Television has brought murder back into the home – where it belongs.”
His movies and his method:
Reporter: “What is the deepest logic of your films?”
Hitchcock: “To put the audience through them.”
On his mission in life:
“to simply scare the hell out of people.”
“Even my failures make money and become classics a year after I make them.”
“If I were to make another picture set in Australia I’d have a policeman hop into the pocket of a kangaroo and yell, ‘follow that car!’”
“Drama is life with the dull bits left out”
On violence:
“Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.”
“There are several differences between a football game and a revolution. For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms. Also there are more injuries at a football game.”
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
On his dry wit:
“This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.”
“I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never have equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.”
ANECDOTES
A timid little lady approached the trainmaster at Wappinger Junction and said: “What time does the train for the North go by?”
“3:30,” said the trainmaster.
A few minutes later she asked, “What time does the train for the South go by?”
“4:17,” said the trainmaster.
A third time she approached and demanded, “What time does the train for the East pass here?”
“Tonight at 8,” he answered.
Once more she approached him.
“And what time does the train for the West go by?”
“There won’t be another train for the West until tomorrow evening,” said the trainmaster wearily.
The old lady’s face brightened.
“Come along, Willie,” she cried to the little boy on the platform. “It’s safe to cross the tracks now.”
***
The train conductor came round, saying: “Tickets, please.”
A sleepy passenger opened an eye, looked up at the conductor, and closed it again.
“Where’s your ticket?” asked the conductor, giving him a vigorous shake. “Haven’t you got one?”
The passenger yawned, opened the other eye, and shook his head.
“Then you’ll have to pay,” went on the conductor. “Five and six, please. I say, wake up! Can’t you hear me? Five and six.”
The weary eyes opened again, and a suspicion of enlightenment dawned on the passenger’s face.
“Eleven,” he answered.