Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
The Masterpiece Collection offers, in one box, a veritable galaxy of brilliant work by the man who, when all is said and done, can creditably be considered the greatest movie director ever, at least in the English-speaking world. In this galaxy there are the Plutos, the curious outliers begging for further exploration -- Saboteur (1942), The Trouble with Harry (1954), Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz (1969). Here, too, are the magnificent, multilayered Saturns and Jupiters, replete with rings and moons of ceaselessly inventive, bravura filmmaking -- Rope (1948), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1962). There's also a touch of Venus, with North by Northwest (1959) and Marnie (1964) mixing matters of the heart, mind, and hormones into inimitably strong sexual-romantic cocktails. And then there's the brilliant, blazing star around which all the others orbit, comprised of the three single greatest contributions the master made to the filmography of the ages, perfect films all: Shadow of a Doubt(1943), Rear Window (1954), and, glory of glories, Vertigo (1958). Finally, there are the pale moons -- Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976) -- that, after that sun sets, keep on luminously reflecting its light. Having so categorized the wealth of cinematic wonders spilling over from this deceptively compact package, we'll work our way through the set not chronologically, but in a direction from more peripheral to absolutely central (not just in Hitchcock's oeuvre, but in anyone's experience of the movies), always keeping in mind that it's space and time limitations that necessitate these handy thumbnails, and even the least of these films could inspire several in-depth essays....
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
***** Hitchock was never really a topical or explicitly political filmmaker, which may have something to do with the Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. slightly more rote, somewhat less "purely Hitchcock" feel [Cite your source here.] of Saboteur, Torn Curtain, and Topaz. Saboteur is probably the best of this grouping, with its tensionfilled, reluctant romance between stars Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, fueled by mistaken identity and constant jeopardy after an aircraft-manufacturing plant is bombed by enemy agents during WWII, recalling Hitchcock's earlier The 39 Steps. Similarly, Torn Curtain's saving grace is the disorientation and divided loyalty that Julie Andrews experiences when she discovers that her fiance, Paul Newman (the two make a surprisingly effective, chemistry-laden onscreen couple) means to defect to the Soviet/East German side in the thick of the Cold War. Topaz, with its cast of international stars (e.g., Contempt's Michel Piccoli), is the most dated of the bunch, in a way that places Cold War machinations front and center, sapping its energy somewhat and making it feel heavy, weighted down, unconvincing; its source is a humorless potboiler novel by Leon Uris, and it betrays those origins too often to come off
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
completely (even Hitchcock later declared that what he meant to be an intriguing experiment in color-coding, with the plot If it's a good movie, the sound could go off coming secondary, didn't ultimately work -and the audience would still have a though it must be said that the colors, as rendered by cinematographer Jack Hildyard perfectly clear idea of what was going on. (Summertime, Modesty Blaise) are delectable). Its overstuffed plot about personal and political loyalties clashing amid CIA/Cuba/KGB intrigues, along with its indecisive ending(s) (various conclusions for various versions, all included here for your perusal) are still worth tolerating, however; Hitchcock never made a picture that lacked his impressive, assuredly choreographing visual sensibility, and when you see Topaz's numerous, elegantly dynamized shots and montage, the most memorable example of which is a cut to an overhead shot as a woman (Karin Dor) collapses after being shot out of her lover's tender mercy, her gown "pooling" beneath her like blood against the stark black and white checkered floor. Similarly strong moments -- the thrilling climax on the Statue of Liberty or the sinisterly quiet, nonchalant revelation that a friendly grandfather is dangerous in Saboteur; Torn Curtain's hair-raising, not-for-the-claustrophobic final escape from a ballets russes performance -- punctuate, and go a long way toward redeeming, the other two as well, with Hitchcock's unflagging visual precision and fluidity taking up much of the excess slack elsewhere throughout these (relatively) weaker entries. As for The Trouble with Harry, the closest to a flat-out lark in the box, it's "minor" and mild-mannered by design, with an ensemble of actors (including Shirley MacLaine, in her big-screen debut, and Hitch's later Topazstar, John Forsythe) playing out, against a magnificently shot (by Robert Burks, who shot many of the films included in this collection), autumnal New England backdrop, a snowball of misunderstandings in which multiple characters feel culpable for the suspected murder of a man they didn't kill but whom nobody really liked. It's a comedy in the Shakespearean sense, culminating in not one but two happy romantic pairings, the principal of which is that between the spunky MacLaine and the Thoreau-ish painter Forsythe (a sort of comic counterpart to Rock Hudson's nonconformist in the contemporaneous All That Heaven Allows).
Jimmy Stewart began his long and very fruitful collaboration with The only way to get rid of my fears is to Hitchcock on Rope, an oddly (and, make films about them. most often, very successfully) experimental work that plays out in real time, over the course of a dinner party with a murderous underlying secret, with almost no cuts, the camera following the characters from framing to framing and room to room without skipping a beat, in a transfixing dance as Stewart, a college professor who blithely spouts quasiNietzchean, beyond-good-and-evil platitudes, slowly but surely realizes that the two of his former students (John Dall and Farley Granger) hosting the gathering have taken him at his word, thrill-killing a third ex-pupil and hiding the corpse right under the noses of the guests. With its proudly matte-painted "New York skyline" glowing through evening, dusk, and into nightfall outside the apartment-set windows,Rope may be the purest example of Hitchcock's career-long embrace of artifice as an aesthetic strategy, and is something beautiful to behold. No less so are the use of rear projection and colorfully well-appointed sets and costumes used to create an exotic, threatening world around Stewart's midwestern doctor
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
and his restless, former-famous-singer wife Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much, which rightly keeps the Cold War machinations way in the background, focusing instead on the rude awakening experienced by the blissfully ignorant, surprisingly resourceful American tourists' horror at finding themselves submerged in it, forced into a nightmarish quest to find their kidnapped little boy, who's being held to oblige the doctor's silence vis-à-vis some incriminating words whispered to him by a dying man.
LOOK FOR ALFRED HITCHCOCK QUOTES THROUGHOUT TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE METHOD BEHIND HIS MADNESS…OR MAYBE JUST HIS MADNESS.
IMAGES IN THIS ISSUU CORRESPOND TO THE ARTICLE REVIEW IN THE OPENING TWO PAGES ONLY. THESE ARE ORIGINAL PROMOTIONAL POSTERS. THE “PHOTO SHOOTS” ARE RECREATIONS FROM VANITY FAIR (THE HOLLYWOOD ISSUE #8. IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY YOU CAN SPOT POPULAR MODERN ACTORS REENACTING HITCHCOCK’S MOST FAMOUS SCENES.
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
The Birds marks another performer's debut under Hitchcock's auspices, this one of a more alluringly feminine sort: Cool blonde Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock's find and protĂŠgĂŠ, is a frankly sexy, confident, aimless young woman from a wealthy family who's caught between unruliness and civilized order, both within herself and, more frighteningly and violently, in the exterior world, where the birds of the little Northern California coastal town -- where Hedren is staying to pursue a hunky man (Rod Taylor) a bit too under his mother's (Jessica Tandy) thumb -- have mysteriously banded together and mounted increasingly savage, aggressive attacks on the townspeople. Here, once again, Hitchcock employs artifice -those birds, who sometimes swarm in Jackson Pollock-like abstract squiggles across the screen; the use of rear projection and hybrid studio/location shooting highlighting the tension between realism and frank illusion, nature and civilization; that final, haunting, painting-like shot in which the survivors of the birds' attacks head off toward what looks to be a matte-painting horizon lit by shafts of heavenly but clearly fake light -- to create a sinister storybook about how illusory are our anthropocentric assumptions about the human animal's relation to the natural world it comes from and lives in. And then there's the much more documentary-like Psycho, its deceptive black-and-white appearance of realism sliced into something sleek, foreboding, and inevitable in the cutting room, propelled swiftly along toward doom by perhaps the most instantly recognizable of Bernard Herrmann's many
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
Hitchcock scores. The film's notorious "shower sequence," storyboarded precisely and painstakingly edited to There is no terror in the bang, only in the create a flurry of cuts between the shots to match the one depicted within anticipation of it. them, works so effectively on so many levels at once, from the most viscerally repulsed to the most admiringly cerebral, it's no wonder that it's the single sequence most commonly associated with Hitchcock in the popular imagination. (No less ingeniously innovative, if more subtly so, is the film's gloriously perverse structure, in which the story we think we're watching gets derailed after the first third and becomes something quite different in the aftermath -- a structure whose jarring legacy has lived on in films that pay it homage, from Dressed to Kill to Full Metal Jacket to Storytelling).
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.
Hedren's next, final role for her discoverer was even better: the psychologically scarred thief of Marnie's title. Marnie is a kindred spirit of sorts to Cary Grant's frivolous, overgrown playboy in North by Northwest; despite their apparent disparateness, the films that give these two children in adult bodies are both equally fine and strangely complementary. They're both twisty-turny romances that depict the processes of growing into actual maturity and falling into actual love as tortuous strivings, whether it's Grant's obsessive desire for Eva Marie Saint and Eva Marie Saint alone leading him, another in Hitchcock's large gallery of "ordinary," glibly indolent and overconfident men whipped into shape through the interventions of coincidence and mistaken identity, into situations where he risks getting attacked by a crop-dusting plane or falling from the face of Mt. Rushmore. The unbearably sexy but implicitly frigid Marnie, for her part, must face up to a horrific repressed memory and the domineering mother (there's quite a long line of those in Hitchcock, too) for whom she's repressing it before she can attain her desire to melt at last under the ruggedly masculine hand of Sean Connery. North by Northwest, a superlative and exhilarating thriller, was a hit and is a well-established Hitchcock classic; it's too bad the different but equally excellent Marnie's box-office failure and lukewarm reception seemed to end the director's collaboration with Hedren and his melodramatic impulse. To at least the same extent that the swooningly emotional Rebecca decades earlier,Marnie, with its emergency-red flashbacks and women's-picture preoccupation with feminine iconography, ritual, and identity, suggests that Hitchcock could have been a compatriot of Douglas Sirk and Fassbinder.
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
Of course Marnie, great as she is, is only younger sister to Kim Novak in Vertigo, with its even more powerful exploration of the same themes. But when it comes to Vertigo, that's only a part of it: It's almost too much, the way Hitchcock reaches with this film the furthest possible heights of everything he's about, creating a world-class masterpiece (one that, with much ado, recently beat out Citizen Kane as Greatest Film Ever Made inSight & Sound's comprehensive critic's poll). The upstanding, upright, apparently well-adjusted regular guy (Jimmy Stewart) sucked by coincidence and slippery, elusive identity into something he doesn't understand, can't control, and can't get out of? Check. A passionate, obsessive love hopelessly complicated by submerged pasts, inscrutable desires, and murky motivations? Check. The persistent, uncannily dream-like feeling of something important and very dangerous just around the corner, just out of sight? Check. The vertiginous chasm that opens up when the beautifully artificial and the sobering, despondently real, set on a collision course, finally collide, shattering apart the seemingly rational, ordinary, and predictable veneer of life? Double check. No wonder Vertigo wasn't a hit upon its release, or that its stature grows with every passing year; it's Hitchcock's most serious film in every sense, a tensely anxiety-ridden modernist masterwork to rival Antonioni's L'avventura or Bergman'sPersona with its deeply troubling look at the irresoluble problems of alienation, a permeating and amorphous sense of loss, and the instability, deceptiveness, and warped projections of identity.
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
Very nearly as breathtaking and disquieting is Raymond Burr's murderous husband in Rear Window, who's an actor in a panoramic drama -- love! pain! suspense! -- that seems to play out just for the diversion of wheelchair-bound photographer Jimmy Stewart, who can observe everyone through his binoculars and telescope from his comfortable, shadowed observation perch overlooking the courtyard of his building. His and on-again, off-again fiancee Grace Kelly's ongoing date night at this ever more enthralling "movie" turns on them, though; in yet another testament to Hitchcock's taut visual and conceptual genius, few moments in the movies are as terrifying as when the gazed-upon murder suspect gazes right back at Stewart (and, by extension, us), then shows up in his apartment, violating the voyeur's privileged space, demanding menacingly, "What do you want from me?" This is infinitely more disconcerting because we, from our own invisible vantage point, are doing to Stewart and Kelly and everyone else what Stewart is doing to Burr and his other neighbors, and it would be terrifying to be confronted by the those we observe with the sadism always implicit in our detached looking -- for what? Titillation? Escape? Catharsis? Release of violent impulse? What do we want from them?
Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
Shadow of a Doubt, too, pulls back a veil to reveal something deeply disturbing behind a comfortable, complacent illusion, but not the one Teresa Wright's wide-eyed young protagonist, "Little Charlie," thinks. She's stifling in her family's Californian small-town health and contentment, and she longs for her dashing, footloose Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) to come visit them from back East. But the worldly cosmopolitanism she projects onto Uncle Charlie is in reality an enraged, soul-sick nihilism, and he's only returning to his family's bosom to evade the consequences of some ghastly, cruel crimes he's committed. Like Stewart in Vertigo and Rear Window, the allure of something that looks pretty and seems exciting will reveal itself as what it really is to Little Charlie only after it may be too late, and even if she can extricate herself from the abyss she's opened up, she won't be left unmarked. Shadow of a Doubt is Hitchcock's first perfect film; from its recurrent, progressively more disturbing image of couples elegantly ballroom-dancing to its tensionbuilding use of subjective point-of-view shots to the wonderful rhyming dollies-in that introduce us first to Uncle Charlie, then to Little Charlie, as each daydreams or plots while lying in bed with their arms folded behind their head, it persistently takes stylistic chances that clearly give its maker a great thrill, and it pulls them all off with an astonishing panache, never once making a misstep or ringing a false note.
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
And then there's the afterglow. Hitchcock ended his career in the '70s with two films that rather Self-plagiarism is style. neatly and insouciantly sum up much of what he accomplished over the preceding decades: Frenzy allows him to go back to his native England (where he began his career and made many a fine film before emigrating to Hollywood in 1940 to make Rebecca), bringing along the suspense and horror tricks he'd honed across the Atlantic, to tell the story of the grisly "necktie murderer"/rapist (Barry Foster) and the innocent man (Jon Finch) who, naturally, after his ex-wife falls victim, is wrongly suspected of the crimes. Hitchcock has good, sardonic fun with Englishness and class culture while at the same time serving up some of his most chilling, terrifying images: The rapes/murders are not depicted very graphically, but they seem to be, aestheticized as they are in an equal but opposite way to Peckinpah's slo-mo sensuousness, with smooth, cerebral rigor in framing and editing that are all the more unsettling for their sheer formal beauty. Then, unexpectedly but wonderfully, Hitch's last cinematic gasp took him out as a filmmaker with a wink and a smile.Family Plot concerns a pair of hapless, loveable San Franciscan con artists (Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern) lured by reward money into a thick, dangerous plot that pits them unwittingly against a much more competent and evil criminal pair (William Devane and Karen Black). There is something liberated and lively, even "loose" (though never less than technically and aesthetically inspired -- check out that magnificently made chase scene) that suggests, bittersweetly, that Hitchcock would have had many more in him, and who knows where he would've gone. It's marvelous the way Hitchcock concludes the film on Harris smiling and winking at us: for her, a fake psychic who discovers that her con/illusion actually is real, the trajectory has by complete accident been the opposite of what we expect from Hitchcock; the film keeps the great man in his best thematic territory (illusion/delusion vs. reality) and modes (suspense, attempted murder, mordant humor) while well earning that sparkling, apt, and touching happy ending to both one last fine film and to an incomparably illustrious run of filmmaking creativity to which, despite being many decades long, any end was going to seem much too soon. ***** FINAL THOUGHTS: The new Blu-ray release of Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection presents a bit of a conundrum for both the reviewer and the cinephilic consumer. The 15 films themselves are, it almost goes without saying, unimpeachable; Hitchcock is the rarely-matched gold standard of how a filmmaker can work within "the system," make movies that work for pretty much anyone as instantaneously gratifying entertainments, and create the most aesthetically and technically breathtaking, dazzling, rigorous, sometimes devastating works of art that you can spend a lifetime getting more and more out of. Whether the films collected here are "minor" Hitchcocks (Saboteur's
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW
WWII propaganda, Torn Curtains's and Topaz's Cold War semi-coasting); classics of suspense, psychological unease, and intoxicating, iconic use of the cinematic language (Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho); the unforgettable, unexpectedly hard-hitting philosophical/psychosexual forays of The Birds and Marnie; assured, accomplished works from the master's late-career second (third? fourth?) wind (Frenzy, Family Plot); or works near-unanimously counted among the truly greatest films ever made, anywhere (the piercingly deep dramatic and emotional layers of Shadow of a Doubt, the haunting and sublime contemplation of the movie-watcher's experience in Rear Window, and Vertigo, the superlative ultimate masterpiece), every one of these pictures deserves and demands to be seen multiple times, some of them for their enduring thrill and the finesse on display, a few as curios that even so retain some real allure, and several because they've marked you (or will mark you, if you have yet to see them) for life and stand with the greatest artistic achievements in any medium. This already overwhelming cornucopia of movie riches is rounded out even further with a vast smorgasbord of supplements that take you further into the making, meaning, and enduring value of each of the films, from multiple historical, critical, technical, and biographical perspectives. Content-wise, then, Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection is an easy call: It unhesitatingly and unequivocally merits our highest stamp of approval, DVD Talk Collector Series.
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection REVIEW