ALFRED HITCHCOCK: 1899-1980
.IHI IUIIDR Of SDSPINSI by SANJEEV PRAKASH
Alfred Hitchcock's film career was as formidable in its length as it was surprising in its evenness. He has been variously described as a master of suspense, a B-movie director, a "practical joker given to pitiless mockery," and a supreme perfectionist in the meticulous art of planning and crafting a film. The French new wave directors hailed him as auteur extraordinaire and prime exponent of decoupage classique, the classical design of film narration. By turn he played the roles of a film director, an author, a television personality and a humorist with a finely honed sense of the macabre. It is difficult to accept that one
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man could have so many sharply diverging personalities. How much of this is deserved, and how much misdirected adulation? Who was the real Alfred Hitchcock? With the possible (and debatable) exception of John Ford, no American director has been so closely identified with a particular genre as Hitchcock was with the mystery thriller. Perhaps it is the essentially low-brow personality of the genre itself that accounts for part of the controversy about his stature. And yet, isn't Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, for instance, a kind of thriller, a murder mystery? What distinguishes it from the
many forgettable novels in the same genre is the depth of treatment and resonance, the level of mastery and understanding of a medium and its particular strengths. After all, the primary themes of this genre, murder and the confrontation of good with evil, are the subject matter not only in Dostoevski, but in much of the Greek myths and the Mahabharata. Like many others, Hitchcock came to filmmaking the hard way. Born the son of a London greengrocer, he started by drafting the titles for American silent films in the early 1920s. Soon he became an assistant to the British director, Graham Cutts. His first chance to direct came about through the typically lucky accident that affords many a filmmaker his first break: The director fell ill one day, and Hitchcock took over the film. He was young then, barely 26, and looked even
younger; but his interest in the many departments of filmmaking, coupled with a natural and instinctive talent for visual narration, made a success of those early ventures. Working under Michael Baleon, early doyen of the British film, Hitchcock made a reputation for himself through a number of successful films, most of them in the genre that he was ultimately to make his own. Some of these films were lighthearted, forgettable romps, others adapted from popular books of the time; but in films like Rich and Strange, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Sabotage, there is growing evidence of a unique talent in the handling of actors, camera and editing, the primary tools of the cinema. Like Ford, like Erich Van Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch, Hitchcock began filmmaking in the silent days, when the pure impact of the visual image was of primary importance. With the coming of sound, this impact lessened; the quality of visual imagery in many films made today would not have passed muster in the days of the silent cinema. This is certainly not true of Hitchcock's work: The visual impact has always continued to attract the interest, reinforced by a soundtrack that highlights, counterpoints, and sometimes develops the thrust of the plot on a different level, though it never merely joins the images together. By the time Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood from England, World War II at his heels, he had acquired a basic mastery of his craft. Already his thrillers were constructed with a consummate mastery no other director could match. What remained was the further elucidation of this mastery, the exposure to a world audience, and the chance of working with some of the finest technicians in the world. Hitchcock had a rather unusual attitude toward technicians. He wished to be completely sure of each aspect in the making of his films, so much so that he meticulously planned every detail beforehand, leaving no room for improvisation or change. His desire to acquire total control over his films led him to learn and understand intimately the functions of each department. Of present-day filmFacing page: A striking location in Psycho (1960) was this gothic-style, haunted-looking mansion. Above: James Stewart as the inquisitive photographer and protagonist in Rear Window (1954). Left: In 1972 Hitchcock returned to England to make Frenzy, about a latter-day Jack the Ripper.
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ALFRED HITCHCOCK continued
makers, perhaps only Satyajit Ray comes An inherent shyness made him reply close to him in this regard. Hitchcock's facetiously to personal questions all his prowess at scripting, camerawork, editing, life. Let us, then, dispense with biography. the use of sound, even as a publicist are What continues to puzzle many people by now widely acknowledged. If an es- is that filmmakers like Claude Chabrol tablished cameraman disagreed with and Francois Truffaut, acknowledged Hitchcock about how a scene was to be masters themselves, reserve for Hitchcock shot, he would be asked to shoot it both an obeisance that was formerly the due of ways-his own way and the way Hitchcock only Sergei Eisenstein and David Griffith. wanted. Later, when he saw Hitchcock's In a book based on a long interview with version of the shot on the screen, part of Hitchcock, Truffaut has written: the overall thematic flow of the film, the Hitchcock is almost unique in being able to film cameraman would usually concede that directly, that is, without resorting to explanatory he had been wrong. Such total film dialogue, such intimate emotions as suspicion, authorship is rare, not only in Hollywood jealousy, desire and envy _And herein lies a paradox: with its armies of specialists and pigeon- the director who, through the simplicity and clarity of his work, is the most accessible to a universal holed departments, but elsewhere in the audience is also the director who excels at filming the world. most complex and subtle relationships between In 1939, when Hitchc9ck arrived in human beings ... _If, in the era of Ingmar Bergman, Hollywood, the major studios were in the one accepts that the cinema is an art form, on a par heyday of their prestige and influence. with literature. I suggest that Hitchcock belongsControlling every aspect of film pro- and why classify him at all ?·-among such artists of anxiety as Kafka, Dostoevski, and Poe. duction, distribution, and exhibition, they had strings of directors and stars on their This is high praise indeed, but is it payrolls. Each major studio prided itself deserved? Well, over the years one thing on its "look," a particular stylistic hall- has been established beyond reasonable mark that was unique to films made in doubt: he was a master in telling a story that studio. In their work, even major in purely visual terms. No one, not even directors were often forced to conform to Eisenstein, was his peer. Take an example this image. It is interesting to note that by now well known to cineastes, the first although Hitchcock wm:ked for every establishing shot in Rear Window. major studio of the time, his work does James Stewart, a professional photognot bear the mark of any particular one. rapher, is laid up after an accident at the The Hollywood moguls realized, to their race track, and is feeling slightly bored. chagrin, that Hitchcock's was a style Some filmmakers would have broken apart, one that it was safer not to meddle this up into a sequence of separate shots, with. making the flow of events mundane and A number of Hitchcock's later films, more explicit. For Hitchcock, it is all such as Spellbound, Rear Window, North contained in one shot, laden with implicit by Northwest, and Torn Curtain, have meaning: Opening with a close up of dealt with particularly American pre- Stewart's plaster-encased leg, he moves occupations. What had in the British upward to reveal the sweating, tense films been thrilling yarns with a touch of face, then passes· a nearby table upon fantasy and make-believe, became, with which a battered camera is lying, and the shift to America, reflections on the finally pans across the motor racing predominant trends and social conditions photographs hanging on the wall. Simple of his time. Whereas in the British films enough, but uniquely effective. Very often he was not much concerned with verisimili- . what the nature of the cinematic medium tude, with making the audience believe ·'de~ands is not prosaic explicitness, but the him, in America he came to employ all inherent power of such implicit imagery. his powers toward that aim. It was there, Hitchcock's weakness for the macabre after all, that he confronted the reality to the virtual exclusion of other themes of the milieus associated with his genre. would be puzzling if we did not know that This explains in part why the American what scared him most was the prospect of films are more powerful and compelling. ever boring his audience. If he is in fact Biographical details are often un inter- the least boring of filmmakers, this is esting because they reveal so little about due almost equally to his choice of themes the inner personality. Of Hitchcock this is as to his technical mastery. Hitchcock's particularly true. It is difficult to describe attitude to evil, if not that of a moralist, the major shaping events of his life be- is certajnly not that ofa glorifier: to me, cause we do not know much about them. his attitude seems to be one of acceptance
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of evil as an unavoidable part of life. Perhaps it is this near-existentialist philosophy that explains the fondness the French had for him. In most of his films, he tried to show places of historic and touristic interest. This was his way of taking the audience with him on a little "trip": an apology for cooping them up in narrow dark theaters to watch the films. The exceptions are the deliberately claustrophobic films, like Rear Window and Lifeboat, where to convey the feeling of being enclosed is precisely the filmmaker's purpose. In North by Northwest there are scenes of the corn belt in the Midwest and of Mount Rushmore (including the famous scene where the main characters are chased across the carved face of Theodore Roosevelt). To Catch a Thief is shot entirely on the French Riviera, and Vertigo is located in and-around San Francisco. Each ingredient of a Hitchcock film serves to fulfill a particular aim. Take his particular contribution to film terminology, what he liked to call the "mcguffin_" The mcguffin was the device that explained the abnormal behavior of certain characters. Once established, so Hitchcock held, it could be dispensed with for the rest of the film. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant believes that he has been mistaken for a secret agent and will be released when the real agent is discovered. In truth there is no real secret agent, and Grant is unwittingly being used as a decoy by the government. Once this curious situation has been explained, we accept it for the film's duration. The mcguffin has served its purpose. Hitchcock reveled in using ordinary backgrounds for the most extraordinary
Above, left: A crop-dusting plane terrorizes Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959).
universal language of images. This is why Satyajit Ray's films are acclaimed by people who do not speak a word of Bengali; why Kurosawa was hailed as a great director outside Japan; and why Alfred Hitchcock's own name is known to film-
Above: Rope (1948), which featured James Stewart (left), was made as one continuous shot. Above, right: Blackmail (1929) was Hitchcock's first sound film. It was made after 10 silents. Right: The killer in Psycho approaches unsuspecting Janet Leigh while she is taking a shower.
occurrences.
He would much rather have
a murder take place in the midst of a crowd than up some cliched dark alley. If the approach is at all credible this is a very clever idea, since the realistic, innocuous backgrounds heighten our sense of surprise and shock. Perhaps the most famous example of this is in The Man Who Knew Too Much. The murder is planned to take place during a symphonic performance at the Albert Hall in London; the report of the murderer's gun is to be disguised by the clash of the cymbals so that the murder goes unnoticed, a part of the symphony! Hitchcock's films are filled with ideas like that, sophisticated, suspenseful, highly effective. It is true that his milieus arc nearly always violent ones, and this obsession is strange in a man who was professedly unviolent. But perhaps it all came from a keenness to please, a desire to hold the interest at any cost. He has held it now, from one film to the next, for over 50 years. Now he is dead, and it is difficult to believe that we will never see all the ideas that were in his head these last few years; at any rate, not in Hitchcock films. More than most filmmakers of his time, Hitchcock understood that the cinema is international
because
it speaks
in the
HITCHCOCK
QUIPS
There was a movie writer who always seemed to have his best ideas in the middle of the night, and when he woke up in the morning, he never remembered them. So one day the man had a brilliant idea. He said to himself, ''1'11 put a pencil and paper beside my bed, and when I get the idea, I'll write it down." So he went to bed and, sure enough, in the middle of the night, he awoke with a terrific idea. He wrote it down and went back to sleep. When he awoke the next morning. he'd forgotten the whole thing, b~t all of a sudden, as he was shaving, he thought to' himself, "Oh God, I had a terrific idea last night and now I've forgotten it. But wait, I had my paper and pencil: that's right, I wrote it down '" So he rushed into the bedroom and picked up the note and read what he had written: "Boy meets girl"! I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm. I don't want clouds overhead. I get a feeling of inner peace from a well-organized desk. When I take a bath, I put everything neatly back in place. You wouldn't even know I had been in the bathroom. My passion for orderliness goes with a strong revulsion toward complications. I don't
want to film a "slice of life" because
people can get that at home, in the street, or even in front of the movie theater. They don't have to pay to see a slice of life. And I avoid out-and-out fantasy because people should be able to identify with the characters .... What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out!"
goers who do not speak any English. His intention was to fill the frame up with the drama of life and death, to "charge it with emotion," as he put it himself. He brought to this task, and to the cinema, a liInique sensitivity and intensity of feeling. His well-known cynicism, as is often the case, effectively disguised a childlike fear of the seamy side oflife, of the police, of violence, of sex and death. As Truffaut has pointed out, it was from his own genuine fear of these that the mastery in transmitting that fear to his audience stemmed. In a way, he earned the right to scare us; and no one can deny that in this department, at least, he was a master without peer. Never pointing attention to themselves as great works, his films remain superbly effective examples of film craft. Like any great artist he has his share of imitators, but before any of them can take his place he needs to undergo a qualifying test. Hitchcock himself once said, "If you've designed a picture correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience." No other filmmaker can do that as consistently or as well. For Alfred Hitchcock, I suppose, that is the ultimate accolade; one that is completely deserved, and one that he would have been more proud of than any other.
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About the Author: Sanjeev Prakash, who writes frequently on the cinema, has made several short .films and documentaries.
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