Las Vegas Review (1999) - Hitchcock still holds our imagination after 100 years
Details
- newspaper article: Hitchcock still holds our imagination after 100 years
- author(s): Lewis Beale
- journal: Las Vegas Review (21/Feb/1999)
- issue: page 8.J
- journal ISSN: 1097-1645
- publisher: Las Vegas Review - Journal
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Article
Happy birthday, Hitch. You would have been 100 years old this year, and even though you died in 1980, it's as if you never left us.
It's not just that the term "Hitchcockian" – used to define a stylish suspense film – has become a permanent part of movie language. It's more that very few directors have equaled your ability to make thoroughly entertaining films that also qualify as art. No wonder your movies look as fresh today as when they were produced.
A lot of this can be attributed to the incredible range you showed, and your willingness to experiment. You made obsessive love stories such as "Vertigo" (probably your masterpiece) and "Notorious." Horror films such as "Psycho" and "The Birds." There was the witty comedy of "The Trouble With Harry" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." And the desperate realism of "The Wrong Man."
You even shot one film set entirely in a lifeboat and made another using 10–minute takes. Then there's the famous shower scene in "Psycho" which, with its screeching Bernard Herrmann score and furious intercutting, has influenced every horror and suspense flick made since.
So it's really no surprise that directors such as Brian DePalma, Claude Chabrol and Roman Polanski have been ripping you off for years. That Mel Brooks made an entire movie ("High Anxiety") parodying your films. And that all sorts of hacks keep trying to remake your work – in 1998 alone there was a TV version of "Rear Window," a redo of "Dial M for Murder" called "A Perfect Murder" and the widely panned shot–for–shot remake of "Psycho."
Hitch, you're still the master. And those who worked with you know why – because like all great artists, you knew exactly what you wanted.
"(Hitchcock's) degree of planning and preparation was about 500 percent over any producer or director I ever worked for," says Gregory Peck, who starred in "Spellbound" and "The Paradine Case." "He had the picture made inside his head, which made it a lot easier for the actors."
"(Hitchcock) had planned the whole film before he did one shot," adds Farley Granger, star of "Strangers on a Train" and "Rope." "You would walk into his offices and there would be pieces of paper all over the walls, all drawings of what the movie was about. (Then during filming) an assistant would sit next to the camera with this thick book of the drawings, and Hitch would go over to the book, and say, 'The next shot is ...'"
The fact is, Hitch, you may have known more about every aspect of film making than any director who ever lived. Maybe it's because you studied engineering in college, which not only led to an understanding of mechanics and electricity, but encouraged your technical inventiveness.
Certainly the art courses you took at the University of London prepared you for the visual world of film. And then there was that long apprenticeship in the industry itself – as a title card designer, assistant director, art director and screenwriter.
What this means, Hitch, is that your background helped you become a master visual stylist and technical innovator. No wonder film students continue to take apart some of your classic scenes – such as Cary Grant running from the crop duster in "North by Northwest" or the opera house assassination sequence in "The Man Who Knew too Much" – trying to figure out the key to such sheer entertainment value and technical virtuosity.
"(Hitchcock) saw the technical possibilities of the cinema as going hand in hand with style, so he was always interested in pushing the envelope," says Richard Allen, head of the film studies program at New York University. "He saw the expansion of technique as increasing the expressive and artistic powers of the medium."
If this sounds like all you cared about was the look of your films, Hitch – well, that's not quite accurate. The fact is, you were just as concerned with the acting in your movies. That intense preparation of yours actually made your sets very relaxed ones – no one ever had to worry whether the director knew what he was doing – and the performers who worked for you say this led to a real sense of creative freedom.
"(Hitchcock) gave me complete autonomy with what I did with Marion," says Janet Leigh of her part in "Psycho." "He said at the initial meeting: 'I give you freedom to bring to Marion who you think Marion is. My only insistence is that you move when I tell you to move.' That provided me with one of the richest experiences in making movies, in that he gave me respect as an actress. He had enough trust in me to provide my motivation."
"'The Birds' was my first movie," adds Tippi Hedren, who also starred in Hitchcock's "Marnie." "I was used to the camera (because of commercial work), but as far as playing a character, it was very different. He worked very closely with me. He would be open to suggestions. I was lucky having him as my drama coach."
This is not exactly a description of the man who supposedly said, "Actors are cattle." The fact is, Hitch, if you did say it, you meant that actors had to be told where to move, not how to create their characters. It's just another little bit of subversive humor coming from a man known for his drollery.
And that, Hitch, is another reason why you remain so vivid to us. You were just about the first director to become a public personality. There were all those cameo appearances in your movies, and the long–running TV show you hosted. All of which served to create a particular persona – the dumpy–looking man with a wicked sense of humor who liked nothing more than scaring people. It was as if you were an overgrown kid, jumping out of dark places while hollering "boo!"
That was really clever of you, Hitch. Maybe the cleverest thing you ever did; more than your decision to work almost exclusively in the suspense genre, which meant that a lot of highbrow film types refused to take you seriously – they saw you as nothing more than a very slick entertainer.
Yet the fact is that the films you made were deeper, had more subtext, than people thought. And the clownish, public Hitchcock served to hide what you were really doing: subverting moviemaking in truly daring ways.
"The sensibility of (Hitchcock's) works cohere with contemporary cultural concerns," says NYU's Allen. "There's an amoralism about Hitchcock. He asks you to buy into romance and the future, but he also thinks it's b.s. He takes an ironic stance toward romance. That kind of sensibility is amoral and irresponsible in a certain way."
What Allen means is that even though you worked for years in the Hollywood studio system, the romantic elements of your films were darker than the norm. In "Notorious," Cary Grant essentially pimps his lover, Ingrid Bergman, so she can infiltrate a Nazi cell. In "Vertigo," possibly the most obsessive movie ever made, James Stewart falls in love with the spitting image of his dead love. And "Psycho"? Janet Leigh can't marry lover John Gavin for lack of money, so she steals it.
But wait. There's more. Allen also contends that "Psycho," certainly your most notorious work, actually is "the founding film in the modern horror genre, defined by its explicitness and its shock. 'Psycho' kind of mainstreamed B–movie shock horror films. It brought B–movie values into the A film, and that redefined the cinema."
Does this mean we have you to blame for all those "Friday the 13th" films? In a way, yes. But that's not why we're celebrating your life and career, Hitch. It's because your films get us in the gut – they're entertaining and also disturbing. They speak to those little dark places inside all of us, where fear mingles with that secret pleasure we get from being scared. And no one reached us there better than you did.
"(Hitchcock) had the ability to manipulate the audience to a certain point, a fever pitch where their (imagination) took over, and once it took over, they would never forget what they'd seen," says Janet Leigh. "He was like a salesman, the greatest salesman in the world."
"Audiences like to be held in suspense, and he gave them a puzzle to work out, step by step, and the audience followed him along," adds Gregory Peck. "I suppose that, along with his special gift for storytelling and camerawork, was the secret of his longevity."
Happy birthday, Hitch. You were one of a kind.
