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Philadelphia Inquirer (26/Apr/1990) - The two Hitchcocks

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The two Hitchcocks

Was he artist or entertainer? Was his British output superior to his American work? And should we forget the questions and simply enjoy his mastery of suspense?

Though Hitchcock died 10 years ago, the critical controversy about him is still very much alive.

Was he a minor English artist who became a major American entertainer, as the more persuasive evaluations have it? Or was Hitchcock a masterful storyteller — the equal of an Edgar Allan Poe or a G.K. Chesterton — who happened to have toiled in a suspense genre considered trivial? Was he a visionary blessed with unusual psychological insight or a manipulator who cursed his audience by implicating it in crimes of strangulation and slashing?

Hitchcock is guilty of all charges. But these indictments serve to obscure rather than illuminate his extraordinary output.

Even before his death, historians, reviewers and fans from Australia to Zaire argued the relative merits of Hitchcock's British films versus his American movies. If you listened to the debate, it was as though the prolific filmmaker, who made 53 features and directed 20 episodes of his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, had distinctly marked creative periods, like Picasso's blue and rose periods.

The "British Hitchcock" encompasses 1925 to 1939, when he worked in England, making 23 films, most of them comic thrillers, in a mere 14 years. (His earliest films weren't released until 1927.) The "American Hitchcock" spans 1940 to 1976, during which he made 30 features and 20 TV episodes, the majority of them slick murder mysteries drenched in blood and irony.

Those arguing on behalf of the superiority of his British output didn't seem to notice that Hitchcock's earliest American movies were his most aggressively British: Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Suspicion (1941) all deal with English manors and manners. Nor did those favoring the Americanized Hitchcock note that Stage Fright (1950), Dial M for Murder (1954), the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Frenzy (1972) were all set — and many of them shot — in London.

In Hitchcock's case, geography was not destiny. Throughout his career — whether he was working in London, Hollywood or on the Riviera, as in To Catch a Thief (1955) — Hitchcock's films were characterized by unusual thematic and visual consistency.

This primary theme is as marked in the 13 (he would have liked the number) most famous Hitchcock movies as they are in the director's under-known works. The best-known (and worst-imitated) Hitchcocks are The Lodger, Blackmail, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds.

Alas, Hitchcock's best movie, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), is not among his best-known, but should be for the way it crystallizes the Hitchcockeyed weaving of innocence and guilt.

During the 1950s, French critics Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol (later celebrated filmmakers) perceptively observed that in all of Hitchcock's films they discerned the recurring theme of transference of guilt, the curious affinity between heroes and villains. Hitchcock expressed this cinematically, implicating you, innocent viewer, by filming from the killer's vantage point, by using dynamically charged tracking shots that drew you forward into the frame and the story.

As English film historian Raymond Durgnat noted, perhaps because Rohmer and Chabrol shared Hitchcock's Roman Catholicism, they were sensitive to the director's notion of original sin, that the apparently innocent are also guilty.

Think of Farley Granger's tennis pro in Strangers on a Train (1951), whose secret wish to rid himself of an inconvenient wife is acted upon by the homicidal Robert Walker. Think of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (1954), whose secret wish to rid himself of girlfriend Grace Kelly is mirrored in Raymond Burr's murder of his wife.

In Hitchcock films, as Durgnat astutely observed, the villains embody temptations to which, on some secret or unconscious level, the heroes have yielded and for which they must be punished or from which they must be purified. Thus Hitchcock films are suspenseful parables of sin, expiation and redemption. (You might argue that in his later movies, such as Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), Hitchcock characterized the sin and expiation, but denied his audience cathartic redemption.)

Hard though they try, professional Hitchcock clones, such as Francois Truffaut in The Bride Wore Black, Brian De Palma in Body Double and Curtis Hanson in Bedroom Window or Bad Influence, never achieve the psychological subtlety of the master. This is because while the imitators are visual stylists who know how to elicit shock from a camera move or angle, Hitchcock was also a visual thinker.

What Cold War image is more eloquent than the penultimate scene in North by Northwest (1959), in which Cary Grant, capitalist adman, quashes a communist on the face of Mount Rushmore? (To be more exact, on Lincoln's nostril.) What attempt at moral cleansing is more potent than the sight of embezzler Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960), having decided to give the money back, stepping into her "purifying" — and deadly — shower?

Shadow of a Doubt is more resonant than Hitchcock's later, slicker efforts because it doesn't trade in absolutes such as capitalism versus communism, but rather confronts ambiguities.

In Shadow, a frustrated small-town California girl, Charlie (Teresa Wright), welcomes her big-city uncle and namesake (Joseph Cotten) into the household, in hopes that he will bring some color to drab Santa Rosa. Unnervingly, the film explores niece Charlie's confusion of sexual and family love for her uncle, a mysterious figure from such sophisticated cities as Philadelphia, Boston and London. Suave Uncle Charlie is as worldly as his family in Santa Rosa is provincial. He covets the good life; they covet a good name.

Nevertheless, the two Charlies share a telepathic bond. They even share a symbolic troth when uncle slips an emerald on niece's ring finger.

Of course, Uncle Charlie is not who he pretends to be. In order to prevent him from killing, his niece may have to kill her namesake — becoming, like him, a killer. Which Charlie is the hypocrite? Which the hero? The answer to the former is "both." To the latter, "neither." Shadow of a Doubt is a gripping story of the dangers of moral relativism, of sins that cannot be expiated.

This perceptive film about a deceiving, Europeanized uncle and his deceptively simple niece may have represented Hitchcock's attempt to contrast the old country with the new.

As Hitchcock's biographer Donald Spoto has noted, Shadow of a Doubt is a veiled Hitchcock autobiography, the director imbuing the cynical and the naive Charlies with attributes of his own divided self. Uncle Charlie sees the world as hell, and niece Charlie must resort to something diabolical to prevent her uncle's diabolism.

It's one of Hitchcock's most chilling films, and the first in which he denies his audience the cleansing catharsis of his heroine's redemption. For Hitchcock, the loss of innocence — sexual or moral — necessarily required the assumption of guilt.

Spoto quotes G.K. Chesterton's observation of Robert Louis Stevenson and applies it to Hitchcock: "It can be said of him that he knew the worst too young; not necessarily in his own act or by his own fault, but by the nature of a system which saw no difference between the worst and the moderately bad."

This could be Hitchcock's epitaph. Wherever his soul rests, it is probably not at peace.

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