The New Republic (2013) - He Had to Look
Details
- article: He Had to Look
- author(s): David Thomson
- journal: The New Republic (02/Sep/2013)
- issue: volume 244, issue 14, page 52
- journal ISSN: 0028-6583
- publisher: New Republic
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Archives & records, Bodega Bay, California, British Film Institute, Cary Grant, David O. Selznick, François Truffaut, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Motion picture criticism, Motion picture directors & producers, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Rebecca (1940), Rope (1948), Sabotage (1936), San Francisco, California, Spellbound (1945), Stage Fright (1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Birds (1963), The Wrong Man (1956), Tippi Hedren, Vertigo (1958)
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Abstract
Thomson comments on Alfred Hitchcock, an English filmmaker who has been dead more than fifty years ago. A package of Hitchcock's silent films, beautifully restored by the British Film Institute's National Archive, is traveling round the country and delighting viewers who had come to think of him as American, Technicolored, and a devotee of desperate cries and screaming music. Recently two feature films about him -- The Girl and Hitchcock -- had a commercial release. They weren't any good, but someone reckoned that this director's curious and repressed sex life was a subject for entertainment instead of biographical research.
Article
The other day, two esteemed literary figures sent me a short questionnaire on Alfred Hitchcock. They wondered, do I think about him? I do.
The questions were going to a lot of people, and I don't know what the esteemed lit figs plan to do with the survey. But what struck me was the currency of Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). It's not that he has an anniversary, but those dates are telling. He has been dead more than thirty years. A group of exceptional film-makers died at about the same moment: Howard Hawks, Chaplin, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, King Vidor. With regret, I have to concede that those careers are now known in the halls of cine-philia but hardly anywhere else. Yet if you say "Hitch" out loud on any bus, people start looking for a bomb, or a fat man with a poker face who is studiously ignoring the search. That voice, his look, the promise, and the threat -- they're all with us still.
A package of Hitchcock's silent films, beautifully restored by the British Film Institute's National Archive, is traveling round the country and delighting viewers who had come to think of him as American, Technicolored, and a devotee of desperate cries and screaming music. Recently two feature films about him-The Girl and Hitchcock -- had a commercial release. They weren't any good, but someone reckoned that this director's curious and repressed sex life was a subject for entertainment instead of biographical research. And in 2012, the poll of critics organized by Sight & Sound (it comes once a decade) determined that at long last Citizen Kane should step aside. [[Ve...
