Case Study: Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock's career as a director spanned an
extraordinary half decade, from his first credited film in the silent era 'The
Pleasure Garden' (1925) to his last 'Family Plot' in 1976. However, it is in
the paranoid atmosphere of the 1950s that Hitchcock emerged as a truly
astonishing talent. Hitchcock is one of the few directors whose name and face
are very well known to the general public. This is, in part, due to his shrewd
self-publicity: he hosted the television series 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' for
many years, put his 'brand' name to various publishing ventures and made a
signature 'appearance' in most of his films. Nevertheless, his world-wide
reputation is also based on a large and definitive body of work, which made him
one of the most important and widely studied directors of the Twentieth
Century.
Although regarded as a more 'modern' director, in every sense, it was in his work within the British studio system in the thirties that Hitchcock developed many of the characteristic techniques and thematic concerns of his later Hollywood career. His distinctive style was quickly established and can be seen in his earliest successes: 'The Lodger' (1927), his first sound film 'Blackmail' (1929) and 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (1934), all suspense thrillers, a genre he was to make his own.
Fluid camera work, expressionistic lighting, camera placement and mise-en-scene are evidence of the strong influence of his earlier experiences at the German UFA studios, where he worked alongside Lang and Murnau. They also display a keen awareness of the metaphorical possibilities of Soviet Montage and ‘the tense cross-cutting developed in American cinema’ (O’Neill 1996). His earliest sound films 'Blackmail' (reshot and partially dubbed) and 'Murder' (1930) showed him to be confident and innovative in the medium - using music, dialogue, sound effects, silence and the first recorded use of voice-over as 'stream of consciousness'. The success of these films meant that by the start of the decade he was already regarded as Britain 's leading director.
In 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (1934, remade in 1956), Peter Lorre plays the kidnapper of a young couple's daughter. The couple, who are on holiday in Switzerland , have learnt of his plan to assassinate a visiting statesman in London and have to rescue their child and prevent the murder without informing the police. This 'classic Hitchcockian parable of horror asserting itself in the midst of the ordinary and innocent' (Cook) included a characteristic motif, the use of a famous setting (in this case the Royal Albert Hall) for the climactic sequence.
'The 39 Steps' (1935) explored another typical Hitchcock dilemma - a man suspected of murder who must prove his innocence while on the run from the police and the real criminals. The film used sound montage to great effect in the famous sequence where a landlady's scream, on discovering a corpse in the hero's room, merges with the shrill whistle of the train on which the hero is fleeing.
The success, in particular, of Hitchcock’s British thrillers drew him to the attention of the Hollywood studios, where he moved to film ‘Rebecca’ in 1939, for which he won the Academy Award as best picture. Hitchcock's American films probed more deeply into the psychology of the characters and were longer, more complex works. Rebecca (1940) Hitchcock's first United States film, received the Academy Award as best picture. His other major American films include 'Shadow of a Doubt' (1943), 'Spellbound' (1945), ‘Notorious’ (1946), 'Strangers on a Train' (1951), 'North by Northwest' (1959), 'Psycho' (1960) and 'Frenzy' (1972).
In recent years some of Hitchcock’s commercial failures have also received intense critical inspection. The boldly experimental ‘Rope’ (1948), which barely recouped Hitchcock’s personal investment on its release, is one such film. Recorded entirely in continuous one reel (8 minute) takes, it is the gruesome, and true, story of a murder (the Leopold-Loeb case of 1924) in which a body was hidden in an unlocked chest which was then used as a table for a dinner party. The invited guests, family and friends of the victim, thus unknowingly eat their meal on the body of their loved one, while the murderers revel in their crime.
‘Rope’ is one of the few films in history to have been made, in effect, in real time. It was typical of the technical problems that Hitchcock liked to set himself. ‘Dial M for Murder’ was filmed in 3D, although released as a ‘flat’ print when the popularity of the process had faded. In ‘Rear Window’ (1954) the action is confined within the apartment of a photographer and to his view of a block of flats from the living room window. Most of the sequences are extreme long shots, brought closer only by the photographer’s telescopic lens. As Cook remarks:
‘Rear Window’ is a disturbing and profoundly modern film: its theme of the moral complicity of the voyeur (and by extension, the film spectator) in what he watches anticipates both Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’ (1966) and Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ (1973) to say nothing of Hitchcock’s own ‘Psycho’ (1960).’
Hitchcock films frequently feature a beautiful and ‘unobtainable’ blonde woman. In Molly Haskell’s study of the treatment of women in film ‘From Reverence to Rape’ she observes:
‘For Hitchcock, beginning with Madeleine Carole in ‘The 39 Steps’ and continuing through Grace Kelly (‘To Catch a Thief’ ‘Rear Window’), Eva Marie Saint (‘North by Northwest’), Janet Leigh (‘Psycho’), Tippi Hedren (‘The Birds’, ‘Marnie’), Kim Novak (in her Madeleine persona in ‘Vertigo’), Dany Robin (‘Topaz’) and Barbara Leigh-Hunt (‘Frenzy’), the blonde is reprehensible not because of what she does but because of what she withholds: love, sex, trust. She must be punished, her complacency shattered; and so he submits his heroines to excruciating ordeals, long trips through terror in which they may be raped, violated by birds, killed. The plot itself becomes a mechanism for destroying their icy self-possession, their emotional detachment.’
In ‘Vertigo’ (1958), an astonishing and unsettling film, the hero (played by James Stewart) falls in love with the blonde, elegant, mysterious Madeleine (Kim Novak), but because of his vertigo is unable to save her when she falls from a church tower. He then meets Judy (also played by Kim Novak) an ‘ordinary’ shop assistant who reminds him of his lost love. In a progressively unstable state of mind which Hitchcock forces us to share, he tries to reincarnate Judy as Madeleine (dying her hair, changing her clothes etc.) only to suffer the supreme disappointment of finding that Judy and Madeleine are one and the same person, and that Madeleine was a fictitious role (a fantasy designed to ensnare Stewart) played to conceal a murder. In a repeat of the earlier scene he drags Judy/Madeleine (!), now cured of his vertigo, to the top of the same tower where she falls, by accident, to her real death. As Cook suggests, the conclusion, at a deeper level, of ‘Vertigo’ is that:
‘the ultimate consequence of romantic idealism-of aspiring beyond the possible-is successively, neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, or, more specifically, necrophilia.’
In addition to a masterful control of camera and mise-en-scene that ‘Vertigo’ displays, Hitchcock is also widely regarded as ‘the greatest editor in the history of the cinema’ (Gianetti 1996). His precut scripts detailed each shot that would take place and Hitchcock was therefore able to meticulously plan every scene, editing ‘in camera’ and thus avoid studio interference. For this reason he preferred working in the controlled environment of the studio (even the English countryside in ‘Suspicion’ (1941) is a set). It also explains his attitudes to actors which he referred to as ‘cattle’ to be moved about.
Hitchcock’s films became stranger and darker in the 1960s and 70s and the violence towards women increased. ‘Psycho’ the story of a ‘psychotic momma’s boy who lives in a gothic house with the rotting corpse of his mother’ (Cook) revolted many contemporary critics, although it was a huge commercial success. The (in)famous shower sequence has been compared to Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence. To quote Cook again:
‘Psycho is an outrageously manipulative film and is thus, like ‘Potemkin’, a stunningly successful experiment in audience stimulation and response. Hitchcock’s precisely planned knife murder sequence is in fact a masterful vindication of the Kuleshov-Eisenstein school of montage: in a series of eighty seven rapidly alternating fragmentary shots, we seem to witness a horribly violent and brutal murder on the screen, and yet only once do we see an image of the knife penetrating flesh, and that image is completely bloodless.’
Hitchcock’s career reached its peak with ‘Psycho’. ‘The Birds’ (1963) and ‘Marnie’ (1964) while of great interest to critics of today, were uneasily received, and as O’Neill (1996) suggests, he never again regained the same degree of popularity with film audiences.