6. The Master of Suspense:

Transcription

1 6. The Master of Suspense: Director Alfred Hitchcock set the standard for movie thrillers Alfred Hitchcock may entertain us, and sometimes astonish us, but that doesn t mean he ever really liked us. Indeed, there is ample evidence to the contrary which, all things considered, might not be such a bad thing. Francois Truffaut, the late, great French filmmaker who famously interviewed and occasionally emulated the Master of Suspense, once spoke of his idol as the man whom we are glad to be despised by. And, mind you, Truffaut meant that as a compliment. It s important to remember that, throughout his life, Hitchcock never tired of manipulating our ambivalent responses to violent death. In doing so, he shamelessly pandered to our baser instincts, implicating us in the machinations of his characters by exploiting our voyeuristic impulses. Thanks to him, we really want James Stewart to be right when thinks he witnessed a murder in Rear Window (1954). We really want Farley Granger s slatternly estranged wife to get what s coming to her in Strangers on a Train (1951). And we really, really want Anthony Perkins to dispose of that car with the bloody corpse inside the trunk in the swamp behind the Bates Motel in Psycho (1960).

2 2 As early as Blackmail (1929), his first talking picture, Hitchcock was indulging in devious sleight-of-hand to make moviegoers share the guilty pleasure and the not-sopleasurable guilt of being, in essence, accomplices to crime. A reckless young woman abandons her policeman boyfriend for a night on the town with a seductive artist. The artist lures her into his apartment truth to tell, he doesn t have to do much to convince her and tries to rape her. She responds by stabbing him to death, then taking flight. The next morning, however, she s so conscience-stricken that, at the breakfast table, she jumps at each mention of cutlery. Hitchcock intensifies the tension by playing tricks with the soundtrack, so that we, like the young woman, recognize only one word -- knife amid an otherwise barely audible murmur. A few years later, in Sabotage (1936), Hitchcock mercilessly sustained a sequence of almost unbearable suspense by following a little boy aboard a bus as he unwittingly transports a package containing a bomb. Just when we re almost ready to assume that, hey, Hitch really had us going there for a few minutes ka-boom! The bomb explodes, the boy is killed and his older sister (Sylvia Sidney) is sufficiently motivated to stick a large knife into the saboteur (Oscar Homolka) who just happens to be her husband. But rest assured: She doesn t do it nearly fast enough to satiate the audience s bloodlust. Do we blame Hitchcock for bringing out the worst in us? Quite the contrary: We re greatly amused, and grateful, for being so effectively worked over. And yet, when you remember the haughtily droll host who quipped his way through countless interviews, promotional shorts and wrap-around segments for his long-running TV series, you may find yourself reading something like contempt in his insolent smirk. Something like the regard of a seasoned prostitute for her most eager customers. The son of a London poultry dealer, Hitchcock attended St. Ignatius College, London, and the University of London, where he studied engineering. In 1920 he began to work in the motion-picture industry, designing title cards for the Famous Players-Lasky Company. Within a few years he had become a scenario writer and an assistant director, and he directed his first film (The Pleasure Garden) in With The Lodger (1926), the story of a family who mistakenly suspect their roomer to be Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock began making the thrillers with which he was to become identified. His Blackmail (1929) was the first successful British talking picture. During the 1930s he directed such classic suspense films as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). In 1939 Hitchcock left England for Hollywood, where his first film, Rebecca (1940), won an Academy Award for best picture. During the next three decades Hitchcock usually made a film a year in the Hollywood motion-picture system. (From the 1940s on, he usually made a fleeting, wordless appearance in a bit part in each of his films.) Among the important films he directed during the 1940s were Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), 2

3 3 Spellbound (1945), and Rope (1948). He began functioning as his own producer in 1948, and went on to make a series of big-budget suspense films starring some of the leading actors and actresses of Hollywood. These films include Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955; a remake of the 1934 film), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959). In the 1960s Hitchcock turned to making thrillers with new and original emphases, among them Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964). His Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) are conventional espionage stories, while in his last films, Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976), he returned to his original themes. Hitchcock's films usually center on either murder or espionage, with deception, mistaken identities, and chase sequences complicating and enlivening the plot. Wry touches of humor and occasional intrusions of the macabre complete this mixture of cinematic elements. Three main themes predominate in Hitchcock's films. The most common is that of the innocent man who is mistakenly suspected or accused of a crime and who must then track down the real perpetrator in order to clear himself. Examples of films having this theme include The Lodger, The 39 Steps, Saboteur, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, and Frenzy. The second theme is that of the guilty woman who enmeshes a male protagonist and ends up either destroying him or being saved by him; examples of this theme include Blackmail, Sabotage, Notorious, Rebecca, Vertigo, and Marnie. The third theme is that of the (frequently psychopathic) murderer whose identity is established during the working out of the plot; examples of this theme include Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Rear Window, and Psycho. The psychopathic killer theme may sometimes be combined with the plot of the falsely accused innocent man, as in Frenzy. Hitchcock's greatest gift was his mastery of the technical means to build and maintain suspense. To this end he used innovative camera viewpoints and movements, elaborate editing techniques, and effective soundtrack music. He had a sound grasp of human psychology, as manifested both in his credible treatment of everyday life and in the tense and nightmarish situations encountered in his more chilling films. His ability to convincingly evoke human menace, subterfuge, and fear gave his psychological thrillers great impact while maintaining their subtlety and believability. Throughout the history of cinema, which began only a few years before Hitchcock was born in 1899, few directors have been so successful at pleasing three major branches of the film community: Critics, who have given him steadily increasing respect; scholars, whose analyses have uncovered extraordinary depth in his works; and everyday moviegoers, whose enthusiasm has turned a remarkably large number of his pictures into world-class hits. 3

4 4 All of which raises an important question: What's behind his enduring success as an artist, entertainer, and cultural phenomenon, more than a century after his birth and 22 years since his death in 1980? There is no simple answer. Many other filmmakers have spun suspense-filled tales and earned box-office glory. Many have also won the Academy Award as best director, a tribute that eluded Hitchcock, despite several nominations and an honorary Oscar in Yet he was the only one of his peers to become an instantly recognizable celebrity around the world, and to give his very name ("Hitchcockian") to the vocabulary of film critics and movie buffs. Complicating the puzzle more, individual Hitchcock pictures have received widely varying responses. Many have captivated just about everyone, from The Lodger and The 39 Steps to Rear Window and North by Northwest, for a few uncontroversial examples. Yet some movies adored by critics, such as Rope and Vertigo, fared poorly at the boxoffice when they were first released. During the 1940s and 1950s, moreover, most mainstream reviewers wrote off even his major hits as mere entertainment, reserving the label of art for dramas about important social issues and adaptations of literary classics. This began to change around 1960, when auteurist critics started seeing great directors as "authors" using film as a vehicle for personal expression. Hitchcock quickly became Exhibit A for this view, but the mixed nature of his best works, at once philosophical reflections and rip-roaring thrillers, still confused pundits not well-versed in critical niceties. The chief reviewer of The New York Times called Psycho a blot on an honorable career when it first opened, then placed the movie on his 10-best list only a few months later. Today such confusions are largely forgotten, and a varied lot of Hitchcock movies have settled in as all-time favorites. If one factor can be singled out as a key to their enduring popularity, it's the lifelong pleasure Hitchcock took in breaking down barriers between the story on the screen and the emotions in the audience. When a Hitchcock movie is working as intended, we're subtly implicated in the actions and motivations of the characters, guided by images and sounds that Hitchcock meticulously designed before the cameras ever started rolling. This explains the intense feelings his greatest films evoke. Most movies invite us to be passive spectators. Hitchcock invites us to be living partners in his shivery morality tales. Psycho, one of his most haunting and intricate films, provides excellent examples of this. Consider the first extended scene featuring Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins with such boyish charm. Skulking into the back of his office, he spies on a guest in his motel as she undresses for a shower. We know his behavior is unethical, illegal, and immoral, and yet we peer at Janet Leigh's character along with him, aided and abetted by Hitchcock's snooping camera. 4

5 5 Are we innocent entertainment-seekers just getting our money's worth at the movies? Or are we momentarily sharing Norman's voyeurism, falling into cahoots with a man who will soon be revealed as a dangerously mother-fixated lunatic? Something similar happens later, when Norman tries to hide a victim's car by pushing it into a swamp. We watch attentively as the vehicle starts to sink; we grow tense when it momentarily stops; and we breathe more easily when it disappears from view. Again we've been tricked into identifying with a villain, and again the trick has a serious purpose: Unlike storytellers who see life in simplistic terms -- good is one thing, bad is another, and we can always tell them apart -- Hitchcock recognizes the daunting complexity of human nature. Instead of merely preaching about this, he makes us feel it in our deepest selves. It's no accident that sight plays a central role in these famous Psycho moments, since Hitchcock's preoccupation with the value of it in our lives, and the many ways it can mislead or deceive us, is another factor in his continuing appeal. He explored this theme as early as his silent-film days, and some of his greatest Hollywood movies are all about the power of vision. Think of James Stewart's character spying on his unsuspecting neighbors (including a possible murderer) in Rear Window, or stalking a beautiful but mysterious woman (who may be supernaturally possessed) in Vertigo. These are not conventionally flawless heroes, and their stories have unsettling implications about our tendency to trust superficial appearances rather than deeper intuitions. But it wasn't just sight that Hitchcock found fascinating. What moved him was the realization that all of our bodily senses are as limited and limiting as the physical world itself, and should never be trusted as guides to ultimate truth. His movies are full of characters who construe things wrongly because they put too much faith in sensory evidence. The effect may be comic, like the gobbledygook phone conversation in Blackmail, or tragic, like the deadly charade in Vertigo, but it invariably points to Hitchcock's belief that there are more things in heaven and earth than material perceptions can reveal to us. An aspect of Hitchcock's filmmaking that needs special scrutiny today is its relationship with violence. Mayhem comes naturally to the thriller genre, and Hitchcock's involvement with it grew more explicit as censorship customs relaxed. This began with the shower scene in Psycho, which has been credited (or blamed) for touching off a cycle of slasher movies. His most lurid scene was a rape and murder in Frenzy, his biggest hit of the 1970s. Hitchcock's interest in suspense didn't grow from a morbid fixation on violent action for its own sake, however. What fascinated him was the existential conflict between order and chaos, which he explored in many ways, both direct and roundabout. 5

6 6 Significantly, even his most violent movies show a sense of restraint that today's belligerent filmmakers could learn a lot from. He enjoyed pointing out that the violence in Psycho actually diminishes as the movie goes along, since little mayhem was needed once he'd planted the explosive shower scene in the viewer's imagination. Frenzy follows the same pattern, and the famous killing scene in Torn Curtain a Russian agent is beaten, stabbed, and finally gassed in a kitchen stove by hero Paul Newman -- is an object lesson in how difficult and unpleasant a task murder is. I have always felt that you should do the minimum on screen to get the maximum audience effect, he told a psychiatrist who interviewed him for Redbook magazine in I believe the audience should work. If he were here to observe today's movie scene, it's easy to imagine Hitchcock admiring a revisionist thriller like The Blair Witch Project, which shares his love of streamlined simplicity, and suggests violence instead of rubbing it in our faces. He might have applauded its producers for using the Internet to publicize it. This can be seen as a contemporary extension of his wizardry with the media of his own day, from pulp-fiction magazines to his weekly TV show. Hitchcock believed cinematic jolts serve a positive purpose in human affairs. Our nature is such that we must have these shake-ups, or we grow sluggish and jellified, he wrote in Why Thrillers Thrive, a 1936 essay. Yet he was a preeminently civilized artist who wanted to make the world richer and more exciting, not more frightening or degraded than it may already seem. Little children go on a swing, he said in They go higher and higher and then they scare themselves and stop at the crucial point. And after they get off the swing, they're laughing. This combination of anxiety, relief, and sheer fun was what Hitchcock brought to movies throughout his 50-year career. Nobody else has provided it as reliably and pleasurably as he did. 6

7 7 Ten Hits from Hitchcock Twenty-five years after his death, Alfred Hitchcock remains immortal in his art. Here are ten titles that qualify as essential Hitchcock: THE LADY VANISHES (1938) Considered by most critics to be the very best of Hitchcock s early British thrillers, The Lady Vanishes is as bracingly witty as it is ingeniously plotted. During a Central European holiday, saucy young Margaret Lockwood befriends an aging ex-governess (Dame May Whitty) who isn t all that she seems. Midway through their journey aboard an elegantly appointed train, Whitty inexplicably disappears. But when Lockwood raises a ruckus, other passengers deny ever seeing the older woman. Fortunately, a charmingly roguish Michael Redgrave is on hand to help our heroine sort things out. The Lady Vanishes has inspired several remakes, ripoffs and respectful homages Silver Streak (1976), starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, is just one of its progeny but the original remains remarkably fresh as smart and snappy entertainment. Take note of the old lady s hidden agenda: It ranks among the best examples of a MacGuffin (i.e., the almost entirely irrelevant item that propels the plot into motion) in the entire Hitchcock oeuvre. REBECCA (1940) Hitchcock made the fateful move to Hollywood in the late 1930s, expecting to make a movie about the sinking of the Titanic for producer David O. Selznick. Once he arrived in L.A., however, he discovered Selznick had changed his mind, and instead wanted Hitchcock to direct a film based on Daphne du Maurier s popular novel. It wouldn t be the last time that Hitchcock felt he was misled by the freewheeling and iron-willed producer. As for Rebecca itself, the film Hitchcock s only Oscar-winner is a stylish gothic drama starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine as a newly-married couple haunted by the memory (and, perhaps, the ghost) of Olivier s first wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. It s not really a Hitchcock picture, the Master of Suspense told Francois Truffaut. But Truffaut, among others, disagreed. SUSPICION (1941) Is Cary Grant just a charming scoundrel with a flair for romancing naive women and a knack for gambling away money? Or is he something more dangerous: a cold-blooded killer who s planning to collect on his wealthy wife s insurance policy? Hitchcock keeps us guessing right until the end of Suspicion, a riveting romantic thriller flawed only by its compromised ending. The way Grant plays his role, you re never entirely certain what will happen to Joan Fontaine, his understandably anxious wife. SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) Playwright Thornton Wilder (yes, that s right, the guy who wrote Our Town) might seem like an unlikely collaborator for the Master of Suspense. But their one and only joint effort is an unqualified masterwork, a tale of beguiling evil lying low in a cheery small town, that Hitchcock listed among his personal favorites. Joseph Cotton gives one of his best and creepiest performances as a charming 7

8 8 gentleman with an unfortunate habit of wooing and murdering wealthy widows. At first, his family greets him with open arms when he arrives on a train, naturally for an extended visit. But then his favorite niece (Teresa Wright) reads about the manhunt for The Merry Widow Murderer, and starts to suspect the worst about her beloved uncle. NOTORIOUS (1946) An irresistible two-fer: Cary Grant gives his finest dramatic performance in Alfred Hitchcock s very best film. Grant plays a cold-fish Federal agent who convinces a good-time girl (Ingrid Bergman, also excellent) to serve as bait in a plot to trap some troublesome ex-nazis in Rio. Our hero doesn t want to admit he loves his beautiful pawn, especially when she agrees to marry the suave villain (Claude Rains) who literally holds the key to a dark conspiracy. By agreeing to the wedding, Bergman becomes a whore in Grant s disapproving eyes. What he refuses to recognize, of course, is that she s sleeping with another man only to prove her love for him. Worse, he isn t grateful for her sacrifice until it s nearly too late. Notorious may well be the most perverse love story to ever slip past the Production Code censors. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) Along with The Lady Vanishes, this fiendishly clever thriller ranks among the most frequently imitated of all Hitchcock classics. Aboard yet another train Hitchcock relied on rail travel almost as frequently as contemporary thrillers involve laptop computers a champion tennis player (Farley Granger) is approached by an insistently ingratiating stranger (Robert Walker) who proposes a bizarre quid pro quo: He will murder the tennis champ s estranged wife, who refuses to sign divorce papers, if Granger will in turn murder Walker s overbearing father. Blithely ignoring Granger s rebuff, Walker does indeed kill the guy s inconvenient wife and threatens revenge if Granger doesn t repay the favor. Production Code busybodies forced Hitchcock to trim a few seconds of dialogue that underscores what nonetheless remains obvious: Even as he s recruiting Granger as a murderer, Walker s also trying to seduce the somewhat thick-witted hero. REAR WINDOW (1954) Hitchcock often took an almost masochistic delight in working within self-imposed restrictions of space, time and point of view. Think of Rope (a drama that unfolds in real time on a single set, with invisible cutting to link each reel) or Lifeboat (in which almost all of the action takes place in -- well, yes, you guessed it). Better still, marvel at Rear Window, the casually audacious thriller about a cynical news photographer (James Stewart) who spends his idle hours spying on his neighbors while immobilized by a broken leg in the confines of his Greenwich Village apartment. Slowly indeed, much more slowly than most contemporary filmmakers would ever dare Stewart recognizes telltale signs that the burly traveling salesman (Raymond Burr) in the apartment across the courtyard may have murdered his nagging wife. Just like the documentary filmmakers in The Blair Witch Project, Stewart serves as our surrogate: We can see and hear only what he does while seated inside his apartment. Not for the last time, Hitchcock implicates us in the guilty pleasures of a central character by making forcing us to recognize that we, like him, are voyeurs seated in the darkness. VERTIGO (1958) Cast as a traumatized ex-cop who tries to re-create the woman he loved and lost, James Stewart gives what arguably is the spookiest performance of his 8

9 9 career in Hitchcock s fevered dream of love and death. On one level, Vertigo can be read as a metaphor for filmmaking itself, with Stewart representing the auteur who shapes reality to his own ends, and Kim Novak as the actor whose sole purpose is the fulfillment of her director s vision. But the movie also can be viewed as a psychosexual examination of neurotic desire, with Stewart frantically struggling to replicate a perfect relationship, and Novak subjecting herself to repeated humiliations by shedding all aspects of her true identity to please the man she loves. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) In this intricately plotted and exuberantly entertaining thriller, his final collaboration with The Master of Suspense, Cary Grant plays a carefree New York advertising executive who s mistaken for a spy by enemy agents. Once again, Grant turns frosty and judgmental when his leading lady (Eva Marie Saint) feels duty-bound to sleep with an elegant bad guy (James Mason). Almost as if to punish our hero for his presumptuous moralizing, Hitchcock sends him racing through an open field, pursued by a machine-gun-equipped cropdusting plane, and later forces him to precariously dangle from Mount Rushmore. Serves him right, too. PSYCHO (1960) Take your pick: It s the granddaddy of slasher movies, the blackest comedy ever made, the most mean-spirited prank ever pulled on an audience -- or all of the above. And more. Hitchcock blindsided moviegoers in 1960 by daring to switch gears from sexy crime story to shocking gothic horror, by insidiously luring the audience into sympathizing with a homicidal maniac -- and, even more impudently, by daring to kill off a well-known leading lady (Janet Leigh) 50 minutes into his movie. Almost four decades after Hitchcock first opened the trap door, Psycho continues to loom large in our collective pop-culture conscious so much so, in fact, that Gus Van Sant s 1998 remake never really had a chance to be judged on its own dubious merits, not even by people who never saw the original. (Since everybody knows what happens in Psycho, a shot-by-shot reprise isn t merely redundant it s useless.) For better or worse, this is the first movie most people think about when they hear Hitchcock s name. The association is more than a little ironic -- in many respects, it is the least typical of Hitchcock s works but maybe inevitable. The Master of Suspense prided himself on his ability to coldly manipulate audience responses. He was never more amorally successful than he is here. 9

10 10 Quotes from Hitchcock: In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man. Give them pleasure the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare. The assembly of pieces of film to create fright is the essential part of my job, just as a painter would, by putting certain colors together, create evil on canvas. I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach. They pay money to be scared but always come out laughing. When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, It s in the script. If he says, But what s my motivation? I say, Your salary. I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. Television has brought back murder into the home where it belongs. Disney, of course, has the best casting. If he doesn t like an actor, he just tears him up. Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake. 10