Alfred Hitchcock Geek

"The 39 Steps" declares Alfred Hitchcock Month

2010-09-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

As you know, I have a rather soft spot for The 39 Steps in New York City. While the play has moved from its Broadway location at the Helen Hayes Theatre to an Off Broadway home at the New World Stages, the fact remains that a long-running hit is still drawing big crowds. As well it should!

Each year, they declare September to be Alfred Hitchcock Month, and 2010 is no exception. Visit the official contest site for more details and to enter. Hope you can join in. Here is the high level view:

ALFRED HITCHCOCK LOOK-A-LIKE CONTEST
Now through Sept 23rd The 39 Steps is accepting photo submissions for the Third Annual Alfred Hitchcock Look-A-Like Contest. Three lucky finalists will win free tickets to attend Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps on Monday, September 27th at 8:00pm. The audience will then vote LIVE to select the grand prize winner of the Third Annual Alfred Hitchcock Look-A-Like Contest. Win tickets and a special prize package from The 39 Steps! To Enter: Send your “Look-A-Like” photo via email to: alfred@hhcmarketing.com

HITCHCOCK TRIVIA CONTEST
Fans can test their knowledge of all things Hitchcock and The 39 Steps with the “Mr. Memory” trivia contest. The 39 Steps is giving away a great prize package to the fan who can answer the most questions of this classic Hitchcock trivia quiz. One lucky winner will win four orchestra tickets, a CD and a poster signed by the cast! Log on here to submit your answers.

FREE TICKETS!
Lucky number “39”! During the month of September, any person born in 1939 or who is currently 39 years old* can see the show for FREE! Simply bring a valid ID to the New World Stages box office (340 West 50th St.) to receive one complimentary ticket for any September performance. *For tracking purposes, “39 years old” qualifies as being born in the year 1971.

PRIZE GIVEAWAYS AT EVERY PERFORMANCE
Winners will be chosen at every performance of THE 39 STEPS during the month of September to receive prizes, including merchandise and signed posters by the cast.

Alfred Hitchcock Geek to Interview Tippi Hedren

2010-09-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

Tippi Hedren preparing for her interview.

Very exciting news! On Sunday, September 12, I'll have the honor of interviewing and moderating a discussion with one of Alfred Hitchcock's most fascinating and inspiring blonds - Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds and Marnie. A strong, intelligent women, her life in Hollywood and beyond has made the world a better place. To wit: my interview with her is in conjunction with a fundraiser for her Roar Foundation and its Shambala Preserve -- a rescue sanctuary for large exotic cats. You're heartily encouraged to attend, and the cost is very reasonable. Here's the official press release, along with this review quiz: If you enjoy healthy cuticles, why should you thank Tippi?

The Birds Star Tippi Hedren to Appear at Benefit for the ROAR Foundation.

AUGUST 28, 2010, LINCOLN CITY, ORE. – On Sunday, September 12, screen actress Tippi Hedren will host “An Evening with Tippi.” The event will include a special screening of Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller The Birds – her first starring role; an interview and Q & A session led by Alfred Hitchcock scholar Joel Gunz; an autograph session and more. The screening and interviews will take place at Lincoln City's Historic Bijou Theatre, which will also provide a catered reception. Afterward, attendees will have the option to gather at the nearby Historic Anchor Inn for an intimate dinner with Ms. Hedren.

The event is a benefit for the Roar Foundation and its Shambala Preserve, whose mission is to educate the public about wild and exotic animals, advocate for legislation to protect them and provide sanctuary for abused and neglected animals, especially big cats such as lions and tigers.

Says event organizer and president of the Bay Area Merchants Association Alex Ward, “We are delighted to help out Tippi and the very important work that she does.” He adds, “This project is a community effort, and I've been amazed to see our volunteers generously pool their time, money and other resources to make it a success.” Gunz adds, “Hedren's talent on screen, combined with her devotion to such humanitarian causes as Shambala, are an inspiration to millions of people around the world.” Event sponsors include the Bay Area Merchants' Association, the Bijou Theater, Chinook Winds Casino and the Historic Anchor Inn.

Event packages are as follows: Autograph Package: Screening of "The Birds" with Tippi, autograph and Q&A session, catered refreshments, $30. Dine with Tippi Package: Autograph Package, plus an intimate dinner with Tippi (limited seating), $90. Overnighter Package: Autograph and Dining packages, plus a one-night stay at the Historic Anchor Inn, $149 per person, $239 per couple.

About the Roar Foundation and Shambala
The Roar Foundation, founded in 1983 by Tippi Hedren, exists solely to support The Shambala Preserve. Shambala is sanctuary to approximately 70 exotic cats all rescued from roadside zoos and private citizens unable to properly care for them or have been confiscated by authorities such as the United States Department of Agriculture, Humane Society and the ASPCA. A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Roar Foundation’s Shambala Preserve gives animals a home where they can live out their lives with love, professional care and dignity.
Website: www.shambala.org

About Tippi Hedren
A former New York fashion model, Tippi Hedren made her screen debut playing the lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic, “The Birds,” a role for which she earned a Golden Globe award, and has gone on to appear in some 50 films and countless television appearances. She continues to work in motion pictures and television. An outspoken voice against cruelty to animals both wild and domestic, she co-authored “The Captive Wildlife Safety Act,” halting the interstate traffic of exotic felines for personal possession. It was successfully passed and signed by President Bush on Dec 19, 2003. She has now co-authored a bill titled “A Federal Bill to Ban the Breeding of the Exotic Feline for Personal Possession”. She is not only rescuing these unfortunate animals but is desperately trying to stop the problem. Ms. Hedren sits as president of the American Sanctuary Association that has defined “sanctuary” and is an accrediting organization. In addition to her animal welfare work she served two USO tours during the Vietnam War . She later served as volunteer coordinator for the organization Food for the Hungry providing relief for people all over the world including the Boat People in Southeast Asia. This led to her sole sponsorship of Vietnamese women in the U.S. to learn the manicuring trade. As a result of her efforts, the multi-billion dollar Vietnamese manicuring industry was established.

Out of the over 80 awards Ms. Hedren has received, the most recent are:
2010- Genesis Award for 2009 lifetime achievement.
2010- City of L.A. Congratulations on 2009 Genesis Award
2007- Jules Verne Nature Award
2008- Smithsonian Institute acknowledgement for donation of scripts for “The Birds,” “Marnie” and “The Countess of Hong Kong”.
2003- Received Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

About Joel Gunz
After a lifetime of study and association with film makers, authors and scholars, in 2004, Joel Gunz launched a blog devoted to the scholarly consideration of Alfred Hitchcock. Since then, he has built an international audience and won several awards for his writing and research. In 2009, he was twice invited to speak at New York City’s Broadway production of The 39 Steps and in May, 2010, previewed his one man show, Alfred Hitchcock Geek at Portland Center Stage. He is currently finalizing plans for the publication of his film guide Notes from an Alfred Hitchcock Geek.

Blog: www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Alfred-Hitchcock-Geek/194418010799?ref=ts

Twitter: www.twitter.com/hitchcockgeek

About the Bijou Theatre
www.cinemalovers.com

About the Historic Anchor Inn
www.historicanchorinn.com

Alfred Hitchcock's Most Wanted Actresses

2010-08-29T12:40:00.000-07:00

It was probably no surprise to Patricia Hitchcock that she was one of her father's most favored actresses.

Like many good directors, Alfred Hitchcock tended to work with the same people – on screen and off. Among the male actors he preferred, such as Cary Grant and James Stewart (four films each) and Norman Lloyd (three films, several Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes and associate producer and director credits on the TV show as well), there is one who appeared more frequently than any other: Leo G. Carroll (six films). Many Hitchcock geeks and scholars know that one. But which female actor appears in more Hitchcock films?

That answer is a bit dicier because it can change, depending on how you look at it. If you count TV appearances, his daughter Patricia Hitchcock takes the cake, with three movie credits and 10 roles in Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But let's stick to the movies.

My answer is Clare Greet, who had speaking roles in a total of eight Hitchcock films (Number 13 (1922), The Ring (1927), The Manxman (1929), Murder! (1930), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Sabotage (1936) and Jamaica Inn (1939), plus Lord Camber's Ladies (produced by Hitch, 1932).

Clare Greet helped Hitch out and he never forgot it.

In Number Thirteen, her first film with Hitchcock, Greet had been awarded the starring role. His uncle, John Hitchcock, had invested in the movie and when that money ran out, Greet kicked in more funds. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. Filming was brought to a halt and both of those individuals lost their investment. Humiliated, Hitch took that lesson to heart and he tried never to lose an investor's money again, earning a reputation for shooting his films on or under schedule and budget and aiming for commercial success – which he usually got. Hitch never forgot Greet's generosity and the belief in his talents that it implied and he repaid the favor by offering her more acting roles in his films than anyone else.

As an extra, Bess Flowers usually played what Sinatra would have a called a “classy broad.”

That said, there's another woman who could also contend for that top spot. “Queen of the Hollywood Extras,” Bess Flowers, appeared in over 700 movies in her career as an uncredited, usually non-speaking, walk-on. She can be spotted in seven Hitchcock films: (Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) as nightclub extra, Notorious (1946) as a party guest, Dial M for Murder (1954) as a woman departing the ship, Rear Window (1954) as a guest with a poodle at the songwriter's party, To Catch a Thief (1955) as a guest at the costume ball, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) as an attendee at the Royal Albert Hall concert, and Vertigo (1958) as a diner at Ernie's) and one episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (“The Legacy” (1956) as a diner at the hotel restaurant).

Finally, we shouldn't forget (though at this point it could be an uphill battle) Hannah Jones, who appeared in six of Hitchcock's early films: Downhill (1927), Champagne (1928), Blackmail (1929), Elstree Calling (1930), Murder! (1930) and Rich and Strange (1931). She missed the number one spot by one film, but in case the name comes up on Jeopardy, there you go.

Defending Gus Van Sant's Psycho

2010-08-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho left more than a few critics stone-faced -- unfairly, in my opinion.

It's pretty much an even bet that, when I introduce myself to someone as an Alfred Hitchcock Geek, the first thing he or she will say is, “What do you think of Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho? My answer is always the same: I love it. I love the fact that he tried to recreate a great film, shot for shot, and I think he broke new ground in how we experience classic films. His 1998 recreation has been unfairly chastised, and I feel the need to defend it when few others will.

Classic movies are often regarded as sacred cows, off limits to the supposedly dexterous, yet maladroit mitts of (insert scornful tone) film school graduates – and it isn't limited to Hitchcock. (I'm reminded of how similar contempt was once heaped upon Julliard or Berklee-bred jazz musicians who performed songs written by older musicians who'd paid their dues the old-fashioned way.)

Classic films will be enjoyed long after you and I are gone, and from that perspective, Hitchcock's movies – along with those of William Wyler, Orson Welles, etc. – are still very young. Perhaps they (or their late makers) are too freshly ensconced in the can to be exhumed and reanimated. But, really? Is there a statute of limitations on remaking films, that they can't be remade until a certain, respectful time period has elapsed? Maybe there is. It's unseemly to speak ill of the freshly deceased; but at a certain point their memory becomes fair game and we can relax the rules of respect for the dead. I don't know where that line is drawn, but while the recent remake of Hitch's early classics The Lodger (1926) and Easy Virtue (1928) irked only the staunchest Hitchcock geeks, even the most casual moviegoers have deemed Psycho to be forbidden territory – and the controversy surrounding the potential remake of The Birds has ruffled more feathers than those possessed by the film's principle actors.

Van Sant's remake pissed a lot of people off. And I don't think that can only be chalked up to its iconic status. I think it had something to do with the fact that his version was too faithful, too uncomfortably close to the original, in the way that a prosthetic hand ought not imitate too closely the original it's replacing. People see it and don't know what to think, so they reject it.

I say that Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake was a real tribute, the way a remake ought to be done. As the independent director once told an audience at BFI Southbank, “I was sort of angry at Hollywood trying to remake movies, because it seemed like they would rob the screenplay and … actually change the script. So I said, 'Why don't you just shoot it exactly the way it is, because it's a great movie?'” His intent was to honor the film, not desecrate it by changing the movie with arbitrary updates. He was genuinely surprised when it failed to be the blockbuster hit he'd hoped it would be. (In a note of poetic symmetry, Hitch was flummoxed when Psycho turned out to be such a worldwide phenomenon.)

When a chamber ensemble redoes Mozart, it's usually expected to faithfully recreate the original note for note. From this perspective, Van Sant's faithful-to-the-original approach would place him squarely in a conservatory camp, preserving the original “score.”

That said, there's plenty in the film to make you scratch your head. The casting was all wrong. Macho, fast-talking Vince Vaughan is about as far away from the birdlike adolescent Norman Bates as you can imagine, and Norman's lines – halting and stuttered in the original – come off flat in Vaughan's verbal waterfalls. Likewise, girlish Ann Heche, with her pixie hairdo, is no voluptuous, maternal Marion Crane. (Personally, I think the two actors should have switched roles, performing in drag. Imagine this: Heche playing Norman, with a wink to the Peter Pan tradition.) Van Sant himself admits that there are problems with the movie and has contemplated remaking it again. Now that's sure to get the old school critics talking!

Still, he corrected a few matters with regard to Hitch's original, while adding touches that enhance it. Regarding the murder in the shower, sharp observers have noted that Marion's pupils contracted as her life went out of her. In reality, her pupils would have dilated – a detail that Van Sant fixed with a cutaway shot (though they do return to their contracted state, a consequence of the studio lighting.) Hitchcock also envisioned the scene as a veritable slashing at the film and the screen itself – Van Sant enhances that impression, interjecting a few frames of the gleaming-white knife as it consumes half the frame; the effect is that the film appears to have torn inside the projector.

Screenwriter Joseph Stefano had written into the screenplay that there would be an overhead shot of Marion, her buttocks and legs exposed, her beautiful body laid waste. Hitch cut that shot on the grounds that censors would disapprove, a decision that Stefano always resented; Van Sant returned Stefano's shot to the sequence.

Then there's the final scene. In the original, we see a close-up of the rear of Marion's car as it is being pulled out of the swamp. In the remake, the camera pulls back to reveal a swarm of news crews and police investigators taking over the scene of the crime. The impression is that, though the movie has ended, the story has just begun. In a sense, that is true, for in retrospect, Psycho, the movie, took on a life unlike that of just about any other movie, period. I tip my hat to the director for not giving in to the cliché impulse by pulling back to reveal a movie set and camera crew.

The main point is, however, that it got people talking. Prior to 1998, when average moviegoers asked me about Hitchcock, it was as a subject of middlebrow Hollywood fare. Since 1998, even if people know little else about the maestro, they often know about Van Sant's version of Psycho; such knowledge invariably launches questions about the ideas behind Hitchcock's films. And that puts our conversation off to an infinitely more interesting start.

Alfred Hitchcock –- The Compleat Filmmaker

2010-08-11T01:21:00.000-07:00

Alfred Hitchcock often spoke with near-reverence of montage – the assembly of pieces of film – to create emotion in the audience. Montage he often said, “is the whole art of the cinema.” He told Francois Truffaut, “I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that make the audience scream. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion.”

From this, one could easily conclude that Hitch was a formalist, a disciple of Russian film theory pioneers Eisenstein and Kuleshov – that is, that he was more concerned with the form of filmmaking than its content, such as plot, story or dialogue. But that really isn't the case. The record – actual transcripts of his story conferences – reveals that he cared deeply for the content of his films. Also, if he didn't care about content, he never would have given a second thought to the idea of the long take, an approach in which the camera records an entire scene uninterrupted, which was anathema to montagists. But the fact is, he loved using long takes.

One superb example can be found as far back as 1931, with the auction scene in his class conflict fable, The Skin Game. Putting cinema audiences in the privileged spot of auctioneer, they are treated to a view of that event's attendees as if looking out from the platform. Clocking in at two minutes and twenty seconds, that long P.O.V. sequence is covered one continuous take, as the camera scans, darts and whips about the faces in the room, seeking bids. The audience joins the auctioneer in his exasperation as the bidding gets off to a sluggish start, empathizing with his efforts to wheedle a higher price for the land at stake. Excitement mounts as casual bidders drop out of the game, leaving the film's two antagonists to duke it out amongst themselves, jacking the price beyond what either had hoped to pay, the camera anxiously zipping between them.

Who hasn't fantasized about the thrill of standing at an auctioneer's podium? Hitchcock used a long, subjective take to give the audience just such a taste.

The long take can serve several purposes. One of them is to make the audience feel as if it were in the room with the characters. We are like the invisible man, present-but-not-present, walking among the characters. (I'm reminded of Saboteur's Barry Kane, who, as if invisible, sneaks around the blind woodsman, all the time watching him nervously.) With that in mind, sharp readers may recall Hitch's description of the famed love scene in Notorious. “The public, represented by the camera, was the third party to this embrace,” he said. Spectators were “given the great privilege of embracing Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman together. It was a kind of temporary menage a trois.” In this case, the unbroken shot of Bergman and Grant fused in an unrelentingly intimate close-up, neck and peck at each other, not even stopping while Grant answers the telephone. This is indeed one of the most intensely erotic scenes of that conservative era of Hollywood censorship. It's as if you were cozying up to the couple yourself.

Longer takes also maintain whatever mood the director has established. Rebecca De Winter's backstory in Hitchcock's eponymous 1940 film is at first a mystery. Though she seems to haunt Manderley estate, we don't know exactly why – until the scene in the seaside cabin when all is revealed. The scene begins with Maxim's flashback (as performed by Lawrence Olivier), his face in profile and illuminated from behind by the window. (A similar longish shot appears in Spellbound, when Gregory Peck recalls his dream from the night before.) As he wraps up his soliloquy, the camera pulls back to allow room for Mrs. De Winter (Joan Fontaine), who, for the first time, gives herself over un-self conscious compassion for Maxim's plight. The camera pulls in closer, giving us a close view of both her virtuoso moment and of Maxim's doubtful reaction (or non-reaction!). Then, strangely, the phone, long disused, rings. The camera pulls back again as the pair stare at it, as surprised as the audience is, then tilts down to a close-up of the cobwebbed device, as if responding to (or prompting) Maxim to answer it. This two-minutes-and-37-second spell would have been broken if Hitch had chopped it up with edits, such as standard action/reaction shots of the two characters.

One of the earliest questions I had about Hitchcock's style (and this is going back to my teen years in the 1980s) was: If Hitchcock was such a devotee of montage, why did he employ so many long takes? Wouldn't that have been a violation of his theoretical code? The short answer is that he had no interest in being bound by any one theory. What follows is a longer answer.

Alfred Hitchcock walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "Why the long take?"

In 1948, Hitch, the most vocal proponent of montage since Eisenstein, departed from his usual aesthetic approach and decided to try filming its diametric opposite, the eight-minute continuous take – the longest then technically possible. It was an ambitious move, to be sure. In the magazine L'Ecran Francais, Jean-Charles Tacchela and Roger Thérond declared that, with Rope, Hitch had become "audaciously sure of his audacity." It was such a bold move that you might suppose that its novelty alone, buoyed by James Stewart's star presence, would have been sure to attract a large audience. (It didn't.)

Numerous theories have been proffered to explain why Rope was shot to appear as one take – about as many theories as there are Hitchcock scholars. (Of course, the film was actually constructed from a series of seven-to-nine minute takes, spliced to appear – mostly – as one take.) All right. It's my turn to have a go at it.

First, it's important to mention the context in which the film was made. While Hitchcock kept himself busy making formalist montage-oriented movies, a countervailing theory was emerging that stressed long takes and the inventive use of depth of field (the background in the frame). This idea was put forth most explicitly by French critic André Bazin, co-founder of the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and, arguably, the most important theorist in his day since Eisenstein. While montage directs the viewer to have one response to the film, Bazin believed that a person should have the freedom to choose what to dwell on within the frame. In fact, he opposed editing and montage in the strongest terms. "Editing was the destruction of the cinematic form,” he said. “the destruction of the essence of cinema...it is the shot, the unedited gaze of the camera onto the world before its lens that constitutes cinemas aesthetic core." He lauded Orson Welles, whose use of background as counterpoint to foreground action is legendary. (My favorite use of this technique by Welles occurs in the long-take opening scene of The Trial (1962), in which K (Anthony Perkins) is rousted out of bed the state police.)

If montage uses bits of film to create an idea or emotion that exists purely in the audience's head, long takes are, in Bazin's view, pure, unambiguous representations of reality. The emphasis in this latter approach is almost entirely on the content of the scene, the camera dollying and swiveling about as it goes about framing a scene.

So along came Hitchcock, always on the alert to try out the latest technologies and tricks of the trade. Though Bazin might be rolling in his grave as I write this, Rope is, in a way, a consummate example of his own philosophy. As one 80-minute length of almost uninterrupted film, it is the granddaddy of all long takes; but remember this too: its ever-present, ever-changing New York skyline – which was a character in itself – along with an elaborately designed sky, delivers an infinitely deep field of vision! As the movie's soiree goes its not-so-merry way and the camera (always a surrogate for both the director and his audience) follows the characters about that swanky Manhattan penthouse, spun-glass clouds scud across the sky, the daylight recedes from bright afternoon to orange sunset to starry night time, and the city lights begin to twinkle as if in concert with the party. Hitchcock's cameo occurs in the form of a flashing red neon replica of his famous profile, punctuating the cityscape like an artist's signature.

Hitch first saw the Patrick Hamilton play at London's Ambassador Theater in 1929, and ever since then had wanted to adapt it for the screen. He'd discussed it with screen writer Peter Viertel during the production of Saboteur in 1942, suggesting, in the words of biographer Patrick McGilligan, “that it might lend itself to being shot in continuous, carefully planned, single-shot takes.” In later discussions with Hitch's business partner, Sidney Bernstein, McGilligan reveals that the producer desired to see West End plays filmed just as they had been staged, so as to preserve these classic dramas for posterity. With that, Hitch didn't need any prompting to trot out his ideas for Rope. And this is an important aspect of the film: the play takes place in real time on a single set: given his vision and Bernstein's convictions, how could he not direct the film adaptation as if in a single take?

And so he went into action. Having satisfied his stipulated desire for long takes, Hitch also set about devising perhaps the most extraordinary background field ever up until then – that scale model of New York City, complete with thousands of tiny lighted windows, which covered three times the floor space of the actual set. (That diorama was an obvious precursor to the Greenwich Village courtyard apartments in Rear Window – as well as, I might go so far to say, the topography of George Lucas' similarly-lit starships in Star Wars.) The film's aforementioned gradual transformation from afternoon sun to full nighttime served to reinforce the illusion that the story was unfolding in real time. But that was just a trick. Realistically speaking, there is no way that the murder, pre-dinner conversation, the dinner service itself and subsequent departure of the guests, culminating in the climactic reveal could have all happened in under an hour and a half. Its actual time is compressed. Aided by the changes in the background scenery and by the long take, which directors had long known seemed to stretch the perception of time, the story only appears to take place in real time. In fact, that elasticizing of perceived time is one of the film's flaws: though shorter in duration than most films, Rope drags, seeming to last far longer than it actually does.

Bazin should have been impressed with Hitchcock's application of his ideas in Rope, but he wasn't. He said:

“Each time we are struck by his effectiveness, it is because [Hitchcock] managed, at the cost of a thousand resolved hardships, to create the impression of shot and reverse shot or a close-up where it would have been easy to use a single [edited] take like everyone else. This directing through continuous traveling shots -- which is simply an endless succession of reframings -- is completely different from Wyler's 'stationary shot' or from Welles, who managed to integrate into a single frame many moments of a virtual editing."

Bazin's problem was that, despite the long-take methods Hitchcock nevertheless continued to carefully control audience perception – a result opposite of the democratic looseness that Bazin called for. And Hitch himself admitted as much. Perhaps recalling Bazin's rebuke, he told Truffaut that “the film was, in a sense, precut. The mobility of the camera and the movement of the players closely followed my usual cutting practice.... I maintained the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional importance.”

As the late Hitchcock scholar Robin Wood put it,

“For Hitchcock, the experimentation of Rope is never in the least conceived as in opposition to his already highly developed montage technique, but as a possible alternative to and equivalent for it, another means of exerting total control over the gaze and the emotional response of the viewer."

While it's true that Hitch's long takes follow a different train of thought than that of Wyler or Welles, I can't agree with Bazin, who held that Hitch could more easily have achieved his effects through traditional editing. The long take in Rope gives the camera (again, thus the audience) a visceral, if invisible presence and underscores the claustrophobic, hothouse hermeticism of the two killers. The uninterrupted take is an essential component of the film's overall design.

Keep in mind, though (and Wood goes on to concur), that however constrained the audience might be in its response as a result of the uncut camerawork, it is never reduced to automatons. As in all his films, if he exerted unusual control over the audience, he also dignified its free will by making it privy to an extraordinary abundance of information withheld from the movie's characters. Indeed, that's the basis for his development of suspense – and also the objective of Bazin's brand of realism. The audience responds to Rope by engaging with the film, trying to guess the characters' next move, at times even reacting as if in a debate with what Hitch is saying through his surrogates, the characters.

And so Hitch's camera, in one long take, moves among Brandon, Phillip and their dinner guests, swooping in to examine a broken glass or a stack of books, while discreetly, like a good guest, staying out of the kitchen. If in the stage play audiences watched as dinner was served and consumed, in the film they can almost smell the chicken and taste the toasty fizz of champagne.

I'm not so sure Wood got it quite right in his above comment, either, though. I believe that Hitch wasn't so much looking for an alternative technique as he was searching for a synthesis of Eisenstein's formalist methods and Bazin's mise en scene. Between those two critics, almost all that could be said about film theory up to that point had been said. It would seem that Hitch was searching for a way to add his two cents to the theoretical conversation with the development of a new film grammar that combined the best that both previous methods had to offer. Getting back to Bazin, I also disagree with him somewhat that Rope is overly manipulative with its images. That may true at certain points, but as the clip below shows, there are other times when Hitch magnanimously gave audiences plenty to choose from in the mise-en-scene.

In this scene, Mrs. Wilson (Edith Evanson) clears the dishes from atop David Kentley's makeshift casket. We know his corpse is in there, and the suspense is terrific in this cinematic fugue, which combines offscreen dialogue, dramatic use of depth of field and, of course, Swiss flywheel timing to heighten the audience's awareness of all that is going on and to keep it guessing about what will happen next. My experience of this scene is that at times I feel I must choose between listening to the dialogue and worrying about whether the chest's lid is going to be opened all the way. (Although the resolution in this clip isn't the best, later on in the sequence you can see Hitch's flashing red profile in the skyline.)

There are many reasons to praise Hitchcock's filmmaking ability: his technical virtuosity; his adeptness in any setting from the writing phase and into the cutting room; his survival skills in an industry that believes backs were made for stabbing. As I've hopefully demonstrated here, Hitch excelled at integrating all that film had to offer as a communications medium, seeking to resolve apparent contradictions in opposing methods and approaches. All of which is to say, Alfred Hitchcock was a compleat filmmaker.

AHG Facebook Poll: Which Hitchcock Movie House Would You Live In?

2010-08-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to my Facebook page co-moderator Elisabeth Karlin, who has been dreaming up some ingenious polls for our Alfred Hitchcock Geeks to participate in. Today's question:
You're living in a Hitchcock movie--but nothing bad can happen to you--In what house, apartment or motel do you see yourself?

To weigh in with your opinion and see what others have to say, drop by the Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook Fan Page!

Dial M for Murder in 3D now on YouTube (Well, a few highlights, anyway)

2010-07-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's been up there for a few months, but I just discovered it recently. So, grab a piece of red and a piece of blue cellophane, sit back and enjoy.

(Click thru to the YouTube page itself and then click on the 3D icon to choose the format you prefer - including "cross-eyed."(!))

Although Alfred Hitchcock was at first dubious of the 3D process (he correctly saw it as a flash-in-the-pan), he approached the technical challenge with enthusiasm and a fresh viewpoint, assuring his friend and sometime business partner Sydney Bernstein that there would be "no spears or chairs to throw at the audience." Almost perversely, the film's primary setting is a one-bedroom flat in London.

Hitchcock almost had Cary Grant booked for the role of Tony Wendice (finally casting him in the role of a wife killer), when producer Jack Warner vetoed the idea, on the grounds that he was a "light comedy type." Nevertheless, Ray Milland gave the film a superb performance. I can't help imagining that at least part of his onscreen charm was buoyed by that fact that his costar, Grace Kelly, had developed a crush on him during shooting. At least, I know it would work for me.

Kelly, however, was very available -- and the price, as Bob Barker would say, was right. Not yet a major star, she received $14,000 for her role; Milland by contrast received $125,000.

Dial M comes across as a profiterole in Hitch's works -- light and satisfying, but with little substance. Set in one room, the script was barely changed from the original Broadway play on which it was based. But Hitch just made it look easy. Knowing that it might be released as a "flattie" as he called it, he nevertheless took advantage of the 3D process to add depth to its setting. The visual effect brought an otherwise ordinary apartment to life, giving audiences the experience of a night at a live theater performance. He mused on the possibilities of 3D filming, but was constantly thwarted by the technical restrictions posed by the unwieldy 3D camera.

Those disappointments notwithstanding, Hitch's adaptation differs in many subtle ways from the play. The 3D effect of the murder scene is Gothic horror at its most sublime. And, though he made few changes to the dialogue, it may be the most cinematic stage play ever to find its way the screen.

For those reasons, when asked about Dial M for years afterward, I believe Hitch was merely demonstrating his inability to resist a pun when he replied, "I could have phoned that one in."

Cezanne takes a turn in The Wrong Man

2010-07-15T18:07:00.002-07:00

House of the Hanged Man, Paul Cézanne.

Kudos to art expert Chris Fletcher, who recently pointed out that a print of Paul Cézanne's Impressionist masterpiece, House of the Hanged Man (1873), appears in The Wrong Man (1956). Alfred Hitchcock always took care (or thusly encouraged his designers) to include relevant art on the walls of his film sets. I can imagine him buttonholing set decorator William L. Kuehl to find artwork suitable to the themes present in The Wrong Man. In any event, the presence of such a well-known painting, with such a thematically suitable title can hardly be the work of chance.

Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) discusses his wife's descent into a "landslide of fear and guilt" with Dr. Bannay, played by Werner Klemperer, later of campy Colonel Klink fame in Hogan's Heroes. In this role, however, he uses his German accent to compassionate effect.

And how fitting it is. We've been watching Rose Balestrero's (Vera Miles') emotional collapse as if in slow motion as she and Manny travel about in their fruitless search for witnesses who can establish his innocence. Although her husband, Manny, has been wrongly accused of a series of robberies, the injustice exacts a heavy toll from her and she begins to imagine that she is somehow responsible for the unsolved crimes. On his lawyer's recommendation, Manny takes Rose to see a doctor.

Strikingly beautiful and a first-rate actress, Vera Miles had originally been tapped by Hitch to take on the role of Judy/Madeleine in Vertigo. In The Wrong Man, however, her character is wan, dowdy and psychologically hopeless, as her "confession scene" at the doctor's office shows.

Says Rose to the doctor: "When my husband was arrested, I knew I'd let them down.... [The police] wanted to punish me because I'd failed him and let them down and did everything all wrong.... They knew he wasn't guilty. They knew I was guilty. They were after me. They were after me and they'll get me."

Dr. Bannay pronounces upon her what we already know to be true, namely, that "her mind is an eclipse... as if on the dark side of the moon." Standing in front of the Cezanne above, he says to Manny, "She's buried under some kind of landslide of fear and guilt." Her psyche, as in the painting, had become, as it were, a house of a hanged woman.

Though Cezanne's house's dark windows and bare tree hint at the psychological barenness within, the painting is otherwise warm and inviting, providing an ironic counterpoint to the doctor's observation that Rose lives in "a frightening landscape" and should be committed to that most euphemized of institutions -- "a home."* He says that "it must be chosen with care and it must give her a tranquil surrounding."

Situated on the outskirts of town on a curving drive, the austere walls and bare trees of the sanitarium that Manny has "chosen with care" bears comparison to House of the Hanged Man.

When you stop to think about its macabre subject, House of the Hanged Man hardly fits in with what should be the cheerier decor of a medical office. Unless, of course, the doctor is Hitchcock.

-----
*Speaking of euphemisms, four years after The Wrong Man came out, this exchange occurred between Marion Crane and Norman Bates:

MARION: Wouldn't it be better--if you put her--someplace--?

NORMAN: You mean an institution? A madhouse! People always call a madhouse 'someplace,' don't they. 'Put her in--someplace.'

MARION: I-I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to sound uncaring.

NORMAN: What do you know about caring. Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing and the tears -- and the cruel eyes studying you.

Cezanne

2010-07-15T18:07:00.001-07:00

Alfred Hitchcock and the Grail of Pure Film

2010-06-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

Hitch and Francois Truffaut, during the famed interview.

More than perhaps any other director in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock understood the energy potential of the material of film itself. “To me,” he said, “pure film, pure cinema, is pieces of film assembled” to create an emotional effect. In interviews, he extolled "pure film" and longed for the good old days of the silent era, when movies were constrained to tell their stories visually, with as few interruptions as possible from those distracting dialogue title cards. Like modern poets who learned their craft writing sonnets, the discipline was good for directors who carried those techniques into the sound era.

Nevertheless, Hitch didn't learn those lessons overnight. His early silent films made in Germany faced lukewarm reviews from critics who complained that they were too wordy. But learn he did, soon enough teaching his mentors a thing or two about visual storytelling.

Though he may have popularized it, Hitchcock didn't invent "pure film." The phrase itself originated in the Japanese film industry's Pure Film Movement of the 1910s and 20s, and the theories behind it were developed largely by Russian directors and film theorists, notably Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

Kuleshov devised an experiment to demonstrate that film editing can be far more powerful than an actor's performances. He put together a short movie in which an actor looked off screen at a bowl of soup and then at a little girl's coffin. The audience "raved about the acting," according to one observer, who was praised for his powerful expressions of hunger and of sorrow respectively. The upshot? Kuleshov used the exact same footage of the main character, only replacing the middle piece of film, the object of his gaze. He was directing, not the actor, but the audience's reaction.

With its insistently subjective point of view, Rear Window is little more than a series of such action/reaction shots, a movie that could easily be subtitled, "Variations on a Theme by Kuleshov."

In 1964, Hitch repeated Kuleshov's demonstration, casting himself in the role, first, as benign grandfather figure...

...and, second, as dirty old man.

Hitch kept his eyes on one prize – the audience reaction – and that provided the focus for every single decision he made. It's why he took such care to pre-plan his shooting scripts – themselves analogues to the final product – and why he sometimes seemed diffident during shooting, a stage of production he viewed almost as a necessary evil, and it also explains why he sometimes dawdled in post-production, futzing around in the editing room more than he liked to publicly admit, milking his last chance to get the movie right. As he told Roger Ebert in 1969, “Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon not make the film at all... I have a strongly visual mind. I visualize a picture right down to the final cuts.”

Teresa Wright, who played Charlie Newton in Shadow of a Doubt concurred. In prepping her for the role, Hitch sat her down in his office and told her the story of the film. "He told me everything," she recalled, "including the sounds and the music. When I went to see the film after [the shooting] was all over... I thought, 'I've seen this film before.'" And, really, she had. She went on to say, "I saw it in his office that day."

For Hitch, the final product – the film itself – was the only real talent he had to worry about. No wonder his reputation (not universally held, it should be noted) for being manipulative or emotionally distant on the set precedes him. In his single-minded pursuit of the final cut he had neither time, patience nor budget for distractions.

All film is animation.
The way Hitchcock saw it, motion pictures can impart vitality to otherwise innocuous props, while denaturing somewhat even the most animated actors. (Why else do only a few talented individuals transcend the screen to become stars?)

That's what was behind his famous dictum that “actors should be treated like cattle.” Tongue in cheek though his pronouncement may have been, it wasn't really meant to disrespect actors, but simply to return them to the context of the other elements that make up a movie, such as framing, editing and production design. The movie screen is the ultimate democracy, a land in which people, places and things are stripped of their hierarchy and equalized.

Hitch liked to say that “the best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well" – the better to work him into his overall design. For years, he tried to work with Gary Cooper, who once confessed, "The general consensus seems to be that I don't act at all." And so the city of Quebec is as much a character in I Confess as Montgomery Clift's Father Logan, while the key to the wine cellar in Notorious takes on a hyperreal, talismanic quality as it passes from hand to hand. (Even after the movie ended, the key continued its travels: in 1980, at the American Film Institute's tribute to Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman returned the key to the one who'd breathed life into it decades earlier.)

No wonder the Surrealists, whose manifesto called for the elevation of the ordinary to the extraordinary, glommed onto filmmaking so quickly and so early. It was their medium, made to order. In Rope, a Dada experiment if there ever was one, the murder weapon is what the script calls an “ordinary window sash cord,” yet for the first third of the movie, it drives Phillip (Farley Granger) and the audience to distraction. Hitch perfected such animism, eventually raising up a generation of people unable to step into a motel shower and who glance nervously at a plain old flock of birds gathered on a telephone wire.

The movie is the message.
After the crew has been paid, the sets dismantled and the stars have finished their press junkets, the only actor left standing is a mile-long length of celluloid, stitched this way and that, spiked with visual effects and layered with dialogue, incidental noise and music to create a single time-based, mixed-media collage. This Frankensteinian mishmosh of visual and audio bits is doomed (or released or liberated) to solo appearances at the Bijous, Paramounts and Roxies of America, alone, night after night to endure taunts and jeers (or, the 'laughter and the screaming,' as Norman Bates would put it) to which no audience would subject live actors.

More than the sum of its parts: like a filmmaker's use of close-ups, or a montage that combines bits of film to tell a story, Picasso's 1913 collage, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper, fractures the space of the picture frame, using both close up and montage to tell a story.

It's that very patchwork process that makes film so emphatically a product of modernism. For centuries, visual, sound and text collage were oddities. Sure, you may have heard Tchaikovsky borrowing folk themes here or Moses lifting text from the Epic of Gilgamesh there. But viewed from the perspective of A. D. 2010, such appropriations are comparatively unusual. The explosion of Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Pop Art, along with output from writers like T. S. Eliot and William S. Burroughs and hip hop artists like Kanye West all have one common denominator: the slam-bang assembly of previously manufactured art and artifacts, a.k.a. collage. In borrowing from art, history, popular culture and found sources, they synthesize them into new, original work.

I hate to gush on about my favorite director, but when it came to mashups, nobody did it better or with more gusto than you-know-who – and, by the way, he was among the first to do so. Here's a sampling of his work:

When the housekeeper in The 39 Steps discovers the dead Annabella and opens her mouth to scream, her voice is replaced by a train whistle from the next scene.
The voice of Psycho's Mrs. Bates was provided by at least three women and one man, while her body was supplied by one actor, one actress and one mannequin.
The nun who appears at the end of Vertigo to say “I heard voices” was overdubbed by the voice of Kim Novak, who'd already served in the dual roles of “Madeleine” and Judy.

When Hitch stows superstar Cary Grant away on the fortuitously named Twentieth Century Limited rail line and runs a rear projection of the terrain gliding by, the cut-and-paste job is so seamlessly executed you never see the Exacto knife.

And what are old school special effects, such as rear projection and matte paintings, if not forms of collage? One of the earliest "trick photography" devices was the Schufftan process, which used mirrors to insert miniature sets and small matte paintings in front of the camera, creating the illusion that the action was taking place on a much larger and more expensive set. It was Hitchcock who immediately grasped its potential, pushing the technique like no one before or since. He truly was ahead of his time: in 1929, on the set of Blackmail, he had to hide his miniature sets from incredulous producers who doubted the visual trick would work.

Hitch took special care to make his rear projection scenes, such the views from inside a moving car, appear lifelike.

In To Catch a Thief, the second unit filmed the exteriors for these two shots.

Perfect timing: notice how the tree in the first shot is matched in the second shot, recreated in Hollywood using rear projection. Also, the color values and lighting in the studio shot are balanced so as to render the trick photography utterly convincing. This is what happens when you give a first-rate crew time and money to do what it does best.

At other times, he seems to have hurried through the process, lending a slapdash, artificial quality to some scenes.

In this shot, Marlene Dietrich is quite obviously standing in front of a rear projection screen. Gratuitously fake, the shot is, if only subliminally, of a piece with the film's concerns regarding acting, performance, real life and deception. My favorite shot in the film, it's a collage effect worthy of Robert Rauschenberg.

For that reason, I agree with those who see the cheap, obviously fake special effects in Marnie as part of a deliberate aesthetic decision by a director who had spent decades toying with the artifice of film.

The artificiality of the white studio lighting and the obviously fake painting of the ship (you can almost see the brushstrokes) were, I believe, part of Hitch's overall design, an expressionistic approach that harkens back to the painted-on sets of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1919. In this case, the claustrophobic fakeness of these scenes echoes Marnie's psychological entrapment. Whether they "work" in terms of pure entertainment is one thing, but art-house fans and scholars get it. It would seem Hitch was making his film for a highbrow audience -- or hoping his mainstream audience would go along with him. Unfortunately, many didn't -- though it must be said the film has been vindicated in the test of time.

A painter or a novelist may work cheerfully for decades, with no intention of showing his or her work to another soul, never pausing to look back at it himself. For such individuals, it is the process, not the product, that matters. Film isn't like that. As Immanuel Kant would say, film is the thing-in-itself. It exists to be seen, awaiting its chance to be willed to life — even if by an audience of one in a darkened living room. Indeed, if it were not for film's inherent, intrinsic power, how else could we become entranced by a story whose author has moved on to other projects, whose fashions are out of style and whose performers are long dead?

Even Cary Grant had a hard time being Cary Grant. Nevertheless, though years have passed since his death, his Roger Thornhill, T. R. Devlin and John Robey continue to live. Howard Hawks had the genius to play against Cary Grant's charm and good looks in such romantic comedies as Bringing Up Baby, but it was Hitch who saw inside him the dark moods and the light, the fear and the longing, as displayed in Suspicion and Notorious. And it took more than Grant's considerable acting skills to convey those nuances. No wonder the usually obsessive Grant trusted Hitch so much. In that sense, the apocryphal story about about primitive cultures is true: the camera can indeed capture your soul, or at least make a convincing copy of it -- but only in the hands of a skilled director. That's pure film for you.

Movies are a dream so profound they can take root in our psyche and cause us to resent the intrusion of reality, whether it's the ring of a cellphone in the row behind us or the humdrum life we must face after the lights have come up. Only a genius like Hitchcock could internalize that basic insight and still say with equal conviction, “it's only a movie.”

Hitchcock, Vertigo, and the Uncanny

2010-05-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

Hitchcock often blended eroticism with his murders, to uncanny effect. Here is a lovely scene with Grace Kelly and Anthony Dawson in Dial M for Murder.

An aspiring politician meets cute with his evil twin, leading to chaos and murder. A snaggle-toothed jester leers from the canvas of a painting, foisting guilt on the heroine while mocking the audience. An otherwise harmless little ditty, the “Merry Widow Waltz” acquires increasingly sinister overtones each time it's repeated.* In film after film, Alfred Hitchcock's characters meet their psychic doubles; works of art become as lively as the much-better-paid actors who stand alongside them; and themes, motifs and images repeat themselves, to ghoulish effect. Such devices are part of the language of film, and nobody used them as eloquently as Hitch.

More than any art form that came before it, film blurs the lines between perception and reality, the familiar and the strange. This is the shadowland of the uncanny, a not-quite-haunted place that gives rise, as psychologist Ernst Jentsch wrote in 1906, to "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate." In his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud drew a distinction between “the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about.” Movies check that distinction at the door.

And we experience it as a peculiar oddness at it least; spine-tingling at its most intense.

Whereas horrormongers use the uncanny to send chills up our spines (think of those old wax museums and their all-too-lifelike inhabitants), Alfred Hitchcock mined it for its potential for wisdom and wit. To his titles “Master of Suspense” and “Master of the Macabre” could be added “Master of the Uncanny” – “that class of the frightening,” as Freud describes it, “which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”

I've compared Salvador Dalí's theories regarding attraction and repugnance with Hitchcock's work. I should add that this, too, is tied in with the uncanny. When Psycho's Lila Crane (Vera Miles) tours Mrs. Bates' bedroom, each object in that room is animated with a disquieting sense of the uncanny. But one moment stands out as its spookiest. Caught between two mirrors that face each other, Lila glimpses the infinite regress of her own image.

At first startled at what could be another person's presence, she then sees her own face, catching herself in the act of catching herself. It's as though her faculty of self-perception had been momentarily plucked away. If you've had the same thing happen to you, you know that it's disconcerting, in the way you might imagine an out-of-body experience to be; a reminder that the words “image” and “imagination” do, after all, share the same origin.

Hitch's inspiration for the uncanny came from a number of sources, Surrealism being the most obvious. He also confessed to being a Symbolist (in the tradition of the 19^th century art and poetry movement), going so far as to 'dream Symbolist dreams' at night. As a youth, he pored over the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, authors in whom he saw a kindred spirit.

When you look at it this way, it's no surprise that he never filmed an out-and-out ghost story. Ghosts are too straightforward. You know where you stand with them – you in your world, the spirit in its. Besides that, Hitch, ever the contrarian, liked to cut his stories both ways, fudging the line between those two worlds, dwelling in the shadow of a doubt.

Following the bleak, documentary literalism of The Wrong Man (which is no less uncanny for being so) in 1956, Hitch took a year or so off from work, an unusually long hiatus for him. Part of that time was spent mixing business with pleasure, traveling to Africa to scout locations for what turned out to be an unrealized project, Flamingo Feather. He also started working on his next screenplay, but had difficulty finding writers who could deliver the kind of story he wanted. Then he was hospitalized with stomach surgery, taking several weeks of to recuperate. During those many months, whether he was consciously aware of it or not, it's a fair guess that he was adding nuance to that story, shaping it into, among other things, into an extended meditation on the uncanny. That movie was Vertigo.

From the very first frame, Hitchcock begins playing with our perceptions. Vertigo was advertised as a Technicolor, VistaVision experience designed to lure audiences away from their TVs. The opening credits, however, start out in black and white.

Not only did that monochrome treatment throw audiences off, but it also prepared their eyes to fully absorb the impact of the gradually saturating colors of the eerie, avant-garde title sequence to follow.

Vertigo is observed almost in its entirety from one point of view, that of the “hardheaded Scot,” John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart). Through his skeptical eyes, which stand in for the modern audience's own rational dismissal of the supernatural, we observe a series of uncanny events. Try as he might, Scottie attempts to explain away in scientific terms what appears to be the spiritual possession of Madeleine Elster. We, the audience, are hoodwinked, not so much by the dialogue, but by the visual information provided during long dialogue-free passages, helped along by Bernard Herrmann's Wagner-infused musical score.

Scottie's initial setup takes place in the comfortable, no-nonsense setting of the office of his college schoolmate, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), who wants to hire him to investigate his wife, who, he says, has been engaging in rather bizarre behavior. With serpentine cunning, Elster pulls Scottie into his story, leading to his deception and, finally, obsession. Says Elster, “Scottie, do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?... [My wife will] be talking to me about something. Suddenly the words fade into silence. A cloud comes into her eyes and they go blank. She's somewhere else, away from me, someone I don't know.”

Despite Scottie's refusal to buy his cockamamie occult story, Elster persists. “I'm not making it up," he says. "I wouldn't know how.” Scottie agrees to take the case, albeit reluctantly. Of course, after one look at his putative wife and Scottie was fully engaged on the case. After all, it's one thing to stake out a kooky middle-aged housewife, it's another thing to follow the elegant, mesmerizing curves of Kim Novak around San Francisco. It was an offer Scottie couldn't refuse. Frankly, neither could I.

Soon enough, the seeds of the uncanny that Elster planted begin to sprout. The next day Scottie espies “Madeleine” wandering among the tombstones at Mission Delores. At this point, we may feel as if we're two steps ahead of Scottie: although he may dismiss her spells as a mere psychological disturbance, we've likely already bought into the notion that she has been touched by something or someone from beyond. Of course, Scottie will turn out to be right, but not in the way that he expected, and only after he's completed his trip through the looking glass.

The first of "Madeleine"'s "beautiful, phony trances."

A visit to the Museum of the Legion of Honor sends the mystery deeper. By wearing her hair and carrying a floral arrangement just like the portrait, “Madeleine” doubles the portrait, copying the look of a long-dead woman.

The scene would have been simple enough to shoot using a series of cuts between the flowers in the painting and the bouquet sitting beside “Madeleine” and cutting between her hairdo and that of the woman in the painting. Instead, the camera moves fluidly between between the two, adding vitality to an otherwise straightforward scene.

As Tom Gunning wrote in his essay, "In and Out of the Frame: Paintings in Hitchcock," “The dolly-in camera makes us gradually approach the painting, finally drawing so close to its surface we feel we could touch it. … Through the dolly-in, the camera seems to sink into and open up the space of the painting, not only directing Scottie's (and our) attention, but seemingly confusing the space of observer and painting, of representation and reality.”

When the camera thus moves so close to the painting that its frame and edges disappear, a curious thing happens. The figures in the painting take on a more lifelike quality, as if they had stepped off the canvas to move among the film's other characters, producing the same unsettling effect of portraits whose eyes seem to follow you around the room. That this painting is supposedly a portrait of an undead woman adds another frisson of the uncanny, and we join Scottie in his first step toward belief the paranormal.

Those who believe that the dead can actually rise and haunt the living often cite personal experiences to back up their claim. Scottie, ever the rationalist, suggests that such people ought to visit “the nearest psychiatrist or psychologist, or neurologist or maybe just the plain family doctor.” Nevertheless, as Freud pointed out regarding our modern belief system, many of us “do not feel quite sure of our new [materialist] beliefs, and the old [animistic] ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgment something like this: … ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!’”

Thus, Scottie soon gets caught in the slipstream of strange events.

Not that he completely lets go of his skepticism, but the strange behavior he witnesses in “Madeleine” – tagged along by her mysterious beauty – causes him to question his assumptions. Under the thrall of Elster's snowjob, he doesn't know what to believe.

In one of the most lovely and haunting scenes in cinema history, “Madeleine” prepares to jump into San Francisco Bay.

Hitchcock loved to place important scenes in the vicinity of national monuments – all the better to take the familiar and make it queer – and this one is no exception. It's a strange and wonderful and dreadful moment, replete with Gothic Romantic symbolism: the bridge, which fittingly represents “Madeleine”'s having been caught between this world and the next; the body of water, suggesting death and sex, baptism and rebirth; the statuesque, idealized blonde, symbol of Woman, who mournfully plucks the flowers from her nosegay and tosses them into water – all heightened by the golden rays of the afternoon sun and wisps of ghostly fog rolling off the bay. And then she makes the leap into her watery grave.

Part of “Madeleine”'s beguiling appeal is that she seems to have found her double – her doppleganger – in a dead woman, materialized in a painting. And, as doubles are wont to do, it leads to death. (Or so it would seem, had Scottie not rescued her.) But doubles abound in this film.

The artist Midge, sensing that she is losing Scottie to his infatuation with his client's “wife,” decides to play a joke, replicating the portrait of Carlotta, but substituting the deceased woman's face with her own. Upon showing him her new masterpiece – an uncanny resemblance to the image that has played a part in his seduction – he reacts with a disgusted, “It's not funny, Midge.”

Hitchcock did a similar thing some thirty years prior. In Blackmail (1929), Alice White (Anny Ondra), lured to her would-be seducer's lair and given a quickie art lesson, painted a crude version of her own face. Laughing at her naivete, the artist (played by Cyril Ritchard) took over, finishing the picture with a deft, sensual line drawing of her body. The mix of the two painters' work (the one childlike, the other erotic) add up to a grotesque whole, inciting the same feeling of disgust Scottie felt when he saw Midge's painting.

In another similarity, in self defense, Alice killed the artist, and in fleeing the scene of the crime, she painted over her signature on the painting. Likewise, after Scottie turns and leaves, Midge blots out her face. Though Midge has eliminated her double from the painting, she turns to see herself reflected in the window.

Try as we might, we cannot refuse the existence of our shadow selves.

Foreshadowing the death of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) halfway through Psycho two years later, “Madeleine” appears to fall to her death from the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista. Later, wandering the streets of San Francisco, Scottie spots several women who could be his “lost Lenore.” Revisiting their old haunts – Ernie's restaurant, the museum, her old apartment building – he sees women who at first glance appear to be “Madeleine”'s double, but upon closer inspection turn out to be false leads. Here, Hitchcock deliberately messes with our heads: for each of these scenes, he employed Kim Novak herself as a stand-in for the long shots, bringing in the actual people mistaken for “Madeleine” only for their close-ups.

Finally, Scottie discovers Judy (also played by Kim Novak) – a dead ringer for the lost Madeleine, excuse the pun. Ironically, her hair color, lifestyle, fashion style and even walking gait were completely different. Still, for Scottie – and for us – the resemblance, though ineffable, is uncanny.

We come to learn that Judy really is the same person he earlier fell for (emotionally, psychologically, thematically). Judy was an imposter, a double, a fake standing in for poor, dead Madeleine Elster. Scottie realizes this only after recreating her in the image that she was before. In fact, he only realizes this when he sees Judy's double – and the incriminating evidence of her necklace – reflected in a mirror.

It is such repetition that makes Vertigo an uncanny film in its very structure. In his 1919 essay, Freud spoke of involuntary repetition that can “turn something frightening into something uncanny.” For example, Scottie visits Ernie's three times (while making plans for a fourth trip), each visit is uncanny in its own way. The film makes five separate trips to Mission San Juan Bautista including three visits in “real life,” as well as once in a dream and once in a flashback.

Actions are repeated, as when Judy/Madeleine appears in a window and pulls the shades, first at the McKittrick Hotel and later at the Empire Hotel.

...as are visual motifs. The famous “trombone shot” of the tower stairs at Mission San Juan Bautista echoes the Lissajous spirals that accompany the opening credits as well as the concentric rings of the felled tree at Muir Woods and the spiral twist of Madeleine (and Carlotta's) hair.

As Scottie goes about transforming Judy, he puts her through paces she had already taken, for instance, placing her before his fireplace in the exact same position she had been in following her plunge into the bay and later seating her at his writing desk just as he had done before.

Their famous kiss after her transformation is complete may be the most dizzying moment in the movie. He finally has Madeleine back in his arms, or so it seems, and the moment uncannily recalls his last kiss with her in the livery stable, the hotel room dissolving back to the stable again, swirling around the pair in one hallucinatory moment. So similar. Yet strangely different.

The film's very name – Vertigo – is itself, in this context, synonymous with its spiraling sense of the uncanny.

That Scottie's repetition is indeed a compulsion is borne out by his repetitious speech. During the film's climax, his near-hysterical accusation of her is a repetitional fugue:

In the car, on the way to the mission.

SCOTTIE: [There's] One final thing I have to do, and then I'll be free of the past.

JUDY: Scottie, why are we here?

SCOTTIE: I told you. I have to go back into the past once more. Just once more, for the last time....

Moments later, on the tower stairs.

SCOTTIE: I tried to follow her, but I couldn't get to the top. I tried, but I couldn't get to the top. One doesn't often get a second chance. I want to stop being haunted. You're my second chance, Judy. You're my second chance!

Numbers, too, can take on uncanny resonance in a movie. Whether their place in the frame is intentional or not, digits have a Tarot-like gravity, begging for interpretation. Over the years, all kinds of theories have been proposed for the meaning of numbers in Hitch's films (a parlor game inspired by Hitch himself when he used the number 21 to symbolic effect in Spellbound).

So the "8 mph" seen in the background of Hitch's cameo shot, followed moments later by the number 24 on the crane in Elster's window could have meaning. For instance, film moves through its projector at eight miles per hour and at 24 frames per second. Conversely, the number eight is highly regarded in Chinese culture as an auspicious omen of good luck.**

Or such interpretations could be feverish readings-into by one Hitchcock geek or another. Whether they are meant to or not, they add significance to the film, reminding viewers that this is a film that must be closely watched, lest telling details be missed. They incite the viewer to seek meaning and recognition, which could be their sole purpose, with Hitch enjoying the last laugh as he and Alma watched people spin their pet theories regarding the numbers' symbolic import. It's unlikely that Hitch, who understood the mystical power of numbers, would have allowed them to slip haphazardly into the frame. Uncannily, they take you to the brink of recognition and then, at the last moment, pull back.

You'd think that, with all this repetition in Vertigo, the movie would be a dull experience. But it's just the opposite. Each time we return to these settings, these events, these words, they take on new meaning, drawing us into the story and its insane plot twists, identifying us so closely with Scottie's breakdown that we go right over the edge with him, joining him in his necrophilic obsession. His confusion, terror and anxiety become ours. Drawn to the truth, yet horrified at what we might find we plunge head over heels into the realm of the uncanny.

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* These situations and motifs are from Strangers on a Train, Blackmail and Shadow of a Doubt, respectively.

**That Hitch may have had Chinese symbolism on his mind is suggested by the numerous references to Chinese metaphysics in the movie. Says Scottie to "Madeleine": “The Chinese say that once you've saved a person's life... you're responsible for it forever, so I'm committed” and later, in the tower, she begs him to remember his promise ("keep me safe!"). The cast-iron railing outside Scottie's Lombard Street apartment with its Chinese pictogram for "Twin Happiness" recalls the film's many doubles; this location was personally chosen by Hitch because of its red door -- another Chinese symbol of good luck.

This wouldn't be Hitch's only use of the number eight. Later, during the horse race scene in Marnie, he sat Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery at trackside Table 8; moments later, the red polka dots on their winning horse, number 8, caused her to have one of her psychological seizures.

Private Politics and Public Propaganda

2010-04-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Although Alfred Hitchcock gave hundreds of interviews over the course of his career, as far as I can tell, he never discussed his political views in public, leading many to conclude that he had none. Nevertheless, a mountain of evidence has accumulated to indicate that he actually had a very clear, if personal, political vision that profoundly shaped his movies. Sometimes this worked to his advantage; other times, not. Yet, regardless of the popularity of his message or its lack thereof, Hitch determinedly kept his own counsel, occasionally leaving his producers, critics and even his audience baffled.

Shortly after the War broke out, the director, newly arrived in the Untied States, convened with a group of Britishers in Hollywood. They sought to find ways to help promote the cause of England, which sorely needed American military support and to nudge the United States away from its non-neutral stance. Members included actors Boris Karloff and Reginald Gardiner, director Robert Stevenson (who later went on to direct a number of Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes) and screenwriter Charles Bennett, who, at the same time was working on Foreign Correspondent.*

Thanks to the then-recently-passed series of Neutrality Acts in the United States, such activity was illegal, and for two years the group met in secret. Among their projects was an anthology of short films intended to garner sympathy for England's plight. British-born creatives around Hollywood were discreetly approached to donate their services, with proceeds from the films going to war-related causes in the Mother Country. Such luminaries as Ronald Colman, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Herbert Marshall and George Sanders stepped forward to help out, creating what amounted to a very well-dressed fifth column. Hitch joined the Board of Governors of Charitable Productions, as this ad hoc group came to be called, and agreed to direct one of its five segments. He also co-chaired a fund drive to evacuate British orphans into Canada and the United States and met with Canadian officials to fast-track their passage into the country.

It’s against this background that he directed Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Suspicion (1941), two of those years’ biggest critical and financial successes. (Maybe that helps explain why he occasionally fell asleep on the set while making them.)

Biographer Patrick McGilligan writes:

“Of all the Britishers in his Hollywood cell group, ironically, it was Hitchcock — avowedly the least political of all of them — who found the earliest opportunity to ‘do his bit.’ The tense atmosphere in London stiffened his spine, and influenced the new ending he would shoot for Foreign Correspondent.”

All of this happened in secret, while most Americans were only vaguely aware Hitler’s atrocities in Europe. Perhaps that ignorance steeled Hitchcock's resolve to get the message out one way or the other.

Those who had access to British and European news saw that Hitler's Nazi threat was unprecedentedly dangerous. Yet, most Americans didn't have a clue. Writer Susan E. Tifft explains why. In the April 19, 1999 issue of the New Yorker, she wrote that the publishers of the New York Times knew very well about the Nazis’ Final Solution, yet opted to bury the stories; during the 1930s they also banned all letters to the editor that discussed Nazi activities — pro and con. As the newspaper of record, it influenced editorial policy for other news outlets, which usually followed suit.

The publishers evidently had personal reasons for directing editorial policy in this way. Writes Tifft, “In the seven years that we have spent researching a biography of [Times owners] the Ochses and the Sulzbergers, it has become increasingly apparent that the family’s self-image as Jews has profoundly shaped the paper.” The paper’s owners were in a tight spot: anti-Semitism ran high in the United States at that time, and it would almost certainly have been very risky for a Jewish-owned news organization to publish pro-Jewish articles into which at least some would read Zionist sympathies. Tifft and others take the newspaper families to task for what might look like an abdication of their mission to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print.” Whether that’s a fair assessment or not, the Times’ policy had far-reaching consequences. Most Americans were not aware of the holocaust until the War was in full swing.

With that in mind, Foreign Correspondent can be seen as a rebuke to the U. S. news media. The film is dedicated to “those intrepid [journalists] who went across the seas to be the eyes and ears of America.... To those forthright ones who early saw the clouds of war while many of us at home were seeing rainbows.” Yet, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrae) aside, foreign reporters in general were portrayed as lazy and ineffectual. Stebbins (Robert Benchley), for instance, is a philandering, alcoholic career drone.

Long before then, however, Hitchcock was honing his political chops, at times resembling an outright activist. Like many others in London in the 1930s, Hitch watched with mounting alarm the rise of Hitler and his Third Reich, along with other Fascist and totalitarian states. Having lived through the horrors of World War I in London, he resolved to use his influence to thwart their incursion onto British soil. His films during the second half of that decade dealt with those threats head on while also criticizing British foreign policy as weak and ineffective.

Between 1934 and 1938, he made six movies in England, five of which commented directly on the then-current political landscape: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage and The Lady Vanishes. (The only exception is his 1937 classic wrong man film, Young and Innocent.) Most commentators fail to make the connection with Hitch’s behind-the-scenes activities, claiming that his films merely played on British fears as an entertainment gimmick. Regarding The 39 Steps, for instance, Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto sayss that Hitch and writer Charles Bennett “decided to exploit... aspects of the contemporary scene [such as the ]... vague rumors about Hitler and the rise of fanaticism.” (The Dark Side of Genius.) I think there's mor to it than that.

From his youth, Hitch had strong patriotic inclinations. During World War I he witnessed German air raids, whose bombs fell dangerously close to his home. It was his first experience of real terror. He tried to enlist in the British army, but was excused with a C3 classification, possibly due either to his age or his weight. Undeterred, however, he signed up for a volunteer cadet regiment of the Royal Engineers in 1917.

In addition to bombing near his home, Hitchcock also recalled coming home to the blare of air raid sirens and seeing the German Zeppelins with their searchlights out, probing the London cityscape while shrapnel burst about his house.

The memories of those days under German air assault haunted him throughout his life, the avian attacks in The Birds, for instance, were essentially a fevered re-envisioning of the Luftwaffe. Tellingly, his career really hit its stride when he began addressing those fears directly in his films, beginning in 1934 with the release of The Man Who Knew Too Much. The first of a series of overtly political films, it also kicked off his first unbroken run of box office hits, all of which have stood the test of time.

While making those six films, he hosted an informal film club that met almost nightly to discuss movies in general and to brainstorm ideas for his current projects. That guest list comprised an unmistakably politically active group of socialists, Communists and anti-fascists and their ideas made it into scene after scene of his finished movies. (During those years in England it was possible to be promote Communism with patriotic fervor.) In The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example, the title character must choose between saving his son who has been kidnapped and cooperating with British intelligence in order to avert a political assassination. A direct reference is made to 1914 Sarajevo as he is warned that his inaction could lead to another world war.

His next film, The 39 Steps, generally regarded as the first psychological spy thriller, takes place against the backdrop of foreign threats to England's security. Just months before its release, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed, giving Germany enormous concessions and freedom to build up its military. Many viewed this as an appeasement move on Britain's part. Hitchcock and his cohorts did too.

The impromptu speech delivered by Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is a barely camouflaged call to political action: “I ask your candidate and all those who love their fellowmen to set themselves resolutely to make this world a happier place to live in. A world where no nation plots against nation.... A world from which suspicion and cruelty and fear have been forever banished!” In spite of its ironic humor, Hannay’s impassioned address is quite moving — and, again, relevant to the international climate at that time.

References to current events abound as well. Case in point: its MacGuffin is a state secret, the design for a noiseless airplane engine. At that very time, England was being publicly called upon by Winston Churchill to hasten efforts to maintain its air supremacy over Germany.

One year later, Hitch directed Sabotage, which dealt with the growing threat of anarchists and the fascists behind them; the shootout at the end of The Lady Vanishes (1938) reprimands the British government for its by-then-official appeasement policy toward Germany. As these six films were in turn released, each one’s cry for British action became more pointed and alarmed than the previous film.

For these reasons, I don’t think Hitchcock was "exploiting" or "capitalizing on" British fears as much as he was expressing his own, using the power of film to rouse public awareness and to move the government to take action. That he did so with high style and wit is evidence that part of his genius lay in his ability to detach himself from his subject and deliver first-class entertainment. Few other politically charged movies during this period carried their message with as much aplomb.

When Hitch moved to his family to the United States in 1939, he maintained that same ethos. Like his British films, his first two American war movies, Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, have held up well over the decades; audiences unschooled in the history of the second World War still find much to enjoy and admire in these classics.

At least on the political level, those two propaganda pieces drew a clear distinction between the good guys (England and America) and the bad guys (Fascism and Nazism). As the war dragged on, however, Hitch began to see grey where before there was black and white. With his next war movie he took an extraordinary gamble.

A microcosm of the War, these unruly characters stubbornly refuse to play the propaganda role given them.

Commissioned as another propaganda piece, the wartime allegory, Lifeboat (1944) feels like a sequel to Foreign Correspondent, picking up where the airliner has crashed into the Atlantic ocean.** Set entirely in one location — a lifeboat adrift in the Atlantic Ocean — the boat's 10 occupants, including several Americans, one English woman and the all-too-likable commander of the Nazi submarine that had sunk their freighter, the film is a microcosm of the war. As the smartest, most physically fit and most capable leader of the group, the German seaman, aptly named Willi, exemplified Hitler's conceit that the Aryan race embodies Nietzsche's superman and its so-called Will-to-Life. Made during some of the darkest days of the War, this Nazi was painted in an astonishingly (for the times) positive light. Meanwhile, the other characters, loosely representing the Allies, were either weak, divided by infighting, or, when they resorted to mob violence by clobbering and drowning Willi, resemble nothing so much as "a pack of dogs," as Hitch described the scene to François Truffaut.

My, Willi, what big hands you have!

Lifeboat veered so far from the pro-Ally message that it prompted the United States Office of War Information to complain that it presented "a picture which the Nazi propagandists themselves would like to promote." In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote that the film "sold out democratic ideals and elevated the Nazi superman." What was Hitchcock thinking?

On the face of it, he was shocked that the film could have been so misunderstood. Years later, he defended its patriotism, saying to Truffaut,

"While the democracies were completely disorganized, all of the Germans were clearly headed in the same direction. So here was a statement telling the democracies to put their differences aside temporarily and to gather their forces to concentrate on the common enemy."

In other words, Hitchcock conceived of Lifeboat as a cautionary tale. No doubt there's some truth in that. But there was also much more going on. To quote D. H. Lawrence, this would be the time to "trust the writing, not the writer." Let's start with the matter of timing.

Justifying his portrayal of the German war machine as superior to that of the Allies, Hitch said, "At that time, 1940-41, the French had been defeated, and the Allies were not doing too well." That is correct. But there is just one problem: Lifeboat was filmed in 1943, two to three years after those events, the first draft of the screenplay having been submitted by screen writer Jo(seph) Swirling in August of that year. By that time, the fortunes of all the major players in the war had long changed, with the Germans taking a drubbing on multiple fronts. They had been repelled from London, all but expelled from North Africa, had surrendered at Stalingrad and were mollified before reaching Moscow.

Ironically (as far as the movie is concerned), by May, 1943, Germany had lost so many submarines that it was forced to temporarily halt its Atlantic naval campaign. When Lifeboat was made, it was the safest time in years for a merchant marine vessel to cross the Atlantic.

The Blitzkrieg was over and the Anglo-American forces were as well-coordinated as a ballroom dance duo.

Lifeboat was first screened in January, 1944. As propaganda flicks go, it was as relevant as a two-year-old newspaper. Hitch either seriously lapsed in his longstanding habit of including up-to-the-minute news items in his stories, or he had something far different in mind. The film — and real-life geopolitical events surrounding it — suggest that the latter was the case.

Without question, Nazi aggression was evil. But the fierce Allied retaliation was not much more humane. Take Operation Gomorrah. This U.S.-Britain joint bombing attack aimed to destroy Hamburg and inflict as many casualties as possible. First, bombers destroyed the center of the city, drawing Hamburg's firefighting force inward to battle the flames. A second wave of bombings drew a donut-like circle around the center, incinerating the fire crews and stopping any further firefighting activity. When another concentric circle of bombs was dropped, the city became hell on earth. By the time the Allied bombers had returned to their bases, the city was engulfed in flames shooting 1,500 feet into the air and 50,000 of its citizens had been roasted alive. British officials later dubbed it "The Hiroshima of Germany."

By the way, did I mention that this eight-day attack occurred about a month before the filming of Lifeboat got under way?

Is it possible that the director had Allied atrocities like Operation Gomorrah in mind when he directed his actors to kill Willi "like a pack of dogs" and, at the end of the movie, when another German tried to gain entrance to the boat, he instructed one of the Americans to hiss, "Exterminate him! Exterminate them all!"

Although Hitchcock was assigned to make a propaganda film, he fulfilled his duty like a bartender adding Vermouth to a dry martini: just barely.

Film critics and auteur theorists Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol got it right: Lifeboat is a moral fable. In their 1957 book, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, they wrote that "the auteur here explicitly exposes a philosophy that is implicit elsewhere: his refusal to judge, his exigence, his pessimism, his legitimate suspicion of pity, justice and other fine sentiments." The writers then add, "We profit from evil: let us know that it is evil from which we profit.... Let us expel evil, but at the same time acknowledge that its expulsion does not leave us with clean hands."

Or as the German philosopher who proposed the rise of a superman also famously cautioned, "Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster; if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you."

Though it was released over a year before the end of the war, Lifeboat was really Hitchcock's first postwar film, for it was then that he began to take a close look at a subject he had previously only flirted with: the human and moral cost of doing battle in a modern world.

After production on Lifeboat was all but wrapped, Hitch fulfilled a commitment to his longtime friend Sidney Bernstein to direct two short propaganda films overseas. But Hitch seemed to have lost the heart to rally troops around the flag, at least in any conventional sense. Bon Voyage and Adventure Malgache were intended to bolster the spirits of French audiences. While making the first film, Hitch noticed that the work of the French freedom fighters had become bogged down in quarrels and infighting; he decided to include these details into the second film. At the end of the day, neither film was as rah-rah as its distributors in 1944 had hoped and they received limited circulation.

Hitch's next war movie, Notorious (1946), was developed before the war was officially over, its famous MacGuffin — uranium ore — having been devised while the development of the world's first atom bomb was still a top secret operation. Once again, like a water witch, Hitchcock instinctively honed in on the moral viciousness of the combatants' spy organizations. Ingrid Bergman was called upon to sleep with the enemy and put her life at risk in order to ferret out the details of a covert Nazi operation. As an American agent torn by love and patriotic duty, Cary Grant took on one of the nastiest roles of his career.

And then there's Rope (1948), where Hitchcock again revisited the high moral cost of maintaining our democratic way of life. A perfect bookend to Lifeboat technologically as well as thematically (both take place in closed spaces, the casts of which are representative of society), it picks up the thread of Nietzchean hubris he'd started four years earlier. The American castaways of the 1944 film were ultimately unable to face their own barbarism. But Rope's Rupert Cadell, an armchair fascist played by the ultimate American, James Stewart, stared unblinkingly at his guilt and shame. The message was: the Allies may have been right to repel Nazi aggression, but they had to resort to barbaric means to do it, implicitly assuming the superman's right to destroy human life. Stewart himself had piloted bombers on numerous raids in Germany, adding another layer of irony to them film, which I discuss in further in my August 22, 2005 post.

In 1959, with the release of North by Northwest, Hitch made his boldest political statement yet, once again observing that the Cold War’s deadly gamesmanship had compromised all sides in the conflict and putting these words into the mouth of Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill: “If you fellows can't whip the VanDamms of this world without asking girls like [Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint)] to bed down with them and probably never come back, perhaps you should lose a few cold wars.” An astounding thing to say at the height of the Cold War.

10 years later, Topaz went even further, contrasting short-term expediencies taken by American and French diplomats with the more principled motives of the Cubans and Russians. The movie’s only comic relief was provided by the Russian defector who trades in his Communist ideals for Western materialism.

All right, I think I’ve proved my point that, while Hitch held strong political opinions, they tended to rise above ideology. An international traveler who played to a global audience, he was truly a citizen of the world. Nevertheless, an interesting point was made in a discussion thread on my Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook page, which seems at first to contradict all of the above.

D. K. made this comment regarding the propagandistic ending of Foreign Correspondent: “So many of Hitchcock's films are morally ambiguous. ... The moralizing nature of the speech at the end of Foreign Correspondent just seems so out of character from the point of view Hitchcock expressed in so many of his other films.”

Good point. How do we resolve the moral ambiguity in his films with the moralizing that also often takes place? Or, did Hitch merely contradict himself?

I think the key lies in separating the personal from the political in Hitch’s films. As mentioned, Hitch did not hesitate to weigh in with his opinions. When it came to his characters, however, his views were far more attenuated. In Foreign Correspondent, as propagandistic as it is, the villain, Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall) is an admirable family man who shows deep and tender feelings for his daughter. The movie’s final moments are as touching as any, as father and daughter struggle with their devotion to each other while coming to terms with the fact that his covert, treasonous activities have made them mortal enemies. From the joyful family man Professor Jordan in The 39 Steps to the adoring grandfather Charles Tobin of Saboteur (1942), almost all of Hitchcock’s political villains care well for hearth and home.

I believe that the origins of Hitch’s sympathetic view of all people, friend and foe, can be found in the years he spent in Germany. Hitch spent considerable time there in 1924 and 1925, often working directly for the German-owned Ufa studios, then the largest single studio in the world.

He rubbed shoulders with the people who were writing the book on the art of film, serving as art director for the great director F. W. Murnau, whose systematic, non-improvisational approach to filmmaking had an enormous impact on Hitch’s own working methods. He borrowed enough technical tricks and visual storytelling methods from Murnau to fill a book. He wandered about the movie lot as well, peeking in on the lavish sets of director Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen and soaking up the German Expressionist aesthetic that imbued his films down to the last. Though Hitch could be tight-lipped about his influences, whenever he was asked about the inspiration for his stylistic approach, he always answered, “The Germans.” In short, Hitch saw firsthand the Germanic mindset at its best and fell in love with it.

Then, in the 1930s, he saw that same culture exploited by a megalomaniac and his Third Reich. It must have pained him to see those disciplined minds turn to atrocious deeds. He knew some of those individuals personally. In those years, saw the worst of the Germanic mindset. For the rest of his life, Hitch would maintain a love-hate relationship with Germany, a conflict that would creep into his films.

How could he not conclude that the best of humanity and its worst resides in each one of us? At the same time, Hitch came of age toward the end of the Romantic era, which portrayed man as a tempestuous, roiling, loving, hating, animalistic, godlike creature.

So, to shave a corner off of D. K.’s comment above, Hitch wasn’t morally ambiguous as he was ambivalent, in the sense of one's holding "simultaneous conflicting feelings." Hitchcock’s morality, if there was one, is that man is essentially good and essentially bad.

Last year, the late and sadly missed Hitchcock scholar Robin Wood commented on the fact that Hitchcock’s villains are all very charming — good-looking, cultivated and seductively friendly. Referring specifically to the villains of The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, he wrote, “The charm of this group is superficial, a consciously adopted mask concealing politically evil intent... masquerading as good citizens, a further demonstration of how easily and glibly Fascism (unlike fascist tendencies) can be discredited and disowned.”

I'd like to expand that a bit and add a third layer to these particular characters:(1) their upper-class charm, (2) their Nazi and Fascist carryings-on and (3) their family lives. Looking at them this way provides a key to understanding their beguiling appeal, even as we are horrified to see them plotting evil.***

Their charm is, of course, a mask, part of a deceptive role they play in order to hide their political machinations in plain sight. That charm also draws the audience in, causing us to identify with them. Yet, aren’t their Totalitarian ambitions just a role too? These Nazis and Fascists are professionals, opportunists who have placed their bets on the side they believe will emerge victorious from the war. Though their politics do oppose those of the Americans and British, they are primarily motivated by a natural desire to be on the winning side. As Saboteur’s Charles Tobin says,

“There are millions like you [good Americans]. People who play along, without asking questions.... The great masses, the moron millions. Well, there are a few of us unwilling to troop along, a few of us who are clever enough to see that there's much more to be done than just live small complacent lives, a few of us in America who desire a more profitable type of government. When you think about it, Mr. Kane, the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours. They get things done.”

As essentially apolitical professionals, Tobin and company’s villainy is just another mask.

Finally, then, we see these characters at home, with their families. It’s here that their masks melt away. What do we find? Loving family men who come to home to a joyful house, fully engaging with their children and dutifully spoiling their grandchildren. Even as their politics puts them at odds with society, their family life connects them to all mankind. That’s what makes them so appealing. Their family is something to behold and envy, and it entices us to fantasize about their political ambitions, for who among us would turn down an opportunity for world domination? All of us engage in our own masquerade, whether we're professionals, laborers, students or Facebook users.

It's in that final, unmasked state that Hitch saw hope.

If there’s any kind of a clear “message” to Hitch’s movies, it’s that the world’s problems won’t be solved on the battlefield or at the bargaining table. They can only be solved at home. Lives can only be saved one at a time as the Roger Thornhills of this world keep their Eve Kendalls safe and sound; as parents like Ben and Jo McKenna stick it out in their marriage, protecting their children, their monthly fights notwithstanding.

In Shadow of a Doubt, when speaking of love and marriage and family, Young Charlie says, “Oh, it doesn’t matter anymore.” Detective Jack Graham replies, “What do you mean, ‘It doesn't matter?’ It's the only thing that does!”

Isn’t that also the point of The Birds? At the end of the film, there prevails a temporary, fragile truce between birds and humans that could also be nothing more than the calm before another storm. But then we see the Brenners — Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) included — clinging to each other as a family, hoping against hope, forced in the crucible of unimaginable evil to finally discover, if only as a last resort, love.

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*Much of this history can be found in Patrick McGilligan’s Alfred Hitchcock — A Life in Darkness and Light.

**In the latter film, however, the occupants of the lifeboat are the survivors of a merchant marine ship sunk by the Germans.

***Interestingly, Hitch himself fit this pattern to a T: as public-facing showman; as on-set Supreme Commander who occasionally demanded that his cast and crew pledge their allegiance to him; as devoted and doting husband and father.

"Foreign Correspondent" — A "Masterpiece of Propaganda"

2010-04-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) evades the Germans, er, the Borovians, by escaping through a window in the windmill where he's trapped.

Walter Wanger, the independent producer behind Foreign Correspondent (1940), got his first taste of the power of film during World War I when he handled publicity for the American embassy in Rome. Later, he said,

"Believing in motion pictures as an international force, I really wanted to see our work become a respected calling. I thought it was almost as important as the State Department."

Though he was usually forced for economic reasons to produce more lighthearted fare (for instance, he produced the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts), that sensibility remained. Nevertheless, there was a literary property on his shelf that, he'd hoped, would satisfy his political urges.

In 1936, he purchased foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean's memoir, Personal History, and burned through a busload of writers and over $140,000 trying to adapt it for the screen, all to no avail. And then he met Alfred Hitchcock.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, Wanger greatly desired that the script be kept as topical as possible to reflect the current developments of the war heating up in Europe. Unbeknown to many, Hitchcock was already generously donating money and creative efforts to counter the German threat; he saw Wanger's project as an opportunity to do even more — and in grandiose Hollywood fashion. He jumped at the chance to work with the producer, tossed out most of the content of the book and eventually renamed the finished product Foreign Correspondent.

There was, however, one snag.

In the 1930s, the United States Congress had signed the American Neutrality Act, intended to keep America from involvement in foreign wars. This reached into Hollywood, whose censors under the Hays Office' Motion Picture Code prevented studios from making films that reflected a non-neutral bias. Still, both Wanger and Hitch had something to say — and they weren't about to let a few bureaucrats stop them from saying it. Like any self-respecting producer/director team, they gleefully set about creating workarounds. As Patrick McGilligan wrote in his 2003 biography, Alfred Hitchcock — A Life in Darkness and Light, "From the outset of the project, the director and his new producer got along like co-conspirators."

Hence, though the Germans were rattling their spears in Europe, the creative team was prohibited from referring directly to the threat. Instead, the villains in the movie were identified as fictitious Borovians, intent (like the Germans) on forcing England into war.

Another example: after his editor had given the reporter Johnny Jones instructions on whom he should interview in Europe, Jones naively suggested Hitler, not as a threat but as a news source. "Don't you think it would be a good idea to pump him? He must have something on his mind." The mere mention of Adolph Hitler linked the movie to real-life events.

And that brings us to the picture above. Hitchcock planted an image of Hitler's profile into this shot of Jones climbing out of the window of a windmill outside Amsterdam. Look in the upper right corner and you'll see the Fuhrer's famous slicked-down hair, eyebrows and mustache.

Now let's return to the ending scene of the movie. Jones and his bride, Carol (Laraine Day), were in a radio sound booth, reporting on the bombs falling on London. Though the lights suddenly went out, miraculously, power remained to operate the radio equipment. And it's then that Jones said:

"It's too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come... as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America. Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello, America, hang on to your lights: they're the only lights left in the world."

On paper, those lines seem innocuous enough, but on screen, as strains of The Star-Spangled Banner welled to a crescendo, the message was clear: America was the light to the world and was being called on to defend England and battle the darkness overtaking Europe. The emotional effect is powerful. As one who is relatively politically inactive, it definitely gets my heart pounding. As Mark Glancy wrote in his 1999 book, When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood 'British' Film 1939-1945,

"The emotional impact is overwhelming and it is not at all neutral. Indeed, it can be taken as a subtle, filmic representation of Winston Churchill's widely quoted words that 'in God's good time,' the New World, 'with all its power and might,' would step forth to rescue the old"

— words spoken only weeks before the scene was filmed.

Despite the censors breathing down their necks, Hitchcock and Wanger managed to pull off a military-evangelism coup. The film was successful both commercially and as a propaganda piece, and that is powerful combination — after all how effective would propaganda be, without an audience to receive it? Furthermore, audiences got the coded message. The connection was so obvious that they were unaware that the film was not about the Germans. None other than Nazi Germany's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels declared it "a masterpiece of propaganda."

As such, Foreign Correspondent can be a bit confounding for Hitchcock fans who see his films as morally relative, implicitly neutral, playing both sides of the fence. Wasn't this type of movie rather uncharacteristic of Hitchcock? Hmmm. Let me give some thought to this and get back to you in my next post.

The Real-Life Heroes Behind “Foreign Correspondent”

2010-04-05T23:55:00.000-07:00

As a reporter, how far would you go to get your story? Lie? Cheat? Walk into a spray of bullets? Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) addresses those questions. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a fun ride in the tradition of The 39 Steps and North by Northwest.

Dubbed “The Best Spy Thriller of All Time” by American Cinematographer magazine in 1995, this movie follows the trajectory of a young reporter, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), as he matures to express his patriotism as a news correspondent. Extremely loosely based on the memoirs of World War I reporter Vincent Sheean (1899 - 1975) (among other changes, the setting was updated to take place during World War II, then building up steam in Europe), the movie is a tribute to war reporters of the time. Says its prologue:

"To those intrepid ones who went across the seas to be the eyes and ears of America. To those forthright ones who early saw the clouds of war while many of us at home were seeing rainbows. To those clearheaded ones who now stand like recording angels among the dead and dying. To those foreign correspondents this motion picture is dedicated."

Vincent Sheean

While Sheean’s exploits are all but omitted from the movie, one name does come up in a conversation between Jones and his editor, Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport), who suggests that he go to Europe and cover the impending war “in the tradition of Richard Harding Davis,” “one of our greatest war correspondents forty years ago.”

Richard Harding Davis (left)

The original man on the street, Davis (1864 - 1916) traveled to exotic locales to cover the news and bring stories in from faraway places. Sheean himself followed in that tradition, writing,

“I had not been sent to China to write about politics or the Chinese Revolution, but to engage in some kind of personal enterprise, capers or high jinks, that would carry on the tradition of romantic adventure (the "Richard Harding Davis tradition", it was called) to which my various employers insisted on assigning me.”

Likewise, Johnny Jones (under the pseudonym “Huntley Haverstock”) was tasked to cover the European scene from the street level. Says Powers, “I don't want any more economists, sages, or oracles bombinating over our cables. I want a reporter!”

Initially, Jones, Like Davis, simply wanted to get a good story. But as the movie progressed, he abandoned that old school romantic adventure writing. Before long, he saw that he was reporting on important events and that real lives were involved. The stakes were political and, increasingly, so became his motives. He began to resemble no one more than the great Edward R. Murrow (1908 - 1965).

Edward R. Murrow at the end of World War II.

Murrow’s first taste of fame occurred when he reported on Hitler’s march into Vienna on March 13, 1938, on CBS’ first broadcast of its still-running “News Roundup.” Revolutionary at the time, the Roundup was a rapid-fire succession of live news reports from such places as Paris, Berlin and Washington D. C. But Murrow was in the catbird seat for that first airing. Assigned to Vienna, he delivered a live, eyewitness report of Hitler’s annexation of Austria. With that, modern broadcast journalism was born. So was Murrow’s celebrity.

Interesting background for sure. But Hitch liked using current topics and events in his movies for the frisson of immediacy they provided, and in the movie's producer, Walter Wanger, he found a kindred spirit. That’s why he updated the setting and gave special attention to that new breed of reporters “who went across the seas to be the eyes and ears of America.” Wanger went so far as to keep Hitch up-to-date on overseas news so that the movie would be as timely as possible upon its release. With events in Europe happening quickly in 1939, that meant the script was constantly taking revisions right up until the last possible moment.

They had been watching events so closely that, thanks to changes pushed through by Wanger, Foreign Correspondent accurately predicted the German bombardment of Britain.* Quoted below is the final scene, filmed on July 5, 1940. Jones is delivering a radio broadcast from London as bombs drop about him:

"Hello America, I have been watching part of the world be blown to pieces ... I've seen things that make the history of the savages read like Pollyanna legends.... [Overheard: the noise of bombs dropping and the broadcast booth goes dark.] I can't read the rest of this speech I had because the lights have gone out. I'll just have to talk off the cuff. All that noise you hear is not static. It's death coming to London. Yes, they're coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don't tune me out. Hang on awhile. This is a big story and you're a part of it ... It's too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come. It's as if the lights were all out everywhere except in America. Keep those lights burning! ... Hello America. Hang onto your lights. You're the only lights left in the world."

Five days later, the first German bombs began to fall on Britain. The film was released on August 27 and as it continued its run, it had the shocking immediacy of a newsreel.

"All that noise you hear is not static. It's death coming to London."

Summing up Murrow’s role in covering those dark days in London, writers have all but recalled that final scene in the film:

"You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it.”— Archibald Macleish, 1941.

"[Murrow] seemed to experience life with a special intensity and empathy, and he could capture those qualities in his reports. . . . Murrow was among the first to use ambient sound in radio journalism, and he also called more vivid attention to the plight of Londoners, as well as to himself."— Nicolas Lemann, The New Yorker, January 23, 2006.

There is little doubt that Johnny Jones’ combination of eyewitness reportage, unabashed patriotism and showmanship would have called to the minds of 1940 audiences Murrow's on-the-scene dispatches. As Patrick McGilligan wrote in his biography Alfred Hitchcock — A Life in Darkness and Light,

"The blitz attacks... made the ending especially prescient — a "flash forward," with McCrea's radio address eerily presaging Edward R. Murrow's famous broadcasts from a blacked-out London."

Some feel that Jones' broadcast is rather tacked on and doesn't fit the flow of the rest of the movie. I have to admit they've got a point. As McGilligan noted from this interview with the director:

"It was a speech 'out of key with your kind of picture,' Peter Bogdanovich told Hitchcock, fishing for confirmation that it was forced upon him by the politically active producer.

"'It's all right,' the director said blandly. 'It worked.'"

Foreign Correspondent is a perfect expression of the adage that all politics is personal. Like Murrow, Jones grew to "experience life with a special intensity and empathy." These qualities make him an attractive character study. Hitchcock’s films are often occupied with living life with full intensity — a pursuit that so often means facing death and pain with equal gusto as embracing pleasure. Looked at in that perspective, this movie is almost a sermon on how to live.

Unlike many propaganda films of the era (but not unusual for Hitch, who directed several such films), Foreign Correspondent has aged quite well. In fact, if the 2006 Good Night and Good Luck's portrayal of Murrow’s televised ass-kicking of Senator Joseph McCarthy is a sock in the eye to corporate journalism of today, Foreign Correspondent is its long-overlooked wake-up call.

*For another example of such prescience in a Hitchcock film, see Notorious, which was written in the early months of 1945 (though released in 1946) and foresaw the advent of atomic weaponry. Unlike Wanger, however, producer David O. Selznick was so skittish about the use of uranium ore as the film's MacGuffin that he sold the film as a package to RKO. That August, the atom bombs fell on Japan and, I imagine, Selznick poured himself a stiff drink.

Original Psycho House — Found

2010-03-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

Haunted, though it may be, this house in Kent, Ohio is not the Psycho mansion.

Nor is this slice of Santa Cruz gingerbread.

Various theories have been put forth regarding the origins of Psycho’s Bates Mansion. Author James Michener once claimed that it was based on a Victorian-era, reportedly haunted, house in Kent, Ohio. Another rumor maintains that it was based on the Hotel McCray of Santa Cruz, California. Wrong and wrong. The fact of the matter is that the architecture is more-or-less original.

The house and its downscale add-on, the Bates Motel, were co-created as original designs by production designer Robert Clatworthy and art director Joseph Hurley. Clatworthy was an especially inspired choice, as he had worked on the similarly seedy-gothic Orson Welles masterpiece Touch of Evil just two years prior. (If you’re looking for a fun double feature, watch these two movies back-to-back and count the similarities.) As Hitchcock told Truffaut,

"The mysterious atmosphere is, to some extent, quite accidental. For instance, the actual locale of the events is in northern California, where that type of house is very common. They're either called "California Gothic," or, when they're particularly awful, they're called "California gingerbread."

That said, Hitch, as you might recall from my November 23, 2009 post, named Edward Hopper’s 1925 painting House by the Railroad as the specific inspiration behind the Bates Mansion. That is to say, while the architectural details came from any number of sources (even as the house parts themselves were cadged from other sets on the Universal lot), the Hopper painting provided a basis for the mood of the Psycho house, which would be delivered through lighting, editing, framing and other cinematographic techniques.

Okay, but where did Hopper get the idea for his painting? What was his model?

That would be the large house (now subdivided into apartments) that sits on Route 9W just north of the entrance to Main Street in the village of Haverstraw, New York. While at one time it was a grand home, the place later went to pot. Vagrants even squatted there for a time until district attorney of Rockland County, Thomas Gagan, purchased it 1919 and (presumably) renovated it. Gagan’s daughter, Amo, occupied a bedroom on the second floor and stayed in the house for over half a century. No doubt she occasionally took visits from Hopper fans and, perhaps, later, Hitchcock fans. You can read about her and the house in this article from the Atlantic Monthly. There was, however, one particular visitor who remained lodged in her memory for the rest of her life. That encounter occurred one day when she was 13 years old and happened to be alone in her room. Looking out the window, she caught sight of a man across the tracks, seated at his portable easel, creating an American icon, one brushstroke at a time.

The original house by the railroad.

Join me tonight at TalkRadioX!

2010-03-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

If you're around this evening, I'd love to hear from you as I sit down with husband and wide team Dan and Jessica to chat about Alfred Hitchcock take questions from callers.

You can find us at their online radio station TalkradioX and listen via several easy-to-use options. The topic tonight will be "Hitchcock's Place in History." Hope you can make it!

"Alfred Hitchcock Geek" -- the Poster

2010-03-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

It's beautifully downloadable! Suitable for framing, shucking, jiving, stapling to telephone poles and scotch taping to café windows.

Designed by yours truly -- not bad, if I do say so myself.

Remembered: J. D. Salinger and "The 39 Steps"

2010-03-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

Holden and Phoebe on the cover of a British edition of J. D. Salinger's novel

As you probably know, Holden Caulfield, the hyper-intelligent, distressed hero of Catcher in the Rye, hated movies. I find it gratifying, then, that he made an exception for my favorite director. Here's what he said about trips he took with Phoebe, his 10-year-old kid sister, to see her favorite movie, The 39 Steps:

"She knows the whole goddam movie by heart, because I've taken her to see it about ten times. When old [Robert] Donat comes up to this Scotch farmhouse, for instance, when he's running away from the cops and all, Phoebe'll say right out loud in the movie — right when the Scotch guy in the picture says it — "Can you eat the herring?" She knows all the talk by heart. And when this professor in the picture, that's really a German spy, sticks up his little finger with part of the middle joint missing, to show Robert Donat, old Phoebe beats him to it — she holds up her little finger at me in the dark, right in front of my face. She's all right. You'd like her."

New Yorker writer Lillian Ross recently reminisced about a letter she received from him about a trip he took to London with his children. He took them to see Engleburt Humperdink in the stage production of Robinson Crusoe. "Awful," he wrote, "but we all sort of enjoyed it, and the main idea was to see the Palladium itself, because that's where the last scene of The 39 Steps was set."

Mr. Memory at the Palladium.

When Salinger died last month, I, like every other male born in the second half of the 20th century, was saddened, the loss made all the more poignant because he was like a friend I hadn't seen in many years.

Unlike Holden, old Salinger loved movies and had a decent collection of 16 mm films, the kind they used to use in school. I have a fantasy about meeting him. But instead of sitting down for an earnest conversation about writing, or Seymour, or Franny, I'd rather drop by his place and cook a batch of stovetop popcorn. Jerry would be in the living room threading The 39 Steps through his rackety projecter. Then we'd pull the shades, grab a spot on the couch, and bring Mr. Memory back to life. I can't think of a much better way to kill an afternoon. Am I right, sir?

"Alfred Hitchcock Geek" Comes to Portland Center Stage

2010-02-25T10:31:00.000-08:00

Here's the press release:

Hilarity will erupt and philosophy will ensue as low-tech visual tricks enhance an informative, thought-provoking and entertaining lecture about the Master of the Macabre.

Portland, Oregon — February 25, 2010 — One handheld video camera. One very small movie set. And one guy who knows more about Alfred Hitchcock than ought to be allowed. That’s the gist of Alfred Hitchcock Geek, a one man show written and performed by Joel Gunz, with stage direction and special effects by visual artist Lane Hunter. A preview performance of Gunz’s full-length act will take place in connection with Portland Center Stage’s live theater production of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps during its “Hitchcocktail Hour” preshow events on selected Friday nights, beginning at 6:30. The preview events are free to the public and take place in the mezzanine of the Armory Theater on March 5, 12 and 19.

Gunz believes that Hitchcock was the Shakespeare of the 20th century and he’s willing to go to any lengths to prove it. Interacting with an array of ingenious low-tech visual tricks, he will deliver an informative lecture about the director’s films while hanging from the roof of a building (see Vertigo), peeping into his neighbors’ apartments (see Rear Window) and participating in other famous scenes first conceived by the Master of Suspense. Shooting a miniature city of his own creation with a hand-held video camera, Hunter will project scenes on the wall behind Gunz that will appear to come to life. The technique harkens back to the special effects techniques used during the classic film era, before the advent computer-generated images. Hunter will share the stage with Gunz; like an old-time radio show production, half of the fun will come from watching him do his visual magic.

These devices are the perfect metaphor for the point Gunz is making with his show. Alfred Hitchcock Geek pulls the curtain back to reveal the inner workings that have made Hitchcock’s movies fascinating to generations of film lovers. It demonstrates why his films continue to inspire filmmakers to this day. Hitchcock’s films will be placed in their historical context, as Gunz shares his groundbreaking research, drawing fascinating connections between Hitchcock and the work of such artists as Edvard Munch, Edward Hopper, Salvador Dalí and many others. By the end of his show, audiences will be convinced that Hitchcock’s talent and influence was indeed Shakespearean.

About Joel Gunz
After several years of study and association with other film scholars, Joel Gunz launched his blog, www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com in 2004. Since then, he has built an international audience and won several awards for his writing and research. In 2009, he was twice invited to speak at New York City’s Broadway production of The 39 Steps and he plans to take his full-length show back to New York in 2010. More information about the show can be found at the Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook fan page.

About Lane Hunter
Lane Hunter’s background in the creative arts extends in several directions. An accomplished and critically acclaimed dancer and choreographer as well as a set and costume designer, he has delighted audiences around the world. Hunter performed with Portland’s Bodyvox dance troupe for several years until he left to found Lane Hunter Dance in 2009. His work can be found at his website and on his Facebook fan page.

Alfred Hitchcock, George Rouault and The Wrong Man

2010-01-18T12:50:00.000-08:00

Aside from an introductory prologue, Hitchcock forewent his usual cameo appearance in The Wrong Man, though he did manage to sneak into some of the movie's posters and lobby cards. (This was from a scene actually filmed, but later cut.)

For many years, commentary on Alfred Hitchcock’s work that touched on religion brought up his Catholic upbringing, citing, for instance, his strict Jesuit education as an important factor to consider when trying to understand his films. Then the tide turned. Most writers today soft-pedal the influence that the religion of Hitchcock's youth may have had on his work. (In his adult years, the director rarely went to church and seemed to adopt a casual attitude toward Christianity in general — as far as his private life was concerned, anyway.) I'd like to approach the director's Catholicism from a more nuanced perspective. At least two of his films are explicitly preoccupied with Catholic themes: I Confess (1953) and The Wrong Man (1956). It’s not hard to draw a connection between Hitch’s equivocal relationship with the church and the ironic way it is treated in those movies.

"It's nothing for an innocent man to worry about. It's the fella that's done something wrong that has to worry." So say the police who spend the night interrogating Manny Balastrero. He finds that advice to be cold comfort as the jail doors clang shut behind him, an innocent man if there ever was one.

There’s a little bit of Catholicism in most of Hitch’s films — even if at times it isn’t much more than an Ash Wednesday smudge. As such, it’s easy to say that he belonged to the 20th century’s small handful of Catholic modern artists — a very short list that also included Graham Greene, (with whom he had tried to work), Expressionist painter Georges Rouault and not many others. Hitch deeply appreciated the painter, once telling his friend and future biographer Charlotte Chandler that he considered it a privilege to be able to afford a Rouault; one of the artist’s La Suaires (in this case, a death mask of Jesus Christ) even hung in the entryway to his home. Rouault-inspired paintings occasionally pop up in his films as well, carrying significant meaning within those narratives.

Every era has its classic portrait of Christ. This one by Rouault, simply called La Sainte Suaire (The Holy Face), may be, at least for Catholics, the definitive Christ-painting of the 20th century. Here, Jesus faces his horror with open eyes and what Buddhists might call radical acceptance.

Hitch must have seen the painter as a kindred spirit. Both artists dealt repeatedly with the same narrow list of subjects. Said the director to Truffaut: “Not that I'm comparing myself to him, but old Rouault was content with judges, clowns, a few women, and Christ on the Cross.” More or less, those same types keep popping up in Hitchcock's films as well. Curious, isn’t it?

The Wrong Man could almost be subtitled “Variations on a Theme by Rouault.” The story is about an everyman, a Queens, New York-bred Italian Catholic named Christopher Manuel (Manny) Balastrero (Henry Fonda), who is wrongly accused of committing a series of robberies. In this case of mistaken identity, he is arrested, put on trial and nearly convicted in place of the real culprit. As such, he is a Christ figure, and the movie goes out of its way to draw connections between Manny (whose name evokes Christ, the Son of Man) and “the one who bore our sins.”

Such Christ-symbolism was fairly common in midcentury movies — think of Fonda’s earlier role as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). (And it persists: see Clint Eastwood's performance in Gran Torino.) What makes The Wrong Man interesting for me is that it shares a specially Rouault-esque view of Catholicism, Christ and suffering. During the early years when Rouault was developing his own voice, he became friends with Catholic writer Léon Bloy, whose novels Le Désespéré (The Desperate,1887) and La Pauvre (The Poor, 1897) deeply affected the painter.

Bloy was concerned with suffering, redemption and the rejection of the sordidness of this world, writing, “I have meditated long and often on suffering, I am now convinced that nothing else is supernatural in this world. All the rest is human.” Those could have been Rouault’s own thoughts — and approximate Hitchcock’s sentiments in this film as well.

In my next post, I will offer some examples of how Rouault’s work seems to have found its way into the visual design of The Wrong Man. But for now I’d like to leave you with a thought that underscores how the artist’s world view seemed to have found its way into Hitch’s psyche — or, rather, how the two modern artists, Catholics, were also sharers in the same view. Art scholar Joshua Kind’s summary description of Rouault aptly describes Hitch’s depiction of Manny:

“He is perhaps existential; his world is that of suffering and melancholy. ... Rarely if ever does [he escape] into a really savage renunciation of self and world — and yet it speaks with a quiet despair of the human condition.”

That is an apt description of The Wrong Man. Check back to learn more.

Merry Christmas from Uncle Alfred

2009-12-24T13:59:00.000-08:00

Only Alfred Hitchcock would brick up his fireplace on Christmas Eve. Maybe because he's the only one who could get away with it with finding coal in his stocking the next day!

In the intro to the December 18, 1955 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock, brick in hand, said, "Santa Claus is always bringing surprises to others. I thought it would be interesting if someone surprised him for a change. I’m rather tired of his tracking soot in here every year." Then he places the final brick in place and continues, "There. Let him Ho Ho Ho himself out of that!"

Ah, Hitch.

This episode, "Santa Claus and the 10th Avenue Kid," makes for first-rate yuletide entertainment. Watch it on Hulu.com. And...

MERRY CHRISTMAS
to all my Hitchcock Geek friends!

Hitchcock Goofs Around with Michelangelo

2009-12-12T12:19:00.000-08:00

I can't think of too many directors who would think of drawing cartoon glasses over a head shot of the most beautiful actress in the world -- Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound.

If you want to really understand Alfred Hitchcock as an artist, you need to know these four words: Imp of the Perverse. This is the guy who carefully cultivated an image as a stolid British intellectual, only to appear on his TV show in drag, dressed as Ringo Starr and in dozens of other outrageous outfits. Hitch was also the auteur who spent months, even years, laboring over the tiniest details of his movies, only to remind overwrought cast members that it was only a movie.

The man took life and art seriously, while never forgetting that it is all one big joke. The more sacred the subject, the more likely he was to send it up. And what work of art is more sacred than Michelangelo's Pietà?

Others have noted that Hitch used Michelangelo's Pietà as an inspiration for some of his scenes. However, a few writers have confused some of these shots with other works of art. So let's clear things up.

The fact is, Hitch returned to two of Western art's most oft-repeated ideas: the Pietà, which depicts the Virgin Mary cradling her dead son in her lap and the Deposition, which depicts Christ being removed from the Cross. As he told François Truffaut, he identified with Georges Rouault in that he repeatedly returned to the same set of themes and motifs. "Not that I'm comparing myself to him, but old Rouault was content with judges, clowns, a few women, and Christ on the Cross." (Italics mine.)

Turns out, Hitch imitated and at times even mocked these two cherished tropes.

I could have chosen from numerous famous works to illustrate the point, but Michelangelo will do nicely, don't you think?

Michelangelo, La Pietà (1499). Arguably the most revered work of art ever. I imagine Hitch looking at it and chortling, "Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha." (Note to self: find out if Hitch ever chortled.)

Michelangelo, The Deposition, c. 1550

Let's take a look at Hitch's Pietà and Deposition shots in order.

In The Lodger (1926), a man wrongly accused of being a Jack the Ripper-style murderer and played by Ivor Novello has been hounded by crowds until, in his escape, he hangs himself from a bridge (that scene, with its clamoring, wrong-headed throng, resembles Jesus Christ impaled). In this shot, he's been lowered to safety and lies in arms of Daisy (played by "June").

A drunken couple from the first party scene in Notorious.

Rope's murder victim David Kentley (Dick Hogan) is cradled in what could be called a gay Deposition. Later, dinner will be served on his "coffin", complete with sepulcheral candles and gallows humor -- a reference to cannibalism, or a very bizarre (Black) Mass?

After his fall from the balcony in Rear Window, Grace Kelly takes James Stewart Pietà-like in her arms, signaling their rapprochement.

Here's a Deposition shot, from The Birds (1964):

In shock from her recent bird attack, Melanie (Tippi Hedren) has her wounds hastily dressed and is ushered out the door in the final scene of The Birds (1964). In this scene she carries all the pathos (and blood) of a sacrificial lamb.

Topaz is Hitch's homage to the French, whose critics in recent years had begun championing him as the great auteur. That predominantly Catholic audience would have quickly grasped any religious symbolism, had he used it. And, it turns out, he had. There is, first, what has always struck me as a Deposition shot:

Caught literally in the cross-fire of the Cold War, French reporter Claude Jade (Michel Subor) suffers a relatively minor bullet wound that stains his otherwise crisp, white shirt. He's gotten his newspaper story -- along with the most excitement he will likely find in his privileged first-world status. The irony here is that Jade may be a good man, but he is no Christ.

That shot seems to set up the gruesome Pietà grand guignol here, which appears later in the film.

The most well-known of Hitch's Pietà shots, this scene from Topaz is also the most literal. This Cuban couple has just spent the night in a torture chamber, confessing the details of their crimes against the new state and paying the price for their fellow counter-revolutionaries' "sins." They are, as Shakepseare would say, poor sacrifices of the superpowers' enmity.

I think both scenes above reflect a conscious creative decision by Hitch. This film is concerned with the deadly Cold War gamesmanship that world powers safely engaged in at the expense of the lives of those in their third-world proxy battlefields.

Of course, just because a man falls into woman's welcoming lap, it doesn't automatically mean he's re-enacting a scene from religious art history. There must be a stronger, perhaps thematic, connection. A smoking gun could help too. With Topaz we have just that: the script itself calls this a "Pietà shot." There are dozens of other shots in Hitchcock's oeuvre that could be called Pietàs. (Spellbound, for one, is full of them.) But that's enough for now.

What are we to make of all this? Hitch often imbued his murder scenes with religious fervor. Dial M for Murder begins with Grace Kelly stretched out on a writing desk, which in the fading firelight turns into a sacrificial altar. For a showman whose stock-in-trade was violence and psychopathy, a closer look at his films reveals a deep sense of the meaning and human cost of death and murder, as well as what the consequences are now and, perhaps, in the hereafter.

Taking his films as a whole, if there is an "open-ended pessimism" as Donald Spoto has described it, there is also an open-ended spirituality that could be a manifestation of God, karma, a cosmic will -- or, at the very least, Hitchcock's own potential for hubris. It's a given that, in a Hitchcock film, there's something hidden in the attic or fruit cellar. But, in truth, there's always something out there -- everywhere. Hitch wisely refrains from telling us what, exactly, it is. Yet, such religious symbolism is a reminder that it's probably unwise to become complacent about seeking answers to life's big questions.

I invite you to leave a comment here if you find another similar shot in a Hitchcock movie! If you have time, be sure to explain why you think it qualifies as a Pietà or Deposition.

Salvador Dali Makes an Impression on "Psycho"

2009-11-26T13:32:00.000-08:00

Hitch at the opening of the Broadway musical The Seven Lively Arts, December 1, 1944. The painting is from a seven-piece series created by Dalí, also called The Seven Lively Arts, which hung in the Ziegfeld Theater lobby for the duration of the show.

Take a look at the two pictures below. If Hitch didn't consciously borrow from Dalí's painting when he came up with the scene in Mother's bedroom in Psycho, I'll eat Magritte's hat.

Mother's final resting-place.

Dalí, Surrealist composition with invisible figures, ca. 1936. (For a closer look, right click on the picture and open it in a new window.)

The bed with its outline of feminine curves, the water and the bright red gem on a pedestal are all sexual symbols. Undercutting that eroticism, however, is a swarm of ants clotted where the invisible woman's sexual parts would be. (They're hard to see in this picture.) In Dalí's skewed, alternate universe, those bugs represent death and decay. Sadly, his wife, Gala, had recently undergone surgery which rendered her infertile.

For now, let's focus on this painting's quality of desire and repulsion, femininity and rot. These are notions that had been on Hitch and Dalí's mind for years. Dalí referred to this as the "phenomenology of repugnance." Yes, it's a mouthful and if you say it out loud, you'll sound like a Harley-Davidson with a fouled spark plug. Try it! Still, it's a key to understanding the painting, along with Psycho.

In La femme visible, Dalí wrote:

"Repugnance would be a symbolic defense against the intoxication of the death drive. One experiences repugnance and disgust for what one wishes to get closer to, and from this comes the irresistible 'morbid' attraction, conveyed often by incomprehensible curiosity, of what appears to us to be repugnant."

In other words, Dalí explained why we slow down to rubberneck at the scene of an accident.

He had been reading Freud's The Pleasure Principle and was at least aware of Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) and Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai, who wrote in Der Ekel (Disgust) in 1929 that "our psychic ambivalence regarding death lies behind most reactions of disgust."

The point is this: as artistic contemporaries, Dalí and Hitchcock drank deep from the same philosophical well.

(Preter-)naturally, that brings us to Psycho. As you might have caught in my post on Hopper's influence on Psycho a couple of weeks ago, when making that movie, Hitch had much more on his mind than how he was going to secretly replace Marion's blood with chocolate syrup. One of its themes is the notion of attraction/repulsion, disgust/fascination.

When Lila Crane (Vera Miles) is drawn to the Bates mansion seeking her lost sister, she is pulled forward by both her curiosity and her fear. The audience, likewise, wants her both to flee that murder site and proceed into the house.

Lila goes straight upstairs to Mother's bedroom, where she encounters a room many audience members in 1960 would have seen in the film's trailer. It's a scene loaded with more red herrings than a communist Bar Mitzvah. (Ba dum bump.)

Though we half expect a skeleton to fall out of the wardrobe, there's nothing in there but a rack of out-of-fashion clothes. Notice the asexually modest long sleeves -- all the better to hide mother's withered arms.

Hitch zooms in on this lifeless statuette of hands on a Bible. Creepy, perhaps, but harmless.

As if to make sure it's real, Lila touches the impression of Mother's body on the bed.

Lila's tour of Mother's room confirms one thing: this room is occupied by a very real, though absent, person -- and it is very much in the spirit of Dalí's Surrealist composition above. Of course, the irony is that Mother has been dead for quite some time. In that way, this room is even more Dalí-esque, for on that bed is a fresh imprint of someone long gone. That understanding, however, is available only to audiences who are seeing the movie for the second time and know how it ends. That is, on first viewing they will think it's Mother's body print; on second viewing, they know it can only be her corpse (or, perhaps, Norman's body print, which would hint at incest or necrophilia). I believe that Hitch planted these clues just for those repeat viewings. Regardless, Psycho is even creepier upon second viewing.

Of course, Lila's "incomprehensible curiosity" doesn't end there. Eventually, it leads her to the fruit cellar -- a storehouse of slowly decomposing vegetation -- to finally come face-to-face with the desiccated flesh of death itself.

So, next time you see a horror movie and your friends yell at the heroine not to go down to the basement, simply tell them that her behavior is quite normal. Tell them that she's simply acting on Dalí's principal of the phenomenology of repugnance. Who knows? Maybe it'll get you laid. Or not.

For more details about Hitch's connection to surrealism, take a look at my post from May 24, 2007 -- updated with new pictures!

Thanksgiving Greetings from the Alfred Hitchcock Geek

2009-11-26T09:49:00.000-08:00

In 1956, Hitch posed for this picture at his favorite New York restaurant, the 21 Club. (He even gave the famed eatery a role in Spellbound.) Photo by John Rawlings

You could say Hitch was a man of many appetites. An old school gourmand, he served guests -- and himself -- more-than-ample portions from his well-stocked wine cellar (he loved Burgundy in particular) and aged beef flown in from England.

Once, on the set of The Birds, he advised 12-year-old actress Veronica Cartwright, who played the film's Cathy Brenner, on the proper way to broil a steak. He also gave her meticulous instructions regarding wine selection, right down to the best distributor to choose. (It's in Bristol, England.) She apparently never deviated from his wise counsel. I wouldn't, either -- would you?

Getting back to the picture above. Ogden Nash liked it so much he wrote the following poem:

Pick a Hitchcock of opulence rather than corpulence,
just pleasingly plump, with a snug silhouette,
To embellish the board when the places are set.
For the ultimate test, more closely examine it.
The Hitchcock Supreme has a wide streak of ham in it.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Remastered "North by Northwest" now on Blu-Ray

2009-11-24T10:32:00.000-08:00

Newly remastered -- and you can win one from me!
As you may know by now, 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. So Warner Home video has arranged for a restoration of the film, releasing a DVD, as well as a Blu-Ray version, the first Hitchcock film yet to get this state-of-the-art video treatment.

In addition to returning DVD features, like a documentary hosted by Eva Marie saint, two new documentaries have been produced: "The Master’s Touch: Hitchcock’s Signature Style" and "North by Northwest: One for the Ages."

It looks like an excellent addition to any Hitchcock Geek's video collection.

How to win a free DVD.
I got my copy, and now you can get yours. The producers have made a couple of extra copies available to me to pass on to you. To get a chance at one of them, all I ask is that you help promote my blog. So I'm running a little contest. Here's how it works:

1. If you're on Twitter, simply follow me.

2. This Friday, November 27, #FollowFriday (#FF) me, as many times as you'd like. Be sure to include both my Twitter handle and my blog url (or the shortened version).

Twitter: @JoelGunz
Blog: http://www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com
Shortened url: http://bit.ly/4Iw3PC

3. Whoever encourages the most people to follow me on Twitter will get their own copy of North by Northwest free! (I'll even pay postage.)

Last week, @carlotta_valdes won. Maybe this week, it'll be you!