Dial 'H' for Murder: Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899 – 1980), probably the most famous of all British film directors, was a master of the thriller and crime genres from 1926 to 1976. At the time of his death he was the only film maker from the silent era still active.
He learnt the cinematic trade from the bottom up, in the classic way, and spent some time in Germany learning his craft at Munich studios. The influence of Expressionist cinema was always present in his work in his use of the camera and lighting and mood. Raised as a Catholic and educated by Jesuits there is also a consistent religious theme in many of his films, notably “I Confess” (1953) and “The Wrong Man” (1957) with subtexts concerning the transference of guilt and expiation of sin.
When he was a boy his father (a lower middle-class London grocer) played a horrible practical joke on him by asking his friends in the police to lock Alfred up in gaol for one night without telling him the reason. Practical jokes, as we know, have a sadistic motive and the result was predictable. The boy never forgot the trauma but it recurs often in his films, notably in “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1935), “The Wrong Man” and “North by Northwest” (1959).
Hitchcock’s early silent films in England included “The Lodger” (1926), which concerned a Jack the Ripper-type murderer. One famous and extraordinary scene shows us the lodger pacing up and down in his room from beneath (the floor is made of glass). By 1929, when sound arrived, he was ready to prove himself a master of the creative use of sound as well as showing his visual flair. “Blackmail”, partly sound and partly silent, caused a sensation. Throughout the thirties his films were increasingly popular, notably “The Thirty-Nine Steps”, “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934) and “The Lady Vanishes” (1938) which eventually led him to Hollywood.
His first American film was a curious choice, “Rebecca” (1940), based on a Daphne du Maurier story. Its Gothic melodrama did not seem quite Hitchcock’s true style but it proved phenomenally popular. By the time of “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), we see his first authentic American masterpiece (it was his own favourite of all his films) and its tale of a man who murders his rich wives mingled thrills, social observation and dark humour (so very English!) and had a first-rate script by the noted playwright Thornton Wilder.
The following films were variable in quality, with the exception of “Notorious”, (1946) starring Cary Grant (one of his favourite actors) and Ingrid Bergman, about Nazi spy ring operating in South America. It was an intelligent, well-acted piece of work with typical Hitchcockian touches and camera movement. In 1951 he made another masterpiece, “Strangers on a Train” (script by the distinguished crime novelist, Raymond Chandler) about a criss-cross murder scheme (i.e. the villain murders the hero’s wife in exchange for the hero murdering the villain’s hated father). There is more typical black humour and Freudian psychology with a wonderful performance by Robert Walker as the mother-fixated murderer.
By the mid-1950s, Hitchcock was at the peak of his powers, making memorable films such as “The Trouble with Harry” (1955) with more mordant humour about a corpse which is difficult to dispose of, the previously mentioned “The Wrong Man”, perhaps his most profound work, a bleak but moving depiction of mistaken arrest and its effect on the man’s life and “Vertigo” (1958), a beautifully crafted colour film about a detective (James Stewart), his fear of falling and his obsessive love for a mysterious woman. The strange, dreamlike atmosphere has never been equalled and the use of the San Francisco locations stunning (although not without sinister overtones) and one of my favourites, “North by Northwest” which featured Cary Grant (superb) as a suave businessman mistaken for a spy. The sequence where he is pursued by a crop-dusting plane in an eerily deserted landscape is wonderfully paranoiac. The script by Ernest Lehman (an original one and not from a novel) is very witty and the various set pieces are mounted brilliantly.
One more masterpiece remained, “Psycho” (1960), made cheaply and quickly in black and white by Hitchcock’s TV crew. It was in Hitchcock’s estimation a comedy, though the audiences who flocked to see it would have ben forgiven for not seeing the humour under the fright. I do find it very black in its humour (the “hero” has a curious hobby, taxidermy – that is stuffing animals and his mother). More mother-fixation and sexual innuendo, real Hitchcockian motifs, make this an undeniable treat.
Hitchcock, after these high points, I feel went into decline although his films continued to be extremely popular (eg. “The Birds” (1963), “Marnie” (1964) and “Family Plot” (1976), his last work), but there was an increasing lack of control and the sadistic elements, always detectable under the surface, are unpleasantly gratuitous (e.g. “Frenzy” (1972). Perhaps the obsessions, particularly sexual ones, were becoming too strong. Another factor is the loss of two key creative associates, the extraordinary composer Bernard Herrmann (they quarrelled) and his imaginative cinematographer, Robert Burks, who died in a fire. I think Hitchcock became too commercially-influenced and much blander and was too old to be coming up with brilliant ideas in film after film.
For me, his reputation will rest on at least eight remarkably original and superbly-made films which brought intellectual and critical respect, particularly from the French, and box-office success – a rare combination. But he was never awarded an Oscar for direction which is, I fear, not untypical of the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences which, so often, fails to honour its most significant creative peers. KR
