Hitchcock's World

Author(s): Charles Higham

Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2, With a Special Survey: Our Resources for Film
Scholarship (Winter, 1962-1963), pp. 3-16
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1210474 .
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HIGHAM
CHARLES
Hitchcock's
portrayed

World

of the screen
Is Hitchcock really the master metaphysician
in such works as Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol's HITCHCOCK?
We present here a vehement dissenting view.

Le cindma, ce n'est pas une tranche de vie,

mais une tranche de gateau .... This comment
of Alfred Hitchcock's from a conversation with
Jean Domarchi and Jean Douchet (Cahiers du
Cinema, December, 1959) crystallizes the director's attitude to the medium in which he
has worked for almost 40 years. At heart, he
has remained a practical joker, a cunning and
sophisticated cynic amused at the French
critical vogue for his work, contemptuous of
Above: Hitchcock (dark suit) shooting PSYcuo.

the audience which he treats as the collective

victim of a Pavlovian experiment, perennially
fascinated by his own ability to exploit the
cinema's resources. His narcissism and its concomitant coldness have damaged those films
whose themes have called for warmly sympathetic treatment: The Ring, I Confess, and
The Wrong Man are obvious examples of
stories which, demanding humanism, have
been treated wth a heartless artificiality.

:4
The mechanics of creating terror and amusement in an audience are all Hitchcock properly
understands. The portrayal of physical or intellectual passion is beyond him, and he has never
directed a sexual encounter with the slightest
perceptiveness. He either exploits his performers, or mocks them, or both-certain mannerisms are seized on and used merely to create a
reliable response in the spectator. Occasional
efforts to extend his range, to probe below the
surface of a theme, have failed.
Hitchcock's much-discussed ability to use the
revelatory personal gestures of a character is
most strikingly displayed when he has a destructive comment to make. In Rebecca, the
predatory American tourist squashes her cigarette in a tub of cold cream; in To Catch a Thief
a similar lady thrusts her stub into the gleaming
yellow eye of a fried egg; in The Paradine Case
the English judge Lord Horfield's lecherous
gaze pounces in subjective camera on a woman's white shoulder; in the party sequence of
Notorious, someone leaves an empty whisky
glass perched on a prone woman's breastbone.
Conversely, when the script is saying something
quasiserious, the director withdraws with a
yawn: Walter Slezak in Lifeboat, James Stewart in Rope, Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent can utter their Fascist, anti-Nietzsche
or patriotic speeches if they like, but Hitchcock
is waiting to juggle the next lens.
Contemporary critics strive to convince us
that a severely admonitory attitude to Hitchcock's work is misplaced. They refer chiefly to
those who denounce him as a sadist doing
moral damage to his audience. His defenders
feel that an onslaught on the director along this
line is merely puritanical and purse-lipped, that
his films are simply there to be enjoyed, guiltily
or not according to the state of one's psyche.
Hitchcock, of course, remains amused by this
controversy and beyond it.
I believe that an understanding of Hitchcock's oeuvre can only be reached when it is
seen in the hard, unwavering light of this commercial-minded philistinism. He remains at

HITCHCOCK
heart a cheerful London showman with a tough
contempt for the world he has made his oyster.
Discussion of mnetaphysicsin his work seems to
me ludicrous, especially so in the various articles published in Cahiers du Cindma; his own
answers to questions put to him in the entretiens which have appeared in that magazine
should clarify for the doubtful his amusement
at the earnest French enquirers. He has simply
taken the most dynamic popular art form of
the twentieth century, toyed with it, and dared
to explode some of the central myths it has
established.
Where he has been most skilful of all is in
his grasp of what can move the masses without
fail. His pitiless mockery of human susceptibilities springs from a belief in the essential
absurdity of those susceptibilities. It is not a
gentle mockery. We know, for instance, the response that the sight of a child or dog in danger
can evoke even in the most brutally sophisticated people. No one save Hitchcock would
dare to turn this natural responsiveness to his
own adventage. In Sabotage (1936), the boy
Steve Verloc carries a can of film, neatly
wrapped by his sister Sylvia, from the fiat
above the cinema where he lives into a bus
headed for Piccadilly Circus. The tension is
achieved, predictably, by keeping the audience
guessing about the exact moment a bomb contained in the can will go off. Any competent
director could have managed this. But, as Desmond Tester (who played Steve Verloc), reminded me recently, Hitchcock was afraid that
the boy's danger alone might not be enough to
disturb the audience. So he gave the old lady
sitting next to him a puppy to play with, concentrating on its gambollings until the exact
moment of the explosion. The introduction of
the puppy constitutes the Hitchcock touch.
In Secret Agent (1935) Hitchcock had
shown a dog frantically barking in a closed
room as its master goes to his death on a mountainside miles away; here again, the effect is
exactly calculated, the audience's reflexes understood. Now that audiences have grown

HITCHCOCK
more cynical themselves, he has been able to
exploit more cruel impulses: in Psycho (1960)
the plunging of a knife blade into a woman's
nude body in a shower is deliberately made to
represent the thrustings of the sexual act, so as
to unleash the repressed libidinous sadism of
large numbers of spectators. In nearly every
case, the effect has come off so strikingly that
even the most detached critic is bound to be
engaged. Hitchcock's mastery of the medium is
never more sharply expressed than in those
sequences where he wants to make us release
our repressions vicariously as he has released
his cinematically.
The skill with which he has engineered the
mechanism of his films has varied sharply from
work to work, but in those films dominated by
morbidity, physical disgust, and terror his gifts
have usually been in striking display. The
Lodger, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934
version), Sabotage, Foreign Correspondent,
Rope, Strangers on a Train and Vertigo remain,
in my view, his finest achievements in the
medium. Whatever one might think of their
internal rottenness and viciousness, their deliberate pandering to mob lust, they brilliantly
succeed as cinema, and are conceived, executed
and embellished by a dazzlingly clever mind.
Over the years, Hitchcock has gradually developed his technique of designing the production in advance, blueprinting each scene so that
it is, in effect, edited before it is shot. His last
three productions were worked on in great
detail by Saul Bass, whose mocking, superficial
brilliance seems exactly to fit with Hitchcock's
own. This method of preplanning the entire
production means that the actors ("cattle" has
been Hitchcock's word for them) simply serve
as pawns in a game played with the audience.
This is very well when they have to be nothing
more than acceptable props, but when they are
called upon to express passion or terror the effect is numbingly mechanical. The love scenes
Hitchcock so elaborately shoots, usually set in
"high life" for the hicks to goggle at, are invariably sexless, antiseptic, and rather nauseat-

5
ingly cold: the much-quoted ear-lobe feast in
Notorious with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman
necking against a cynically clumsy backdrop of
Rio de Janeiro; the flaccid grapplings of James
Stewart and Kim Novak, mounted, we are told,
on a revolving platform; the dumb connexions
of Wilding and Bergman in Under Capricornall show an interest merely in camera manipulation. He is more at home with people who show
no visible evidence of sexuality at all: notably
an array of dead, middle-aged Englishmen and
Americans who come on and off the chalk-line
in successive films to commit murders or shudder obediently in moments of disaster. And the
perverted also fascinate him: one recalls the
Lesbian housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca,
caressing the transparent nightdresses of her
dead mistress, and a succession of homosexuals,
ranging from Peter Lorre's tittering assassin in
The Man Who Knew Too Much to Leonard,
the obedient and clinging secretary of North by
Northwest's smooth master-mind.
The numb hero and heroine, the sexless but
useful character players, and the parade of
sexually twisted oddballs in Hitchcock's films
are, more often than not, engaged in a chase,
and it is in the chase that he has found his
central dynamic. To ensure universality, he has
"Libidinoussadism"-Grace Kelly does in
Anthony Dawson as he tries to kill her,
in DIAL "M"FORMURDER.

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:6
seized on monuments everyone can recognize
and to set his characters in motion across them
-the British Museum, the Statue of Liberty,
Gutson Borglum's sculptured heads of the
presidents at Mount Rushmore. The combination of National Geographic Magazine and
True Detective audience appeal is smartly
managed.
Sometimes, of course, the chase runs below
the surface of the work, rather than physically
disclosing itself in the action: in Vertigo, for
instance, and in The Paradine Case, the search
for the true identity of a mysterious woman.
Sometimes the chase is the director's own: he
is trying to discover the way people die, or
the way they react to danger. The observation,
the degree of understanding, is adolescent,
but the chasing after facts about modes of behavior is adult, similar to a novelist's insatiable
curiosity.
What makes Hitchcock especially fascinating
is that, by dealing with the studio bosses on the
terms they understand, making money for them,
he has now reached a point of freedom usually
possessed only by those working outside the
commercial cinema. Psycho, for instance, is. a
very free film indeed, not merely a commercial
exploitation of a theme, but a personal work of
genuine if unpleasant self-expression. The obvious analogy is with the films of Kenneth
Anger, which express without restraint the
homosexual vision of life and death. In Hollywood, this degree of freedom has been accorded to few, and usually only to those whose
rather sickly brand of humanism has corresponded with that which is assumed cynically
by the director's employers. John Ford's deliberate romanticizing of the harsh, ugly, and
vicious history of the West has served both to
deceive more than one generation of children
and to display his own incorrigibly juvenile and
sentimental mind.
William Wyler's middle-class, middle-brow
values have always been respected by the
toughest tycoons. Zinnemann's liberalism, too,
has found a ready ear among the illiberal, the

HITCHCOCK
enemies of liberty. Only Billy Wilder, nihilistic,
brilliantly vicious, and destructive, has managed, like Hitchcock, to get away with the
expression of a cynicism rarely, in Hollywood,
carried beyond the conference room. Still "boxoffice," and therefore still safe from interference, Wilder and Hitchcock can explore their
worlds without fear of compromise or restraint.

In the films Hitchcock made during the silent

period, there is an obvious impatience with the
ti ed Shaftesbury Avenue conventions of the
time. "Love" scenes are done with bored contempt, matinee idols and limp British leading
ladies cast in the film because of studio requirements, are barely directed at all. The scripts
(mostly written by Eliot Stannard or Hitchcock
himself) seem merely to provide opportunities
for camera display. He established a style by
adapting the German technique of releasing the
camera in the action, using heavily shadowed
photography for melodramatic scenes, heightening the key for love scenes or comedy. Although his films of the early period have been
praised for realism, they are in fact highly stylized, almost abstract in design, while the playing throughout is deliberately theatrical. Hitchcock takes his camera into seedy rooms, alleys,
grubby theaters, but never attempts to make
these places look like the real thing. Rather,
he makes over a highly artificial and impressionist version of London or the English countryside into his own dream-image, as, during
the sound period, he was to do with many
countries from Switzerland to Australia.
Sometimes the style is so elaborate, so exhibitionistic, that it destroys, rather than enhances, the dramatic content. In The Ring
(1927), a story about the infidelity of a boxer's
wife, the theme would have excited another
writer-director to provide a moving study of
human fallibility. Hitchcock simply used the
plot-line to excuse a stunning display of technical virtuosity. The technique is the opposite

:HITCHCOCK
of, say, Pabst's: the camera is used to play
with, not explore in depth, the characters and
their relationships. The whole film is a heartless jeu d'esprit beginning with a maliciously
observed fairground sequence, in which the
primitive performers are mocked; proceeding to
the scenes of the wife's abandoning of her husband, who sees her frantic Charleston framed
in a mirror at a party; and finally erupting into
a dizzying Albert Hall boxing match, the wife's
face reflected in a pail of water, the crowd
swimming in a dazzle of arc-lights.
It's clever, but we don't care-and at times
the virtuosity becomes ludicrous. The heroine
is told by a gypsy she must return to her true
love, and the camera travels along the fortuneteller's arm to disclose a king of hearts clutched
firmly in her palm. The final scene at the Albert
Hall, entertaining at first, gets out of hand as
the hero lurches in a punch-drunk stupor, the
lights swimming in triplicate in his rheumy
eyes.
Champagne (1928) is also a series of setpieces, some of them striking in themselves.
The opening is very enjoyable: a slow fade-in
through a champagne glass of a ship's first-class
saloon, the passengers applauding a team of
acrobatic dancers; then a daring series of shots
as a plane flies past to salute the vessel, the
passengers swarming out on deck like a disturbed colony of ants. Later, the hero's seasickness is amusingly exploited, his eyes blurring as
the subjective camera explores a plate heaped
with rich food; the heroine seen in triplicate as
the hero greets her in his cabin. Devoid of tenderness, the love scenes are done with cynical
smartness, or simply tossed away.
The Lodger (1926) remains the best of
Hitchcock's silent films. Its reputation, thoroughly deserved, has remained intact because
in it the soulless mechanism works perfectly, the
detachment and coldness suit the subject-a
straight murder story-and the setting, London,
lends itself perfectly to bizarre stylization. The
sexlessness of all the scenes involving the hero
and heroine is less offensive when passion is

7
not, as it purported to be in The Ring and
Champagne, the central theme.
The Lodger opens with a killer loose in the
London fog; the police are baffled, and all they
know is that the murders take place on Tuesdays, and that blondes are the only victims. A
white hand slides down a banister rail above
a deep, sinister stairwell; a tall figure moves out
into the night; news placards announce the killings; at a pie-stall, someone looms up, frightening the bunch of Cockneys-he's pretending to
be the killer. In a vaudeville theater, there's a
gaggle of blonde chorus girls: one pulls off her
wig to disclose a brunette Eton crop, telling
her friends with a laugh that she will be safe;
a natural blonde announces she will wear a
brunette wig home. Captions interlace the sequence, the letters printed at eccentric angles
and in varying sizes: Tonight golden curls.
This looks very much like a Hitchcock joke,
used to parody the Eisenstein technique of
making the titles part of the cumulative rhythm
of a sequence (cf. Battleship Potemkin). At the
very end of the film, he turns the tables on the
critics, who have probably been thinking that
the phrase Tonight golden curls is meant to
symbolize the killer's thoughts as he wanders
the street. When the detective and his girl go
into a final clinch, the camera moves out of the
window to disclose lights flashing the phrase,
which is now revealed as a slogan for a peroxide
advertisement.
Several sequences are charged with a peculiarly Hitchcockian irony, notably the arrival of
the suspect Jonathan Drew (wanly played by
Ivor Novello) at the boarding-house, looking at
the portraits of four blonde calendar girls on the
walls. When he asks for the portraits to be removed, the suggestion is that he is stricken
with conscience, or that the reason for his killings may be a fanatical loathing of blondes.
Later, it emerges that the pictures remind him
of his sister, who was murdered during a dance
in a way which foreshadows the famous opening assassination scene of the 1943 Man Who

Knew Too Much.

8
HITCHCOCK,
The faultiness of the Hitchcock method is
shown in one brief scene when the suspect is
pursued by the mob until he hangs helplessly
on a railing by his handcuffs. On paper, this
must have looked exciting: the terrified youth
fleeing his pursuers in the writhing fog, the
helplessness of impalement, and then the horror of a mindless crowd beating an innocent
victim. But Hitchcock's total lack of sympathy,
his cynical use of rather scrappy editing to
bring off a tried-and-true effect, ruins the scene.
There is no sense of involvement, and the sight
of about 200 extras rather feebly pummelling
the boy's by no means robust physique excites
nothing but mirth. It isn't a failure of technique
(though the sequence isn't very well assembled) so much as a failure of intensity, of
concern for those involved in a very probable
situation.
Blackmail (1929) reveals all the faults of
The Lodger with none of its virtues. The story
is full of possibilities for profound and imaginative observation of a human being under stress.
Alice White (poorly played by Anny Ondra),
stabs an artist who tries to seduce her, and is
haunted by a blackmailer, Tracy (Donald Calthorp) who tries to extract money from her
detective boyfriend. The murder, the subse-

quent terror of the girl, the detective's agonized crisis of conscience (duty or love) all seem
promising material for melodrama. The film's
enormous reputation probably springs from its
inventive use of sound-the word knife echoing
in the frightened girl's brain at the breakfast
table, the loud clang of a doorbell, voices and
telephones chiming during a montage sequence.
Yet seen today, in both sound and silent versions, it appears a flat and tired performance,
the camerawork static, the acting (except for
Calthorp's) little better than amateurish.
The all-important murder sequence is badly
fluffed: the camera completely fails to probe
the terror, ugliness, and misery of the situation,
and the subsequent blackmailing and chase are
handled without the slightest sense of involvement. Only in one or two individual shots-the
blackmailer slipping down a chain past a massive Egyptian head, the mocking portrait of a
clown darting out of a canvas to frighten the
heroine-is Hitchcock's hand shown, though the
bantering or bored attitude to the romantic episodes is characteristic. The film is dead inside,
and, pace the critics of the day, it doesn't really
succeed in breaking (as The Lodger to some
extent did) with the frigid British film conventions of the 1920's.

LaurenceOlivier and Joan Fontaine in REBECCA.

III

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Blackmail bridges Hitchcock's work in the

silent and sound period. Juno and the Paycock
(1930), an efficient but rather flavorless version
of Scan O'Casey's play, was followed by the
gimmicky but insipid Murder (1930), The
Skin Game (1931) from a Galsworthy play,
Rich and Strange (1932), Number Seventeen
(1932), and Waltzes from Vienna (1933). A
poor batch: but Hitchcock brilliantly recovered
in 1934 with The Man Who Knew Too Much,
co-produced, like most of his most interesting
films of the next few years, with Ivor Montagu.
The Man Who Knew Too Much opens with
a fine virtuoso flourish: the murder of a secret
agent (Pierre Fresnay) as he dances with the

HITCHCOCK
tweedy British housewife (Edna Best) in a
Swiss hotel. A brief shot of a ski-run; a man on
skis with the smile wiped from his face; a bullet hole neatly drilled in one of the huge glass
windowpanes of the ballroom. Fingers neatly
circle the hole as they point at it; a sinister little
man (Peter Lorre) emerges from the halfgiggling, half-startled crowd, and Fresnay goes
pale. The bullet has found its mark: as Fresnay
dies, he tells his companion where she can find
a note that has to be passed on to the authorities. Before she can do anything, her daughter
is kidnapped, and the film develops through a
frantic pursuit of Lorre and his gang.
Together with Foreign Correspondent, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, this remains
Hitchcock's most brilliantly executed chase
story. Several sequences have become justly
famous among enthusiasts: a visit to an even
more than usually evil dentist, preceded by a
waiting-room scene in which seedy faces and
old numbers of Punch have a horrible reality
(most people's horror of dentistry is cleverly
exploited); the assassination in the Albert Hall,
built up in a flurry of cross-cutting from the
bulging curtain and the protuberant revolver to
the fatuously complacent diplomat, the gun
shot timed to the clashing of a pair of outsize
cymbals; and most striking of all, the final
showdown which recreates the Sidney Street
siege. The onslaught on the house has several
good touches: as police tip a girl out of bed to
use her mattress as a shield, they make nervous
English sex jokes; and one man says that his
wife will not approve if she hears about it, and
at that moment a bullet kills him. Later when a
piano is turned into a barricade, a squalid little
clerk looks on nervously, afraid his bowl of
aspidistras will be shattered.
Peter Lorre's Abbot, the criminal mastermind behind the gang, is a wonderfully detailed creation, effeminate and cruel, the huge
fish-eyes humorlessly fixed and dead as the lips
part for an hysterical girlish giggle, the plump
fingers forever playing with a silly chiming
turnip-watch. A sprinkling of homosexuals in

9:
the cast and the obvious fascination with seedy
London backwaters also show the Hitchcock
touch, and the observation of crowds, especially
the congregation in the chapel used as a headquarters by the gang, is as cynical as usual.
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), despite its
reputation, does not stand up nearly so well to
close inspection today. The celebrated sequences-the mysterious woman (Lucy Mannheim) staggering into the hero's room with a
knife in her back crying "Get out or they'll get
you too!", the scene in the crofter's cottage in
the Highlands, the last showdown in a musichall involving a seedy Memory Man-are all
done on a level of routine efficiency, without
much flair. Secret Agent (1936) obviously engaged the director's imagination far more completely, and the fantastically involved plot,
foreshadowing that of the more brilliant Foreign Correspondent, contained countless opportunities for gleeful sadism and cold, brutal
mockery of human beings under stress. The
story, almost impossible to synopsize, takes
Ashenden, a novelist disguised as special agent,
to Geneva accompanied by a charming killer
The Mexican (brilliantly played by Peter
Lorre). Grossly simplified, the next part of the
story unites Ashenden (John Gielgud) and
Elsa, another agent (Madeleine Carroll) in
murdering the wrong man, whom they take to
be a German spy. At the end of the film, they
locate the real spy, who has posed as a charming American (Robert Young).
Wonderfully fast-moving and loaded with
suspense and clever twists, Secret Agent is only
slightly handicapped by the weak technique of
British films of the time. The opening is justly
famous: the fake funeral of the novelist Edgar
Brodie, whose identity is to be concealed in
that of Ashenden. It was a master-stroke to set
the funeral during a bombing of London, the
camera deliberately settling on a man's stub
arm as he lights his cigarette cynically, from
one of the funerary candles, with his one hand.
The murder of the wrong man by The Mexican is no less well staged: the victim's dog

10:
yapping in the room miles away, Ashenden
watching through the telescope sights, yelling
a futile "Look out!" at the tiny figures far away
on the mountainside. And above all there's the
scene, so often critically referred to, but still
fresh, in which The Mexican and Ashenden
visit the church, hearing the high single whine
of an organ note, entering the apse to find the
dead man slumped over the instrument, his
finger pressing one of the keys ...
Sabotage (1936) again showed the director
at the height of his powers. The opening establishes a seedy and grubby little East End fleapit, the saboteur Verloc (Oscar Homolka) returning home after trying to get sand into the
Battersea generators, washing the sand down
the kitchen basin before his wife can notice it;
the organizers of the sabotage attempt discover
Verloc's failure and order him to plant a bomb
in the Piccadilly Circus underground station
cloakroom, concealing the bomb in a can of
film. The sequence I've already referred to in
which Steve Verloc (Desmond Tester) is delayed by the Lord Mayor's procession while
carrying deadly freight entrusted to him, is directed with ferocious assurance, and Tester still
recalls the relish with which Hitchcock handled
it. At one moment, a toothpaste demonstrator
insists on subjecting the boy to a furious toothscrubbing ordeal, and apparently the directoi
couldn't tear himself away from the shot of the
boy squirming in the chair.
The murder of Verloc by his wife after she
discovers that he has been responsible for her
brother's death is one of the three or four most
impressive set-pieces in the Hitchcock repertoire. For once the method of blueprinting the
sequence in advance works admirably. The sequence begins on a note of drab domesticity:
the couple in the cramped kitchen, the husband grousing about the damp pile of greens
on his plate. The editing is built up in the
Griffith manner, as the woman struggles to keep
herself from committing the murder, dropping
the knife only to pick it up again when more
meat has to be served. Her hands open and shut

HITCHCOCK
on the knife; the husband rises, a look of death
on his face; he crosses past the camera and
makes a sudden grab at the knife handle. The
locked hands fill the frame; a cry, and he falls.
Shot almost without dialogue, the scene has
been conceived in terms of silent cinema; today, probably, Hitchcock would make more
play with music and the incidental sounds of
the room-the squeak of a chair, the click of the
knife on the plate.

Young and Innocent (1937) and The Lady

Vanishes (1938) are simple chase stories,
lightly and quite cleverly done, but too artificially propped up with theatrical "characters"
in the cast. One recalls them chiefly for the individual "turns" of seasoned actors and actresses: Mary Clare presiding over a sinister
children's party in Young and Innocent or glowering through sinister pebble glasses in The
Lady Vanishes; Catherine Lacey as the "nun"
with the huge, haunted eyes in the latter film.
But both films date badly, and technically don't
really measure up to Hitchcock's best works of
the period.
After a routine barnstormer Jamaica Inn
(1939), Hitchcock moved to Hollywood the
same year. Rebecca, made for Selznick in 1940,
looks surprisingly good today, and despite its
falsity and women's-magazine values, it's a
neatly concocted romantic farrago. There is
little of Hitchcock in it, except for his loving
emphasis on the housekeeper's infatuation for
her dead mistress, and the obvious relishing of
Florence Bates's superbly vulgar American tourist, Mrs. Van Hopper. As usual, the "love affair"
that provides the pivot for the farrago is handled with cold boredom, and appropriately
played by Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.
Foreign Correspondent (1940) remains one
of Hitchcock's masterpieces. Several sequences
are stunningly pulled off, especially the assassination in the rain, all popping flashbulbs,
startled faces, and swarming umbrellas; the
superbly recorded episode in the windmill, with
the hero listening desperately to the agents'
guttural, low-pitched conversation in a lan-

11:

HITCHCOCK
guage he doesn't understand; the torturing of
the diplomat in Tottenham Court Road; and
most dazzling of all, the clipper disaster in the
last reel, again recorded with magnificent artistry by Frank Mayer. The sense of involvement as the clipper loses altitude, the passengers are flung into startled heaps, and the sea
finally rushes in, is superbly managed. In particular, one recalls a single shot (over in the
fraction of a second), in which three victims of
the crash are drowned as the water moves up
over their heads to the cabin roof.
After two insipid films, Suspicion and Mr.
and Mrs. Smith, and a badly mishandled attempt to recapture the Secret Agent flavor in
Saboteur (Hitchcock admits that was one of his
failures), the director returned to form with
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) which, until it collapses in the last two reels, has an admirable
fluency, pace, and freshness of observation.
Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) is an American
Landru who murders women for their money;
dodging the police, he hides with his unsuspecting sister Emma (exquisitely played by Patricia
Collinge) and her family in Santa Rosa, a small
California town. The rest of the footage is
taken up with his niece's realization that Uncle
Charlie is a killer, and a final showdown on a
train (clumsily done) in which Charlie falls to
his death.
Behind the credits, long-skirted figures swish
to the tune of the Merry Widow Waltz, which
"An enjoyably
ridiculous
spy story"NoToRIovs, with

Cary Grant,
Madame Konstantin,
Ingrid Bergman,
Claude Rains.

later acts as a sinister refrain in Dmitri Tiomkin's score (this is probably Hitchcock's first
dramatic use of music). The small-town background and family scenes are observed with
amused but disagreeable detachment, especially
the behavior of the Oakley's little pebbleglassed brat, who reminds me of a younger Pat
Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train. The uneasy,
elliptical, half-affectionate relationship between
Charlie and his relatives has been beautifully
realized, partly through the dialogue (in which
Thornton Wilder significantly had a hand),
partly through the unusually detailed handling
of the cast.
The establishing shots of Lifeboat (1943)
show a freighter's smokestack disappearing in
oily water, a crate of oranges bobbing, a copy
of The New Yorker with the celebrated tophatted man on the cover, a sprinkle of dollar
bills, a deck of cards fanning out (was it a
royal flush, like the one Hitchcock in person
displayed in the final sequences of Shadow of
a Doubt?). In a lifeboat, with a corpse floating
past in the mist, perches the elegant stranded
journalist Mrs. Porter (Tallulah Bankhead).
Unfortunately, the film doesn't live up to this
jaded and elegant opening. It soon bogs down
into routine melodrama, with a cast of characters, crudely "typed" in Jo Swerling's script,
reacting predictably to storms, starvation, etc.,
in the studio tank.
Spellbound (1945) a pretentious botch, re-

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12

HITCHCOCK

lieved only by the clever use of white bedspreads, tablecloths, a shaving-brush twisting
in a mug to convey the tormented hero's obsession with whiteness, was followed by Notorious (1946) which, after a terrible first two
reels, settled into an enjoyably ridiculous spy
story. There is a particularly good scene in
which the cuckolded husband of the heroine
wakes his mother up in the morning to tell her
his wife has been unfaithful to him: this is
beautifully played by Claude Rains and
Madame Konstantin (who doesn't seem to have
appeared in any other film, more's the pity).
The Paradine Case (1947) and Rope
(1948) don't seem to be very highly regarded
critically (except, of course, in France) and
one wonders why. They are among the most
elegantly, intelligently made of all Hitchcock's
films, and Rope may very well be, as he claims,
his greatest technical tour de force. The Paradine Case, scripted with admirable literacy by
David Selznick from Robert Hichens's novel,
returns to the Rebecca mood, but with far
greater intensity. The story-a beautiful and
mysterious widow who has murdered her blind
husband is defended by an infatuated barrister
-is as novelettish as it sounds, but as usual with
Hitchcock the plot is nothing, the exploitation
of its visual possibilities everything. Throughout, Lee Garmes's camerawork is beautifully
manipulated by the director, from the openONA TRAIN.
Farley Grangerin STRANGERS

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ing arrest of the doomed Mrs. Paradine through

the stylized, Teutonic prison scenes to the trial
scene at the end-perhaps the most brilliantly
staged single set-piece of the film. One recalls
especially the slow, circling movement that accompanies Mrs. Paradine almost everywhere,
emphasizing the reptilian nature behind the
perfect Madonna mask (Alida Valli's remarkable performance, icy on the surface yet suggesting the seething repressed passions inside,
has never been properly assessed). And there
are imaginative effects all the way through: a
snatch of Annie Laurie echoing down a stone
corridor as Mrs. Paradine's visitors arrive at
the prison; jagged camera movements, accompanying the confrontation of the vicious servant
Latour with the barrister in a country inn; the
enormous slow tracking shot accompanying
Latour's departure from the courtroom for the
last time, Mrs. Paradine in the dock straining
her ears for the last of his footfalls. Tom
Morahan's sets and the delicately recorded
sound-track owe much to Hitchcock's scrupulous control.
Rope is also, for some reason, critically un
film maudit, perhaps because of its abandoning
of editing in the use of reel-long takes. Yet the
sharply directed playing of the cast, the impeccably disciplined camerawork on one set,
and the wonderfully sustained mood of tension
and terror underlying the conventions of a late
afternoon New York bachelor's party, all show
the director at his best. The story, based on the
Leopold-Loeb case, has two homosexuals,
Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger) murdering a friend, David Kentley (Dick
Hogan) and hiding him in the living-room
chest, from which they serve dinner to his
sometime girl-friend (Joan Chandler) and parents. There is a slight loosening-up of the film's
taut structure towards the end, when the publisher, Rupert Cadell, over-played by James
Stewart, decides to expose the killers after discovering what they've done, but up till the final
reel the film has admirable sharpness, precision,
and delicacy. The situation evidently appealed

i:i

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13
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nately Hitchcock added fuel to their fire with

almost all the films of the next few years,
which suffered from slowness and deadness to
a remarkable degree.
-Few films of a major director can have been
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worse than Under Capricorn (1949), with its
achingly dull long takes and flatulent playing
by the entire cast, or Stagefright (1950), or
I Confess (1953). Set respectively in Australia,
England, and Canada, these tiresome farragos
showed how incomparably cold and dead
Hitchcock's films can be when they don't excite his imagination. Of his films of the 1950's,
list of indifferent
CASE. one passes over the long
Gregory Peck, Alida Valli: THE PARADINE
works with a shudder-To Catch a Thief, The
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strongly to Hitchcock, with his passion for

irony, and assisted by Arthur Laurents's sophi.sticated script, he extracts the utmost from it.
The color photography (Joseph Valentine and
William Skall) and the use of a marvelous
process screen which charts the changing light
from late afternoon to darkness, are admirable,
and the players, especially Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier as the dead boy's
parents, play with great intelligence and style.

IV
It was clear, by 1948, that Hitchcock had
matured enormously as a craftsman, and that
he had far more interest in details of performances than in the 'thirties, where his actors
(with odd exceptions like Peter Lorre and
Mary Clare) were indifferent. His pace, handling of editing, had changed, and his films had
grown more deliberate, more subtle.
In England and America, his critical reputation had come pretty low: most reviewers were
nostalgic for The Lady Vanishes and The
Thirty-Nine Steps, which were actually much
inferior to The Paradine Case and Rope
(though it is still sacrilege to say so), and
didn't like the "new" Hitchcock with his elaborate technical effects and eschewing of rapid
editing. I think, looking back on the reviews of
that period, they were wrong, but unfortu-

Trouble with Harry, The Wrong Man, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much-all
of which showed Hitchcock's worst faults,
archness, facetiousness, hollowness of content,
at their most galling. Dial M for Murder, apart
from the murder of the blackmailer (lovingly
handled with a lingering close-up of scissors
sinking into the victim's back) was conventional, and so was Rear Window, despite an
undercurrent of rather repellent voyeurism.
The remaining films of the period, Strangers

on a Train, Vertigo and North by Northwest,

deserve more serious and detailed analysis.
Strangers on 'a Train (1951) seems in retof Hitchrospect like an oasis in the desert
closer,
era.
sound
the
It's
in
cock's worst period
in its sophistication and ingenuity and (except
intermittently) rather slow pace to the films of
the very late 1950's than to those of 1950 and
1952. Like Rope, it deals with homosexuality
-but in a far more flippant way: Bruno
(Robert Walker), the simpering, girlish villain
of the piece, is second cousin to the characters
films of the 1930's.
played by Peter Lorre in the
famous
sequence shot
a
with
The film opens
from ankle-level of two well-shod pairs of feet
carrying their owners through a railroad station,
onto a train and into a saloon-car, when the
two men meet for the first time. The different
walks-one brisk and athletic, the other loose
and effeminate-are beautifully distinguished.

:::

HITCHCOCK
more strikingly succeeds is in the treatment of
silly, predatory, middle-aged women who seem
to
hold a special fascination for Hitchcock.
-:::a:_:
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sive-is matched by that of Norma Varden as
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strangled by Bruno in a moment of accident::-::i::
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ally induced rage (a bespectacled girl, played
by Patricia Hitchcock, reminds him of his
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former victim). Robert Walker daringly plays
:::i:
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of nerves, nastiness, and edgy sensuality by
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Laura Elliott as the ill-fated Mrs. Haines.
Vertigo (1958)
has been unmercifully
VERTIGO.
treated in the English-speaking world, its
peculiar dreamlike pace and deliberate air of
Later, Bruno makes a big play for Guy Haines,
a tennis champion (Farley Granger), on the surreality completedly wasted on the majority
of critics. Carefully examined, it shows a comtrain journey between Washington and New
plete and exciting departure for the director,
York. Flattering, cajoling and batting his eyes,
and the fantastically complex visual texture,
he suggests with a giggle that they exchange
owing much to Saul Bass (more than 780 sepamurders: Bruno is to kill Guy's rejected and
rate shots were drawn up in advance) deserves
spiteful wife in return for Guy murdering full-scale examination
on its own. In my view,
father.
Since neither will have a motive
Bruno's
Robert
Burks's
camerawork
for the film reprefor the executions they perform, neither will
sents one of the high water marks of color
be discovered by police.
The rest of the film shows Bruno's murder- cinematography, others being George Berinal's
work on The Thief of Baghdad, Jack Cardiff's
ing Mrs. Haines after Guy scornfully rejects on
Black Narcissus and Charles G. Clarke's on
the arrangement, Bruno's desperate journey to
the
exquisite Margie, directed by Henry King.
the fairground island where he has killed her
The extremely complicated (and ultimately
to plant Guy's cigarette lighter at the scene of
the crime, and a final showdown on a carousel ridiculous) story of Vertigo involves a detecthat has gone wildly out of control. Aside from tive, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) in a
search for the vanished wife of a friend, Gavin
some feeble sequences involving Guy and his
Elster (Tom Helmore). He finds her, only to
girlfriend (Ruth Roman, whose performance
was a decided liability) the film is one of the see her plunge to an inexplicable death from
most sophisticated Hitchcock has made: a the bell tower of an old Spanish mission. Soon
after, Ferguson meets another girl with an odd
dazzle of cynical observation, ruthlessly cruel
resemblance to the dead Madeleine, and the
exposition of character, and glittering visual script
springs its surprises from that moment
glamor.
on.
The textbook sequences-the tennis match
What Hitchcock manages (as often before)
intercut with Bruno's journey to the murder
is
a total suspension of disbelief in the imposthe
scene,
murder itself, reflected in the dying
sible goings-on before one's eyes. Surrendered
girl's glasses-are deservedly renowned, but to, the film invades
one's consciousness with
perhaps rather conventional; where the film
rules of its own: this is one of those films
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HITCHCOCK:
(Charles Vidor's Gilda was another) which
completely creates a decadent, artificial world
unrelated in any way to the real one. It has
taken the French, not bound by the rule of
thumb that judges a film by its verisimilitude,
to see that the unreality of Vertigo, its free play
with time and space, makes it a genuinely experimental film. It opens with a dream (after
Saul Bass's breaktaking credits with their
spirals and huge blue eye staring out) in which
Scottie is clinging in terror to a gutter after a
superbly managed chase across rooftops. His
fear of heights, and the subsequent vertigo
from which the film's drama springs, is conveyed with dazzling skill, and the music of
Bernard Herrmann accompanies the sequence
with fantastic virtuosity. The whole of the
pursuit of the apparently resuscitated girl,
across a graveyard, into an art museum,
through a redwood forest, is shot with a marvelous and deliberately sustained air of fantasy.
Vertigo is one of the peaks of Hitchcock's
career, a film in which his coldness, his detachment, have found their perfect subject.
A Hitchcockgargoyle: REARWINDOW.

ata

Hitchcock realist-on location for

THE WRONG MAN.

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North by Northwest (1959) is by comparison

a lightweight, but great fun and (though not
nearly as well made as Vertigo) at times brilliantly directed. It's virtually a remake of
Saboteur with better actors, and of course it's
far more assured, more cunningly managed,
than the earlier film.
The set-pieces-Cary Grant being machinegunned by a crop-dusting plane, the last frantic scramble over the Mount Rushmore stone
heads (dreamed up by Hitchcock years before)-are vastly enjoyable, even when seen
for the third time, but the film's greatest success is with the playing of the cast-James
Mason's master criminal, Eva Marie Saint's
ambiguous heroine desperately switching sides,
and Cary Grant's smooth advertising man may
be conceived on a comic-strip level, but they

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techniques of torture in a still more selfindulgent degree. Prudes may sniff, but as
Penelope Houston has rightly remarked in
more than one review, it's far too late to get
prudish about Hitchcock. He has now, after
almost 40 years in cinema, got the power to
do almost exactly what he likes, to scrawl his
signature on the world's lavatory walls without
restraint. He's still a child, pulling wings off
flies, playing with the cinema like a toy. But
there is no other director whose jeux d'esprit
can be shared with equal pleasure by the
masses and specialists alike.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST.

are played with splendid sophistication

and
brio. The mocking, cynical script of Ernest
Lehman, Robert Burks's photography, and
above all the pounding score of Bernard Herrmann, admirably serve Hitchcock's requirements.
The director's latest film to date (The Birds
is being edited at time of writing), the
notorious Psycho, has already been definitely dealt
with in Film Quarterly by the editor, and I
don't propose to add much to his remarks, except to say that I found John Russell's camerawork rather grubby, and the whole film rather
hastily slapped together (Hitchcock has said
that he wanted to do it quickly because
he
wasn't sure if it would be box-office, hence
his failure to use Robert Burks, who is
notoriously slow and careful). The film's obsessive
quality, its feverish unravelling of the director's neuroses, makes it a genuinely
personal
work, however much one may disapprove of it.
It's probably the only film of Hitchcock's in
which he's unleashed himself from first to
last.
And perhaps no other film of his has had so
tumescent an effect on an audience, nor
so
ferociously reduced them to helpless terror.
The Birds promises to be even more abandoned, to combine sexual symbolism and the

HITCHCOCK:

[IllustrationscourtesyAlbert Johnson.]