By Jon Hewitt
Alfred Hitchcock is cinema’s heavyweight, figuratively and literally. A porcine bon vivant with a dry wit and a penchant for the perverse, he directed his first feature in 1922 (the unfinished Number 13) and delivered his final completed feature (the loopy Family Plot) in 1976. That’s 54 years of filmmaking that spanned silent to sound, monochrome to technicolour, cinemascope to television, and includes almost 70 credits, 59 of them feature films – and a good percentage of those are some of the most innovative, inspired, and downright great movies ever made.
Hitch was also the first filmmaker as superstar, with his name on the credits more important at the box office than the lead actors, much like Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and James Cameron today. And to top it off, his films pushed the artistic and commercial envelope with a consistency that can only lead to the conclusion that the fat man was a genius.
Hitch also knew the value of collaboration, working with the best artists and technicians that he could, from the German expressionist filmmakers who crewed his first silent films, through a roll call of Hollywood greats (costume designer, Edith Head; composer, Bernard Herrmann; art director, Henry Bumstead; and cinematographer Robert Burks) to artists like Salvador Dali and Saul Bass. He also practically invented the title sequence (his first movie job was as a title designer) and the openers for movies like Spellbound, Vertigo, and North By Northwest are some of cinema’s greatest.
In 1922, he first worked with editor and screenwriter, Alma Reville. They married in 1926 and went on to have one of the most intriguing (and underrated) creative partnerships in cinema. In a world of literally thousands of books, theses and docos about Hitchcock, we finally got a worthy examination of that complicated relationship in the 2012 drama, Hitchcock, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren as Hitch and Alma.
Hitchcock’s films are marked by their cool formalism. He was a control freak who meticulously planned his shoots through the art of the storyboard, and his reputation as a director who was tough on actors probably comes from the times where he literally did take after take until the actor gave him what he wanted. However, most of his actors did some of their best work with him. On the subject of formalism, check out Rope (1948) for the most extreme (and gob-smacking) example of Hitch’s precise control of all aspects of the mise en scene. It is a murder-suspense story set in one apartment and made up of eight long-take shots – that’s right, almost 50 years before Russian Ark! Hitchcock was unafraid of experiment, another trait that made him truly great.
Hitch was always in love with the expressionist camera, and the way that angle and edit (rather than dialogue and exposition) could combine to give the audience all they needed, and this tactic was consistent throughout all his work. For instance, the first half of Psycho (1960) has hardly any dialogue, yet we are never at a loss as to what is going on both physically and psychologically.
The Lodger (1926) is almost a roll-call of techniques and themes that would become the foundation of Hitchcock’s oeuvre – extreme close-ups, weird angles, icy blondes going through hell, voyeurism both figuratively and literally, murder and psychosis, characters wrongfully accused and hounded by society, twisted cops, characters wracked by guilt, etc.
Hitchcock’s most fascinating films are invariably his most deliriously expressive and perverse. Rear Window (1953) is based on the Cornell Woolrich pulp fiction novel, and is about voyeurism and its consequences. Jimmy Stewart plays a photographer laid-up in his Soho apartment with a broken leg who spies on his neighbours across the way and thinks that he witnesses a murder. His obsession almost gets his blonde girlfriend (Grace Kelly) butchered at the hands of a psycho killer while he watches helplessly!
Vertigo (1957) is a bizarre and glorious story of psychological disintegration and the circularity of fate as a traumatised ex-cop is hired to spy on the cool blonde wife of an old friend and falls in love with her. Shot on location in San Francisco, the film is like a strange fever dream of heartache, madness, and devastation, and is certainly one of the greatest films ever made.
Psycho (1960) is the classic chiller that launched the modern horror film. A familiar Hitchcockian slow-burn suspense for the first half (cool blonde Janet Leigh on the lam with stolen cash), it suddenly flips-out as Anthony Perkins in a dress rips open the shower curtain, making sure that cinema would never be the same again! One film theorist worked up a pretty convincing argument that the famous shower scene metaphorically depicted the victim stabbing herself and what that meant…
That’s Hitchcock. On the surface, his films are gloriously controlled and superbly realised works of commercial narrative cinema with stories, suspense, and stars. But underneath, there’s an ocean of meaning, interpretation, subtext and mystery. Grab his stuff on DVD or find it online, and bow down to one of the greatest filmmakers in cinema.
Hitchcock/Truffaut is in cinemas now. Jon Hewitt is the director of Bloodlust, Redball, Acolytes, X, and Turkey Shoot.
