Hitchcock at 100 - filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock - Critical Essay

National Review, August 30, 1999 by Terry Teachout

Queen Victoria was still on the throne when Sir Alfred Hitchcock was born in London a hundred years ago this month. A massively fat man of relentlessly old-fashioned demeanor, schooled by Jesuits and formal to the point of paralysis, he spent his entire adult life working in a medium that barely existed in 1899, but has since come to be regarded as the very essence of modernity. From 1939 until his death in 1980, he lived in Hollywood, a city that inverts every value of the lost world into which he was born. He made movies about secret agents and serial killers, and peopled them with debonair gentlemen who slept with cool blondes, thereby amusing millions of unsuspecting filmgoers with his own hopeless fantasies; he longed to be the witty, unflappable Cary Grant of North by Northwest, but knew he was really the Jimmy Stewart of Vertigo, haunted and desperate.

Today, when the tempo of cultural change has accelerated beyond the wildest dreams of the maddest prophets, Hitchcock remains a fixed star of American popular culture, the only director of his generation whose name is still as familiar to ordinary moviegoers as it is to the film- studies cranks who churn out ponderous tomes with titles like Hitchcock as Activist: Politics and the War Films and Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory. But it was not always so. Witness, for instance, this testy review of Secret Agent, his 1936 adaptation of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden:

His films consist of a series of small "amusing" melodramatic situations: the murderer's buttons dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist's hands prolonging the notes in the empty church; the fugitives hiding in the bell tower when the bell begins to swing. Very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them; they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.

This review, as it happens, was written by a novelist, Graham Greene, and it is interesting that he should point with distaste to the aspect of Hitchcock's work that is now most admired by critics: the fact that his movies deal primarily in images, not words. It isn't that his characters never say anything memorable. (Cary Grant, in North by Northwest: "Apparently the only performance that's going to satisfy you is when I play dead." James Mason: "Your very next role. You'll be quite convincing, I assure you.") But it is not what they say that we remember after the lights come up. An elegantly dressed man running through a deserted cornfield, chased by a renegade cropduster; a broken wine bottle that inexplicably proves to be filled with sand; the blankly staring eye of a woman lying dead in a running shower-such is the stuff of which a Hitchcock film is made, and next to it, everything else is window dressing.

Though only nine of his feature films were silent, Hitchcock was profoundly affected by the silent-film aesthetic, and spent the rest of his career trying to import it into the age of sound. It took him long enough-many of his pre-1950 films are quite talky-but by the time of Strangers on a Train, he had figured out how to structure his scripts so as to diminish sharply the importance of dialogue. Characteristic of Hitchcock is that so many of his strongest films pivot around a tiny plot twist, uninteresting in itself, that serves as a pretext to set the characters in motion, and even more so that those characters should not infrequently go through entire scenes without speaking a single word out loud. Typical, too, is the remark he made to Ernest Lehman, who wrote North by Northwest, midway through the shooting of that film:

The audience is like a great organ that you and I are playing. At one moment we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way. And someday we won't even have to make a movie-there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons and they'll go "ooooh" and "aaaah" and we'll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won't that be wonderful?

Hitchcock's image-oriented style cut against the grain of filmmaking in the '30s and '40s, which had been transformed almost beyond recognition by the coming of sound. It is no coincidence that radio, which flourished at the same time, made effective use of nearly every Hollywood star of the day; even Citizen Kane, a movie bristling with indelible images, was no less strongly influenced by Orson Welles's experience as a radio director. Small wonder that at a time when scripts were still known as "photoplays," Hitchcock's emphasis on the visual should have caused his work to be widely dismissed as mere light entertainment.

Not until the '60s, after European directors had taken the lead in pulling away from the traditional style of cinema that dominated Hollywood in its golden age, did Hitchcock begin to be acknowledged as a major figure. Yet the irony is that his sensibility is decidedly pre- modern, not merely in its silent-film roots, but also in its emotional tone. A movie like Vertigo, which at first glance appears to be a kind of film noir, actually differs greatly from such earlier examples of the genre as Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past or Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place in that its mode of expression is essentially Gothic-even operatic.