The Birds

Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock was out of ideas after Psycho. Has there ever been a more arbitrary plot in a movie than in The Birds? It's one of the most obviously artificial plots among Hitchcock's body of work. (And it lacks the smart humor of some of his best films.) However, the world of Bodega Bay, where The Birds is set, is interesting enough, and the bird attack sequences are suspenseful. Tippi Hedren plays Melanie Daniels, a spoiled rich girl who becomes attracted to Rod Taylor after he's rude to her in a bird shop. She's so infatuated with him that she buys his kid sister some birds and then treks all the way to his small hometown to deliver them personally. Thus she becomes embroiled in small-town politics, namely with Taylor's mother (Jessica Tandy) amidst an unexpected war waged by the birds. And it's especially convenient that during one attack on the town, there's an ornithologist on hand in the local diner. (Not that she does any good.) With Veronica Cartwright and Suzanne Pleshette. Based--very loosely--on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. 1963.

Vertigo

Vertigo (1958) may be Alfred Hitchcock's most beautiful film, but it's also his most overrated. I don't mean to suggest that it's a crummy movie. It is well-made and absorbing to a point, but not the perfect masterpiece that everyone says it is. It's an imperfect gem, lacking the humor that makes some of Hitchcock's best, most entertaining films (such as Strangers on a Train and Rear Window) so good. Vertigo operates like a voyeur's idea of Freudian psychology: a man (James Stewart) becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman (played by Kim Novak) and when she dies, he becomes obsessed with a girl who looks a lot like her, to the point that when he actually develops a relationship with this new girl, he forces her to change her hair and wardrobe to get the look down perfectly. If anyone ever needed a movie to refer to for ways not to treat a girl in a romantic relationship, it's Vertigo.

Set in San Francisco, it's a tale of obsession that feels obsessive. The colors and the sensual music by Bernard Herrmann (a fantastic score, to be sure) are all hypnotic, and the film has some kind of an enchanting spell to it. But it lumbers on and on like an elongated episode of The Twilight Zone in which the befuddled hero, Scotty Ferguson, is the character whom nobody understands: the alienated figure. Scotty is a private detective, but ever since he nearly fell to his death from a very tall building (he was chasing a criminal, and another cop did fall to his death), Scotty has been unable to deal with heights.

Maybe there's something too unsettling for me about Jimmy Stewart playing such an obsessive person. He's downright creepy, and this from Hollywood's favorite "Everyman." Hitchcock should have gotten someone more heelish to play the part, like William Holden or Tony Curtis. Only then he might have lost the sympathy of the audience, because those would have been actors easy enough to dislike--in a "love to hate them" kind of way. They're both handsome and charming in ways Stewart never was, but they didn't conjure up that Americana image the way Stewart did. (Personally, I'm fine with this, but I can see why Stewart got the part.) Ironically, the picture was a failure at the box office initially, so the casting didn't seem to make much of a difference in terms of box office.

Nevertheless, Vertigo is the one the critics love to theorize all over, to the point of redundancy. People see a movie like Vertigo and like to read all kinds of things into it: it's the most personal film by "the Master," they say in hushed tones. Hitchcock's perversely dark pleasures are certainly showcased here, but the sense of humor that marked other films--North By Northwest, The Lady Vanishes, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 version), etc--is missing. It's a deadly serious affair, and it stays with you, haunting you, for days afterward. It's sort of a shame that this is the one people put at the top of the list, because it tends to negate one of the chief qualities people love about a Hitchcock film: his ability to entertain us by showing us a good time. Here we're morbidly curious--fascinated even--in a dirty, disgraceful sort of way. And we become the corrupted voyeurs along with Scotty. But it's not like in Rear Window, where we were part of his team. Instead we're like amateur psychologists, pretending to diagnose him with some kind of Freudian-sounding neurosis. Nevertheless, Vertigo is compelling in its own morose way, like being unable to look away from a traffic accident.

With Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones, and Ellen Corby. Written by Alec Coppel and Samuel L. Taylor from the French novel D'entre les morts ("From Among the Dead"). 128 min. ★★½

Rope

An ingenious little thriller, adapted by Hume Cronyn from the play by Patrick Hamilton, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and inspired by the famous Leopold and Loeb murder trial. John Dall plays Brandon, an arrogant intellectual, who with the help of his friend Phillip (Farley Granger), tries to commit the perfect murder. They strangle an old chum from prep school, and then hide his body in a cedar chest in the living room of their swanky New York City apartment. In order to add a little novelty to their crime, Brandon and Philip host a party (just hours after the murder), the guests of which include the murdered victim's girlfriend and father, another school friend, and their old teacher, played by James Stewart, who turns into a pseudo-detective, unraveling their perfect little murder. Rope (1948) is surprisingly involving and exciting, as stagey as it is. Hitchcock used an interesting, much-talked about technique: unbroken shots (most lasting about ten minutes each), which make the film feel more like reality. It may be a bit of a gimmick, but it doesn't feel particularly gimmicky here. Rope is a wonderfully perverse pleasure. With Douglas Dick, Joan Chandler, Cedric Hardwicke, Constance Collier, and Edith Evanson. 80 min. ★★★

The Lady Vanishes

200th review

Fans of Alfred Hitchcock's later work should take a look back at some of his early films, made in his home country. The Lady Vanishes (1938) numbers among the best of those British movies. It's a clever, fast-moving adventure about a seemingly harmless elderly woman (Dame May Whitty) who goes missing aboard a train bound for England, and only a young woman (Margaret Lockwood) named Iris seems to have noticed that she was ever on board at all. Iris ropes a fellow passenger (Michael Redgrave) into looking for the missing woman, but everyone else seems to be withholding information. This is light-hearted and engrossing entertainment at its best, bolstered by a sincere performance from Margaret Lockwood, who's constantly being one-upped by Michael Redgrave's witty, charming performance. She matches him in her stalwart forthrightness, though. She's like a tougher, pluckier version of the character Joan Fontaine played in Hitchcock's adaptation of Rebecca, two years later. They have a lovely romantic chemistry together, and Hitchcock's penchant for finding the humor in every situation is at its peak here.

Some of the elements in The Lady Vanishes have dated of course (for example, you can tell that much of the movie's backdrops have been filmed prior, and that the coinciding foreground action is taking place on a set). But the movie is nearly 75 years old, and it seems silly to fault it for the inevitable effects of the passage of time. And a picture that's still so fresh and entertaining after so many years is worth watching. Also starring Paul Lukas, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Mary Clare, and Googie Withers.

Psycho

Psycho may be Alfred Hitchcock's most famous thriller, because of its two notorious scenes of violence. Aesthetically and thematically, Psycho stands apart from the other films generally cited as among the director's best (Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, and North By Northwest). It was independently financed by Hitchcock, and shot with the same crew that worked on his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And so it lacks the silky glamour of his 50s films, and is a decidedly more American Gothic than Rebecca, even though both films are about powerful women who manage to maintain control of people and places from beyond the grave.

Because of its filming conditions, Psycho resembles television more than the movies, and its dramatics are corny the way 1950s television dramas were. (It's also economical the way TV has to be.) The story is straightforward, less sophisticated than a lot of Hitchcock's movies (e.g. Rear Window) and less darkly humorous (e.g. Strangers on a Train), but it has all the tantalizingly delicious Freudian psychology of Oedipus and Vertigo, fashioned compactly into a thriller that reshaped the way people made thrillers, and the way people saw them and talked about them and wrote about them. And somehow, its corniness, its simplicity, its one-track direction toward the big reveal, all work for it. Psycho wouldn't have been as memorable, I don't think, if Hitchcock had made it like his other movies.

Hitchcock can never be accused of putting on airs in his movies: he's at his best when he revels in the low arts. His apparently instinctive approach to movies as low art has made his work deliciously entertaining, much like Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), and Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) (three of the great American thrillers). I think most if not all good thrillers are inherently comfortable with their vulgarity. These movies deal with seedy people whose complicated lives are far from glamorous or tidy. Norman Bates is a genuine lunatic with the most dangerous facade of them all: the facade of a sweet, friendly, handsome boy-next-door. He's a villain who's sympathetic, dominated by the even more villainous presence of his mother. And Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) isn't the pure heroine: she's a thief (a one-time thief, but still a thief).

Hitchcock's previous films were certainly suspenseful, but they weren't so centered around the big reveal at the end. People didn't expect the movie's only star, Janet Leigh, to be slashed to death midway through the film, and they didn't expect the movie to then shift gears and be about Norman Bates and the secrets lurking in his creepy old house. I would imagine that even those who had read Robert Bloch's 1959 novel--on which Psycho was based--were expecting some Hollywood-style changes to protect the heroine from the grisly fate of being butchered in the shower. That simply couldn't happen.


With Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam.

Rear Window

I'm going to take a moment to plug the beautiful Florida Theatre, a landmark of downtown Jacksonville. Every summer they show a handful of classic movies, giving many of us a rare opportunity to see films that were decades old by the time we were born. Even if you've already seen a movie at home, nothing compares to experiencing it in a theater with an audience, especially a theater as elegant (and historical) as this one. Seeing Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train there several years ago got me fired up about about going to as many of these retrospective showings as possible, and this year I got to see my second Hitchcock film on the big screen, Rear Window, from 1954.

Rear Window has been reviewed too many times for me to go deeply into familiar territory, but I will briefly synopsize its plot and its critical reaction: it's about a photographer (James Stewart) who, when confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, begins spying on his neighbors from his conveniently-located rear window, which overlooks a large courtyard. Soon enough he begins to suspect that one of his neighbors (Raymond Burr) has committed a murder. Stewart's chic fashionista girlfriend (Grace Kelly) and no-nonsense rehab therapist (Thelma Ritter) become his Girls Friday in an attempt to prove a murder without a body or any real physical evidence.

As you may be able to imagine, critics have long focused on how Rear Window mirrors the act of watching a movie: Jimmy Stewart uses a telescope to anonymously spy on his neighbors the way we slip into dark theaters and stare at the characters on the screen. The drama that happens between the people in the movies is typically the stuff of closed doors, but to us, the door has been opened, all unbeknownst to the characters in the movie. This is what some critics and philosophers (such as Jacques Lacan) have characterized as scopophilia, the act of looking, and deriving pleasure from it. Rear Window pokes fun at our own voyeuristic curiosity, but it also indicts us in the process.

What struck me about seeing Rear Window with an audience was how much of its wittiness still survives. The humorous aspects of the neighbors--who have very little dialogue and must restrict themselves almost to pantomiming their roles--come through gloriously, and you begin to develop odd little attachments to them. They become endearing or bothersome, the way neighbors do in real life, and Jimmy Stewart, the Everyman of the classic movie days, becomes us...and we him. Hitchcock employs the reaction shot exhaustively in this film (something happens, we see Stewart react, something happens, Stewart reacts, and so forth). That rhythm of shooting was perhaps never more apropos than in Rear Window, which is purely the cinema of reaction (often reaction based on no real knowledge, merely assumption). The visual becomes the hyper-real, rendering communication unnecessary and frankly undesirable.  

Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter deserve mention in this. Kelly of course never looked better, but she also turns in a marvelous performance. She's head-over-heels in love with Stewart. He loves her too, but he thinks their social and vocational differences are insurmountable. Yet she pursues him with reckless tenacity, and becomes a willing pawn in his sleuthing--often risking her own safety--in order to enter into his world. She's trying to prove that she's not just frivolous, that she's game, and I think her performance works because Kelly possessed both qualities: she was glamorous but also tough, and smart. Thelma Ritter is a character actress who I don't think ever got her due. She spices up just about any movie she's in with her dry wit. These three form some kind of bizarrely funny mystery-solving trio. Without them Rear Window would have been a lesser entertainment.

Rebecca

Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, based on an English novel (by Daphne du Maurier) with an English cast (Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson, George Sanders, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny, Gladys Cooper and Florence Bates) and set in Cornwall. It's a modern-era Gothic and a camped up, tighter version of Jane Eyre. Fontaine is a pathetic little thing who falls in love with a millionaire in Monte Carlo named Maxim De Winter (Olivier). Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, died tragically a year before. When Maxim takes his young bride back to Manderley, his lavishly decorated family estate in Cornwall (right on the sea), she finds herself constantly being compared to Rebecca by the staff, especially the sinister head housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) whose long black dress accentuates her long arms and tall figure, making her a shape right out of Dracula or The Monk.

Rebecca is a story that displaces its heroine (she is awkward and naive and clumsy in such an elegant, sophisticated milieu) so that she can rescue respectable English society from wild women by being submissive and trusting to her husband, who may not have loved his wife as much as is indicated by popular gossip and speculation. The second Mrs. De Winter (she has no other name in either the book or the movie) pretty much goes along with things as they are, and while she doesn't fit in on the basis of her class and her mannerisms, she is forthright and obliging and caring. Perhaps breaking class barriers isn't as bad as marrying a woman who's completely deceiving and adulterous and insincere. Well, which is it? The movie is ambiguous, but the house burns down and Rebecca is dead before the story even begins, so perhaps it's a tie.

Regardless, Rebecca the movie is a fascinating and visually exciting tale, one that accentuates the creative style of its director Alfred Hitchcock, and is propelled by a finely crafted tale of suspense from the pen of Daphne du Maurier and the writers who adapted it for the screen (Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan). It's such a good example of the Gothic that one can hardly care about its histrionics--they are part of the fun, and Hitch seems to be having quite a good time with the scowling Olivier and the simpering Fontaine and the positive uncanniness of Judith Anderson's performance. Franz Waxman's music score provides a perfectly syncopated pulse to this body, which is one of the best examples of 40s Hollywood gloss. 1940 ★★★★

Strangers on a Train

At the beginning of Strangers on a Train, an eccentric young man named Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) meets a tennis celebrity named Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on board a train. Bruno asks Guy if he wants a cigarette, but Guy says he doesn't smoke much. In a split second, Guy produces a lighter--engraved with the inscription "from A to G" on it--for Bruno to light his with. This bit of minutiae is extremely pertinent to Alfred Hitchcock's movie, probably his best thriller. It's got a better sense of humor than Psycho and it moves along at a sharper pace than Vertigo. Strangers on a Train has all the ingredients of a perfectly entertaining suspense picture, from the touches of black comedy to the often funny characters themselves: Guy is so noble that he's a perfect dupe for the insane Bruno (but he's also good-looking and sharp enough to keep his cool when he becomes a suspect in his wife's murder). And Bruno is undoubtedly one of the creepiest villains among Hitchcock's menagerie of maniacs. Walker seems to be having a thoroughly marvelous time throughout.

The plot involves Bruno's attempt to "swap" murders with Guy. Both men have people in their lives they don't like: Bruno carries a sense of superior contempt for his father, and Guy is trapped in a fizzled marriage to a nasty, greedy woman. (She's a salesgirl who's pregnant with another man's baby.)
I haven't read the Patricia Highsmith novel, which this movie was based on, but I'm almost certain Guy's character was cleaned up in the process of adapting him to the screen. He's completely opposed to Bruno's proposal in the movie version, which allows us, the audience, to root for his triumph without any guilt. What's so interesting is that, while Hitchcock makes Guy's character sort of banal in his goodness, Bruno is so despicably rotten that we're half interested to see him pull it off.

Much about Bruno's psychosis seems linked to his relationship with his mother (Marion Lorne). Lorne injects into her character a sort of aloof amusement at her son's unhinged behavior, and the result is quite fascinating. There's a scene early on where she reveals a painting she's finished of St. Francis. It looks like The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bruno erupts with devilish laughter, finally composing himself enough to hail the painting as a first-rate rendering of his father. Bruno's mother typically downplays Bruno's tenacious rage, passing it off as a kind of humor only she can understand fully. Hitchcock uses the portrait scene as a moment of comedy where we are laughing despite our feeling that Bruno is truly disturbed--it's as if the murder-swapping ploy that came about in the first part was sort of old hat compared to this sinister little moment.

Bruno's obsession with Guy is clear from the beginning, but as he inflates Guy's involvement in the murder swapping plan, the obsession grows. This shot of Bruno standing in front of the Capitol is one of the most memorable in the film, and it's classic Hitchcock imagery. We can also see the influence of shots like this in later films (such thrillers as Night of the Living Dead and Halloween used similar images of the villain's shape lurking far in the distance--ironically maximizing the sense of danger for the viewer). Bruno is watching Guy from a long ways away, but it's almost as though he can hear every word Guy speaks--indeed, every thought in his mind seems captive to Bruno's eerie prescience.

Strangers on a Train set a new standard for thrillers: it's a cross between film noir and those sophisticated comedies of manners from the 30s and 40s like all the The Thin Man movies and The Philadelphia Story. Bruno is like the creepy brother in The Thin Man if he'd stop repressing his kooky personality. He taps into the morbid repressions of all the other characters in the movie, including Patricia Hitchcock (Hitch's daughter), as Anne's bookish sister, who possesses a strong fascination with murder. When Bruno meets her, she reminds him of Guy's wife Miriam (whom he murdered at a carnival), and the memory triggers an eerie moment in the thriller that pulls us out of the comedy and into the film's dark undercurrent.

This film in particular demonstrates the importance of pacing and building up the suspense, and yet Hitchcock doesn't resort to arbitrary plot devices to move his story along or attempt a superficial development of that suspense. Instead, everything is carefully configured into the story, but the comic touches and the energy from the actors brings it to life. It's no longer something written down on paper: it's a movie, a kinetic experience that involves the viewer in a way that Hitchcock had suck a knack for in his films up until the 1960s. ★★★★