Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Various
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Studio:   Release date:   Rated: Various
Language (Country): ( USA )
Summary: The Films:
Saboteur -- A fairly straightforward patriotic version of The 39 Steps, and not to be confused with Hitch's earlier English Sabotage, Saboteur is a mixed bag of great sequences alternating with some unusually clunky scenes. Hitchcock depended on starpower to give movies like this charm while he concentrated on the gimmicks, but what was available on the Universal lot wasn't up to the task. Robert Cummings, while never actually bad, never seems natural, and top-billed Priscilla Lane is something of a total loss. As this was actually an independent production, using Universal's top talent Deanna Durbin was probably out of the question ... anyone wanting to see what she could do when not saddled with a dumb script should check out the excellent Lady on a Train. Otto Kruger's villain is a straight-out grinning lizard, complete with effete manners and snide comebacks. As such he's the odd man out among Hitchcock bad guys, and probably the least interesting. The best thing in the film is Norman Lloyd's Fry, who with only a few lines and moments on screen creates a very distinctive 'ordinary' young man who is also a remorseless killer.

Barry Kane's adventures are certainly fast-paced, but they don't hang together as they should. America comes off as a nation of not-very-bright people who are either naive and virtuous or evil and unredeemable; the episodes with the circus freaks and the Thoreau-like blind hermit in the woods seem to have drifted in from older Horror films. The key scenes at the traitor's ritzy party in New York fall very flat, mostly because the topical seriousness of the subject matter didn't allow for the breezy cynical attitude that had made 39 Steps a fun treat. Perhaps Hitchcock was just not yet familiar enough with America, or more likely, this was a fast programmer where perfection wasn't part of the plan. Not top-rank Hitchcock, Saboteur is still one of the better wartime budget productions, and makes a lot more sense than a lot of its spy drama competition, where Ronald Reagan or somebody defeats stumblebum Nazi thugs while romancing a Hollywood starlet. It's just that as both entertainment and propaganda, it pales beside Hitch's earlier and utterly charming Foreign Correspondent.

Hitchcock gave all of his attention to a couple of special scenes, a wise commercial choice with a limited budget. The fiery beginning is unusually graphic for the times. But the buzz that made Saboteur a must-see movie was the Statue of Liberty ending, which stands out as a finely crafted setpiece separate from the tone of the rest of the film. The struggle between Fry and Kane atop the very symbol of America is charged with patriotic sentiment on a mythical plane - and even resembles a political cartoon, when one potent view shows complacent tourists enjoying the view out of Lady Liberty's crown, unaware of the desperate struggle taking place on the Torch arm a few feet away. The impact of this convincing, breathtaking finale is what stays in the memory, while the rest of Saboteur becomes a blur.

Shadow Of A Doubt -- Everyone who thinks Blue Velvet is a great film should give Shadow of a Doubt a serious looking-over. Both are about 'normal' American towns living in seeming complacent denial, while dark and malevolent forces seeth below the surface. Both feature amateur detectives and a leading character who wants to 'know' about the reality below everyday normality, a desire which leads to traumatic disillusion. David Lynch's message seems to be that the sweet surface of life is a thin veneer that cannot totally cover a horrible underworld of vice and sickness; Thornton Wilder's thesis is that knowledge can fundamentally transform people's souls, and that the slightest brush with chaos can change the way we perceive the world.

All this is conveyed in the tale of Young Charlie Newton, a perceptive girl who doesn't quite realize that she's the most mature and aware person in her warm and loving family. Adoration for Big Charlie is so complete that his sister Emma has formed an emotional life around him, much greater than her bond with her 'unromantic' husband. Part of the tension of Shadow of a Doubt is the knowledge that the uncovering of the truth about The Merry Widow killer will do irrepairable harm to the Newton family. Young Charlie's revelation of the 'noir' world beneath the visible is fundamentally different than the bad dream experienced by Frank Capra's George Bailey. Evil is no illusion.

Hitchcock's actual design effects in Shadow, such as the use of a literal shadow of doom to announce the arrival of the 'devil' in Santa Rosa, are well documented. It's the naturalism of the show that impresses the most now, the everyday normality Hitchcock expresses that is not typical of his earlier work. Hitchock reportedly respected and admired Val Lewton, who seems to have had as much of an influence as writer Thornton Wilder, whose masterpiece Our Town also has a horrifying undertone. As in the successful Lewton formula, people hold down jobs, weather disappointments and endure lives that are sometimes intolerably dull. As with Thornton Wilder, characters are isolated but human, children aren't idealized, and looking for the meaning behind tragedy may make us wiser, but rarely happier.

When both Charlies retreat to a bar to air their differences, the waitress Louise is a sullen young girl whose spirit seems completely defeated. Big Charlie thinks Louise proves his case when she says she'd do anything for a ring she sees on the table; Young Charlie perhaps sees herself in the sad girl. David Lynch approaches the humanity of his characters in a different way, but the feeling of Shadow of a Doubt is very much present in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs. When Clarice Starling interviews the girlfriend of a murder victim, with her bad hair and worse self-image, there's a similar social tension that gives both films a resonance with a reality we know but rarely examine directly.

Although Shadow has its slightly strained aspects (the detectives disguised as reporters), the overwhelming feeling is this tension between what the world should be, what we want it to be, and what it might become the moment we start examining it more closely. Hitchcock's most subtle and least sensational film is also one of his very best.

Rope -- Everyone should see Rope who wants to admire Hitchcock as a technician; this was one tough assignment carried off with a little imagination and a lot of dogged work. The idea was to shoot a play as an ubroken series of uncut takes, thereby capturing it intact and allowing the actors' work to flow without the unnatural and sometimes destructive interruptions of camera angles and editing. Whether Hitchcock got the idea from watching plays or from other Hollywood experiments, like Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, hasn't been discussed much. That Raymond Chandler adaptation was filmed almost completely from the point of view of its main character, an interesting experiment that was fatally disruptive to its story. Hitchcock had his own theories about the subjective / objective point of view in cinema, that he later developed to their limit in Rear Window. He knew that film could be manipulated to make audiences identify with characters. But be them?

Film directors associated with unbroken long takes were usually one-shots like Joseph H. Lewis with his robbery scene in Gun Crazy, or the occasional artist who attempted to overwhelm the viewer with flowing circus-like imagery, such as Max Ophuls or Federico Fellini. Lately it's Martin Scorsese who impresses with the bravura of elaborate lengthy mastershots that can be very effective, as in Goodfellas. It's presently the fashion among certain showoff directors to garner attention with elaborate long moving masters, that impress the film school crowd with 'style', especially if set to rock music. A cynic might say Hitchcock was the original showboat director, but it seems more accurate that he simply wanted to make the 'cinema' in Rope invisible, by eliminating cutting altogether.

I don't know what audiences were told in 1948; the trailer makes no attempt to let people know that Hitch was attempting a filmic experiment. But when we film students of the '70s finally saw Rope, it was kind of a letdown. We read that the movie was shot in only ten takes of ten minutes' duration each, invisibly joined. In truth, six of the reel changes or cuts are disguised with (sometimes deft, sometimes clumsy) truck ins and truck outs to people's backs. Three of the cuts are just ordinary cuts as in any movie, and one is a not-very-well disguised jump cut.

Maybe in 1948 the movie played normally, but for us whose innocence was ruined by the Hitchcock: Truffaut interview book, it's almost impossible to watch Rope as anything but a stunt. As the camera zooms around the penthouse apartment, we imagine unseen grips silently moving furniture, walls, and cables to clear the way for the giant Technicolor camera. The acting under the circumstances is more remarkable for its professionalism rather than any finesse or sensitivity. It's a live, unbroken set of performances, perhaps, but one with more tension and rigidity than anything on the stage. One flub and another seven or eight-minute take is sunk. One real result of all the effort is the elimination of the need for an editor. Rope bills an editor; I'll bet he did a careful job assembling all thirteen pieces of film that make up the movie!

In the end, at least to Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock admitted that movies must be CUT, that it's the cinematic tool that adds grammar and expresses the necessary elements of point of view, timing, emphasis, and juxtaposition.

Universal's DVD of Rope has a very informative documentary by Laurent Bouzereau with nice interviews with Farley Granger and Hume Cronyn. The most provocative comments are from screenwriter Arthur Laurents, who tangentially reveals that the theme of homosexuality in the film crippled and perhaps doomed it from the start. Since the production code wouldn't allow any explicit mention of the characters' sexual preferences, the full weight of the source play was blunted. Although alert viewers surely picked up on the relationship between Granger and Dall, they never knew that the James Stewart teacher character, whose ideas inspired the killing, was originally written to also be gay, and a past lover of one of his pupils. Laurents said the obvious homosexual theme was never even discussed in connection with the movie, and James Stewart of course played the character not only straight but from a righteous moral position. After preaching an unbroken line of morbid Nietzsche nihilism to the party guests, Rupert manages to be shocked when he finds his disciples have 'warped' his teachings. This makes the provocative original play into yet another conservative Holly-phobic movie where gay characters are by definition sociopath killers; and where liberals who play around with controversial philosophies are the stooges of moral disaster.

Finally, Laurents makes one point that you'd think Hitchcock would have picked up on. Hitchcock made a big deal about believing in suspense and tension, as opposed to the average whodunnit. He usually follows through by not making the point of his thrillers identifying the killers, but indentifying with them as well as with the heroes. He's sometimes taken for task for spilling the beans early about what exactly's going on. But here he encountered a play with a third alternative. Rope's End didn't hide who did it, but instead transcended the issue by letting the murder be an ambiguous event until the finale: the tension being whether the killers' murder talk was a sick game or a sick reality. So the play would presumably be more centered on the strange game-playing tension between the two lovers. This is more in line with later Hitchcock narrative experiments, like the shaggy-dog The Birds where we constantly expect the rug to be pulled out from under our assumptions about the story being told. Hitchcock either didn't like the ambiguity idea or didn't think his audience was mature enough to 'get' it: as shot, Rope isn't an ordinary whodunnit, it's an ordinary willtheygetcaught?

Rear Window -- Nobody ever debates the fact that Rear Window is superior entertainment. The acting of the stellar cast is first rate, and John Michael Hayes gives them a very tense and funny script to work with. Just playing this script straight would yield a great movie, but Hitchcock gave it the full weight of his talent. You can tell the material fascinates him in the precision and wit that fills every shot. He has no problem at all with the glamorous intrusion of the Grace Kelly fashion-plate character into a story one might think more suitable for grimy noir treatment (Savant is informed that the noir The Window comes from a similar Woolrich source story); her glamour plays well against the tawdry story situation.

The technique of this 'experimental' Hitchcock film is a movie natural. The (Russian?) montage concept that uses point-of-view to enforce identification gets its best workout here: Jeff Jefferies looks, and we see what he sees, and then we see him looking again and compare our own reactions to his. It happens to us all while watching movies with other people. We see something interesting and we look to see the face of our companion to see if they sensed the same feeling we did. When we watch a movie, our inability to affect what's going on doesn't curb our tendency to become emotionally involved. Rear Window confects a situation that mirrors the movie-watching experience. Jeff has a perfect surveillance view of ten or so apartments across his courtyard, but his broken leg restricts his ability to 'enter the action.'

The windows Jeff watches have been likened by critics Robin Wood and Raymond Durgnat to a battery of 'movies' from which he can pick and choose, his own 'secret cinema.' Since the restriction of Jeff's distant point-of-view is consistently maintained, the various windows remain rectangles within the cinema frame, often reminiscent of a multiple screen experiment. The narrow view of the street is another vertical screen-within-a-screen that we watch with Jeff. The naturalness of the voyeuristic act can be felt in the urge to crane our necks to see hidden areas around the corners of these windows. 1 The act of watching a movie is a morally compromised activity, if you consider morbid curiosity something to be discouraged. 2 Hitchcock further explored the urge to 'see more' in the 'sick' and popular Psycho, and Michael Powell analysed similar cinematic voyeurism in the 'sick' and publicly despised Peeping Tom. Hitchcock's voyeur here in Rear Window is an everyman hero, and not a murderer. If the Master of Suspense can seduce all the fans of James Stewart and Grace Kelly into his world of guilt and murky morality, well, all power to him.

Rear Window reveals new fun, even after being seen any number of times. During this screening Savant better appreciated Grace Kelly's acting style (it's her best movie) and her self-conscious attempts to bait Stewart with every charm at her disposal. Also admirable is the finely tuned logic of every character's reaction, and every step of the trap that closes in on Raymond Burr. He seems sincerely, wearily aware of being the heavy in dozens of low-budg thrillers. The only less-than-solid detail is the efficacy of Jeff Jefferies' flashbulb defense. Maybe the first flash would slow down a determined killer .. by about half a second. Yet the gag works in context because we feel so threatened, we want the flashes to stop him. The actor Savant thinks needs to be appreciated more in Rear Window is Judith Evelyn, Miss Lonelyheart. Her pantomime skill telegraphs well from twenty yards away and she provides a pathetic contrast, trying desperately to catch her man when equipped with none of Grace Kelly's advantages. William Castle nabbed her several years later to play a pivotal deaf-mute role in his The Tingler, a recommended title.

The Trouble With Harry -- The trouble with Alfred Hitchcock is that his most popular - and best - movies are so incredibly huge in scope and engaging in story and characters that his smaller films sometimes get lost in the shuffle. When faced with choosing between Vertigo, North By Northwest, or Strangers on a Train a viewer could easily overlook a film like The Trouble with Harry (1955).

The trouble with Harry, of course, is that Harry is dead, and while creating the sweet, simple comedic framework around his death Hitchcock toys with his favorite fascinations: The morbid sense of mortality and the constrictions and pitfalls of human relationships. For Hitchcock's characters being dead and being married are often similar experiences and for Harry they are one and the same.

Once Harry expires he becomes the source of much discussion in a small Vermont town and the focus of a day of bonding between John Forsythe, Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, and, in her film debut, Shirley MacLaine. Hitchcock uses the rustic environment to inform these characters and their silly banter is endlessly funny. The film starts a little slow, bogged down with a couple of forced monologues, but once the characters are all introduced it really becomes one of Hitchcock's most enjoyable films.

This tone of comedy mixed with intrigue is reminiscent of his earlier masterpiece The Lady Vanishes and, while veddy British in tone, The Trouble with Harry should be easily accessible to all audiences. Not that Hitchcock lets the film go to straight comedy; He still sprinkles it with suspenseful details, like a closet door that won't stay shut, but these moments serve both as tension-builders and as comic relief. Hitchcock was always able to meld his style to the material at hand.

The Trouble with Harry is also notable for featuring Hitchcock's first collaboration with composer Bernard Herrmann. The score is light and comic but also underscores the macabre sense of humor that the director brings to the picture. It is a fitting precursor to the fantastic work to come in great scores like Vertigo and Psycho.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) -- Frankly, in the 1970s we probably gave The Man Who Knew Too Much short shrift because at the time film students were averse to anything with Doris Day in it. Now Ms. Day's comedies don't seem so annoying and her performance in this film comes off as exceptionally good. Although the movie is another plot-driven spy chase, the identification with the McKenna's plight is very strong, with Jo's trauma over her missing son extremely believable. She is the afluent '50s American mother, for whom security and prosperity is a birthright, and any disruption of that is a psychic disaster. Ben's immediate solution for the shock is to dope Jo up with drugs, just one very telling '50s moment in this very bourgeois '50s movie.

Starting out as a typical Hollywood fake travelogue, we assess the McKennas a lot differently than audiences did in 1956. With the big stars rearscreened or matted into the locations, it's clear that Day and Stewart got nowhere near the real dirt and heat of Marrakech. The script has them making jokes and subtly belittling almost everything they see in the Arab country, from the food to the clothing to the manners of those around them. They aren't candidates for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, exactly, but they are overly concerned with manners and keeping appointments and mainly what they are owed in courtesy from strangers. This makes them easy prey for the sinister types who take advantage of them (no spoilers here, Savant guesses a lot of people haven't seen the movie), but still they're not stupid. Although they probably would have had equal success cooperating with Scotland Yard, the determination of Jo and Ben to find Hank on their own against cunning spies in an unfamiliar country is courageous and convincing.

Hitchcock again knows his central story is the star and doesn't gimmick up the film as much as he did the first time out. A sequence in a tiny church seems a bit more forced than the in the broad original. The sharpshooting talent of the mother in the 1934 version becomes Doris Day's singing celebrity, which is sometimes a benefit, and sometimes not. After being peeved that the "Lisa" song from Rear Window didn't give him the pop hit he was looking for, the composers of "Que será, será" really came through for Hitch on this one.

The concluding concert is given a lot of attention in the Laurent Bouzereau documentary included as a welcome extra on the disc. Letting the rising drama of a powerful piece of music help build the tension of a dramatic climax works even better here than in Hitchcock's first try, and the sequence has the epic feel of a huge theatrical situation held completely within the directorial control of a master. The recurring Hitchcock tension between a complacent mob and the emotionally distressed heroine pays off in unquestioning audience identification - we feel drawn in and involved, but without the aftertaste of manipulation which accompanies similar scenes by lesser talent.

One again, the baddies are a well-orchestrated lot. There's no wicked mother for the villain, but mother instincts stand out in strong relief in two of the kidnappers. The actual assassin is played by one of the most frightening actors ever to grace a mainstream movie - Reggie Nalder, whose face looks every bit as ravaged as Chaney's Phantom of the Opera. Just seeing him smile or narrow those eyes down the gunsight brought on chills when Savant was a child.

The Man Who Knew Too Much has some really fun casting for genre film fans. Whereas the main casting uses top-notch English talent, the bits are a who's who of Science Fiction and Horror names, making Savant think ol' Hitchy was a closet fan of monster movies. The little group in the hotel includes Hillary Brooke (Invaders from Mars), Richard Wattis (The Abominable Snowman), Alix Talton (The Deadly Mantis) and Carolyn Jones (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Ambrose Chappell is played by Hammer regular Richard Wordsworth, of The Quatermass Experiment and The Revenge of Frankenstein. And the IMDB identifies an embassy official as Wolf Preiss, presumably Wolfgang Preiss of The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse!

Vertigo -- We're told that Vertigo laid an egg on its initial release, but it's Savant's pick for Hitchcock's most moving picture. Part of this is personal nostalgia, how and when one saw it, and the fact that it was out of circulation and unavailable for the better part of a decade. Hitchcock has been criticized as a cinemaphile who wanted audience adulation but was mostly concerned with extending his filmic grammar and syntax - to many, a picture like Rope can seem an empty exercise in technique. Vertigo is cinematic magic at the service of an intensely romantic mystery. Hitchcock goes to delirious lengths -- in several instances beyond narrative credibility -- to tell a fundamentally sick tale of obsession that seems to have personal significance for the often-aloof director. It's no accident that the original writers were French roman noir experts specializing in twisted tales - Boileau and Narcejac are responsible for the original story of Eyes without a Face as well.

These days it seems love stories have to be given an aberrant angle, but Vertigo came out when the majority of screen relationships were completely conventional. Stewart's Scotty Ferguson falls in love with a fantasy incarnated by Kim Novak's mysterious siren. Poor Barbara Bel Geddes can't compete - Scotty drops her flat after she tries to puncture Scotty's mania. Scotty is sort of a necrophile - he's in love with a woman he believes is possessed by the ghostly spirit of a literal llorona, an abandoned madwoman who searches for her lost child. Scotty knows how sick he is and doesn't care ... he's on a personal journey to wherever the mania takes him.

Vertigo has Bernard Herrman's most intense love music, which completely takes over in the film's many dialogue-free passages. Hitchcock bends plausibility and even allows his vortex of passion to warp the visuals. Novak's Madeleine/Judy appears half-dissolved in a shaft of greenish light, and Scotty discovers that by recreating a simulation of lost woman, he can mentally transport himself to a different time and place. The movie evokes the surreal eroticism of Peter Ibbetson as well as a goodly slice of Val Lewton. To be wholly consumed by desire is risky business -- nobody can be expected to understand our private lusts. Men will choose fantasy over the reality every time, and the most mature man may be mortified when his irrational dreams don't come true.

Psycho -- One of the most talked about and written-up films of all time, Psycho began as Hitchcock's personal challenge from to himself. Cheap horror pix were cleaning up at the boxoffice, even a series by a director who made personal appearances in his own trailers and used carnival-style audience participation gimmicks. Hitch would show them all up by making a class horror film with as tight a budget as the independents, but with a difference - it would deliver real shocks and scares instead of mild haunted-house thrills.

In Psycho Hitch saw an opportunity to upset apple carts all over Hollywood. Robert Bloch's gruesome story was a true-life horror that nobody in their right mind would consider filming. It had lust, madness, implied incest, matricide and mutilation -- all in a small California town where everybody thinks they know everyone else's secrets, and the second-most dangerous killer is an old biddy who wants to make sure her rats won't suffer when she poisons them. The story structure knocked audiences for a loop, killing off the main character just as we were getting used to her and making the rest of the movie a nervous game of hide and seek. We expect to see a knife-wielding killer grandma burst from any corner of the screen at any time, while a second potential victim sets herself up as cleaver bait as she walks into harm's way: "I can handle a sick old woman."

Anthony Perkins redefined who could be a mad killer in movies made from this point forward --- anybody at all. The biggest clue to finding a psycho killer turns out to be that he behaves normally - perhaps too normally. While putting his audience through the ringer, Joseph Stefano's script indulges in an unbroken line of morbid humor. Delivered by the disarmingly sincere and personable Norman Bates, the macabre quips have a creepy air of calculation -- the offhand remarks of a demented man who has his 'normal guy' act down pat.

When Hitchcock wants to send us up the walls, he give us a montage murder, splintering a stabbing death into dozens of short cuts that fool us into thinking we're seeing content taboo for 1960 - real stabs (no) and real nudity (well, sort of). The sequence ends like a horrible joke, with death staring back at us inert and glassy-eyed. The camera executes some amazing maneuvers here -- again, for 1960 -- that communicate far better than words. We seem to be flushed down the shower drain with Marion Crane's lifeblood.

Modern audiences who couldn't see Psycho in a theater just can't know the impact it had when new. Marion's sister searches the death house, seeing odd statuary and a creepy depression in a bed ... and then looks at Norman's room with its pitiful stuffed toys. An unhappy rabbit is the limit of despair. She opens a journal and reacts to what's written inside --- we never see but our imaginations jump to vile possibilities.

Hitchcock realized that he'd frequently miscalculated with his exposition by assuming that the mass audience he coveted could follow all of his complicated plots. Frequently having gone over an audience's head with new idea or a shrewd plot twist, by the late fifties he was building "Hitch for dummies" scenes into all of his pictures. In Vertigo Kim Novak crudely writes a confession and then destroys it unsent, to establish facts that the audience should be able to figure out for itself. It didn't help. Perhaps that why Leo G. Carroll shows up to redundantly recap the whole plot, twice in North by NorthWest. In Psycho Simon Oakland gives a minutes-long explanation of split personality dynamics that sounds like it was borrowed from Dead of Night. The conclusion is saved by a creepy staredown with madness that can give any viewer a chill.

The Birds -- Francois Truffaut began interviewing Alfred Hitchcock for his career book not long after the enormous success of Psycho, one of the by-products of which was the critical elevation of Hitchcock to new heights of genius. A big part of the upsurge in artistic European films was the deification of names like Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman, while over in America, Hitchcock was the most vital and active of the classic era directors still working - Hawks, Wyler, Stevens, Ford. Many critics suddenly expected directors to be god-like artists, making difficult-to-understand masterpieces with hidden meanings.

Hitchcock's next film would seem to be a response to the deep-dish critical acclaim. The Birds is a weighty study of modern anxieties in the guise of an apocalyptic science fiction film. The unexplainable happens - birds rise up to attack mankind - and fragile humans have to do some fast emotional adjusting.

The critic to read about Hitchcock as a deep dish genius is Robin Wood, in his book Hitchcock's Films. He nailed the poetic meanings of all the big titles way back in the 1960s, and I still re-read him for pleasure. For The Birds Wood came up with a theory about Complacency coupled with the simple but ultimately staggering idea that the bird attacks represent the tensions between the characters. Hitchcock and Hunter suggest that Life is an anxious struggle for peace and security. When the rug gets pulled out from under our daily lives, to shatter our relationships and deprive us of the beliefs and safeguards that we feel protect us, anxiety results. Anxiety in 1963 always gets traced right back to the Atom Bomb, but The Birds is more universal in its view. Chaos never erupts from an expected direction, as several hundred thousand Louisianans have learned. Beautiful as it may be, the world is capable of dealing out merciless destruction and ruin that have nothing to do with moral merit.

The Birds is the ultimate Shaggy Dog story, a gripper that doesn't resolve itself. It's a business-as-usual tale that toys with audience expectations. We follow self-possessed, slightly snooty model Melanie Daniels around for the better part of half an hour wondering if Richard Deacon will lunge at her in a hallway, or if the two lovebirds in her sports car will suddenly transform into monsters. Surely Hitchcock sat through L'avventura amused to find himself wondering when something was going to happen, and realized that his carry-over reputation from Psycho (and a particularly provocative set of TV ads) would keep his audience in suspense almost indefinitely, without anything actually happening.

Hitchcock eventually splatters the screen with a barrage of special effects of mass bird attacks that are still kinetic wonders -- although I'm sure CGI people will immediately notice that rooms full of sparrows don't throw enough shadows, etc. He surprises us by following one 'highlight' bird attack almost immediately with another even more ferocious one. There are masterful suspense scenes where we experience the dread of investigating strange rooms -- those broken teacups, all in a row -- capped by real gore. Of all the later Hitchcock movies, The Birds is one that's really compromised on a small screen. There are many extremely wide shots where the scope of empty spaces is important. The masterful soundtrack needs full concentration, as there is no conventional movie score to tell us how to react. Certain kinds of viewers will be pulled deeper into this thriller than any of the others.

Perhaps viewers are ready again to see the film's performances for what they are, rich readings of normal people under stress, revealing themselves and reaching out to each other. Hitchcock encourages many readings. The attacks do begin with Melanie's brash intrusion, bringing La Dolce Vita with her from that Roman fountain she jumped into (with Antonioni?). Maybe she is a witch. The stunning 'God's Eye View' at the beginning of the town attack implies that the birds are divine plague sent against us. Just like horror characters arguing about vampires, the citizens communicate poorly and are too immersed in their private affairs, to rally effectively against the threat. The birds kill innocent Annie and try to keep Melanie from joining the family as well. The admittance of the lovebirds into the getaway car can be explained, but remains one of the film's thematic mysteries.

The Birds was the first Hitchcock film Savant saw in a theater - by himself at age eleven. I was traumatized and fascinated at the same time. When the film ended so abruptly, I remember (perhaps falsely) an image of the car going much further down the road, and only a small Universal logo appearing up in the corner of the shot - there was no 'The End' card. It's the first movie at which I just sat staring at closed curtains for a couple of minutes, trying to remember who I was beyond a completely unnerved kid. When I stepped out into downtown San Bernardino, the whole world seemed to have changed. Just the kind of result that gave Hitchcock nights of satisfied sleep, no doubt.

Marine -- Marnie is the Hitchcock movie where everything begins to slip. He still has the collaboration of his cameraman Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini and composer Bernard Herrmann but the story is a trite throwback to 1940s faux-psychology. Spellbound was saved by its star chemistry, but Sean Connery and 'Tippi' Hedren never really click as screen lovers. Marnie's childhood trauma is just too pat and the whole business of being sent into shock by the color red equally foolish. This kind of movie requires acting skill and Hedren isn't up to the task.

Robin Wood was able to find plenty of riches in the visual details. The 'alligator purse' that rather crudely represents Marnie's frigidity and hostility to men comes off as misogynistic in the extreme. But there's a certain sympathetic poetry on the otherwise abortive honeymoon cruise, when a lot of bad theatrics finish with a telling pan to a round ship's porthole window. How many women find themselves the sexual property of men they have no feeling for?

The excellent supporting cast, with sly Diane Baker commenting from the sides, comes to very little. We don't believe that Sean Connery -- looking his 007 best -- is an American businessman any more than we buy the much-discussed terrible paintings that place Marnie's mom's house within 50 paces of a docked freighter. Savant realized that auteurists were trying too hard when I read defenses of Marnie -- Robin Wood's included -- that claimed Hitch wanted the matte paintings to look artificial - they represent his knowledge that the instant-cure ending is a false one. Oh, honestly ...

The artificiality extends to the reels of rear screen work, especially the jarringly unconvincing horseback scenes. Faced with tight budgets, a few other classic-era directors got tired of using all their energy to maintain a level of visual realism and opted to move their films toward minimalist basics. Hitchcock just skimps on the detail work.

Partial redemption comes with Bernard Herrmann's score. It's pitched at high drama and does wonders at giving the picture a semblance of shape and purpose. Marnie is easily rewatched just to follow the music, even when the movie seems a waste of time.

Torn Curtain -- Marnie shows Hitchcock slipping, but Torn Curtain is a complete disaster. Only a top director like Hitch could entice actors like Connery, Newman and Andrews and for each working with the Master of Suspense was a career tripping stone. Paul Newman and Julie Andrews have almost no chemistry in an almost ridiculously silly story about a false defector stealing some needed rocket science from East Germany. The entire third act of the movie is a boring bus ride that only serves to make us realize that our stars never left Universal city. Uninspired location work with doubles dampens hopes for excitement. Much of the film takes place in front of process screens or in sloppy matte paintings.

Poor Ms. Andrews is made to look like a simp, finally ecstatic that her boyfriend scientist isn't a traitorous defector, but an incompetent spy. The movie is immature compared to Fritz Lang's similar Cloak and Dagger and much less entertaining than Paul Newman's similar The Prize, an earlier Hitchcock rip-off by Mark Robson that's no prize-winner either. East Germans are either sinister spies or foolish 'freedom fighters,' with the ridiculous false bus trip a budgetarily expeditious way to transport the characters across Germany on a short shooting schedule.

It's clear that Hitchcock was engaged only by his murder scene, which is particularly interesting in that the security man Gromek is almost the film's only character to be given a personality - even Newman has to coast through with his one-man, one-secret role. After that, one must watch carefully to find anything even resembling a Hitchcock 'touch' -- like Tamara Toumanova spinning her head and stopping to stare at Newman with every turn. She's much better as the ballet dancer in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; all she's given to do here is be yet another vicious East German shouting for the polizei to arrest our hero.

Torn Curtain is a particularly dull Cold War thriller with exposition that constantly bogs down the forward momentum, explaining how people get from one place to another. When a nosy cab driver informs on Newman, we see every step of the process, a very un-Hitchcock exercise in literalism. Structurally, the picture is a bust -- Lila Kedrova's cloying would-be émigré seems to be inserted into the final scenes in a desperate attempt to liven things up.

Topaz -- Topaz sees Hitchcock going with a no-star cast (even John Forsythe puts his name at the bottom of the cast list) for a numbingly literal espionage story. An excellent cast of Frenchmen (Phillipe Noiret, Michel Piccoli) are stuck emoting in English. Someone is always explaining what happened in the scene that came before, what they are doing now and what they're going to do in the next scene - this has to be Hitchcock's most talky picture yet that didn't start as a stage play.

Once again Hitchcock travels the world, but this time he actually shoots in Paris. The language barrier prohibits anything like believability, and lead character Frederick Stafford is uncommonly stiff as a French spymaster doing favors for the Americans. In a situation duplicated from Notorious he plays Cary Grant to German actress Karin Dor's (You Only Live Twice) Ingrid Bergman as she beds John Vernon's Claude Rains. Two more in-jokes to earlier Hitch pix are a man who escapes a hotel by dropping onto an awning (Foreign Correspondent) and a pair of telltale seagulls (guess). Savant spotted several more, but nobody jumped up and asked "What is Topaz?" of a music hall performer who felt compelled to give an answer.

Topaz is even more of a Cold War picture than was Torn Curtain. John Vernon -- that's Dean Wormer from Animal House -- is an aide to Fidel Castro, and in a recreation of Fidel's stay in a Harlem hotel while addressing the United Nations, Cubans are portrayed as complete pigs and revolutionaries as cheap thugs. All we learn about Cuba is that it's a police state torturing and murdering (take your pick) innocent patriots or traitorous spies. Vernon's secretary is open to a cheap bribe from Roscoe Lee Browne, a Harlem florist/agent who gives the movies' only refreshing performance.

There are about twenty exciting seconds in Topaz; a scuffle here and there and one breathtaking shot in which a woman's dress spreads out like a bloodstain as she is lowered, dead, to the floor. The rest is dramatically inert, with John Stafford ( a star of many French James Bond wanna-be thrillers (OSS 117; Agent 505) that haven't been seen in decades) mixing espionage with his personal love life. The action is diffused over too many characters, and the movie doesn't as much move to its conclusion as simply end without an ending.

Frenzy -- Frenzy was quite a bounce-back movie for Hitchcock, working again in England and seemingly enjoying doing a film about a murder spree with plenty of garrotings and gargling tongues. The narrative hangs together better than anything since The Birds and Hitchcock is clearly heavily engaged in his intricate camerawork and tight plotting.

Hitch may have been re-invigorated by the sudden explosion of nudity and violence on the screen, as if someone took him by the arm, showed him The Bird with The Crystal Plumage and The Devils and said he could now do whatever he wanted. Just when his peers were calling it quits or turning out Old Man's Movies, Hitchcock gathered a lot of attention for the last time.

The film is as cold-blooded as Hitchcock ever got, with ugly sex rape murders in unpleasant closeup and a brutal attitude toward its cast of would-be victims. Anna Massey survived Michael Powell's Peeping Tom only to be treated like a sack of potatoes and dumped nude onto a highway from the back of a truck. Charming. Our hero Jon Finch had just finished playing a ruthlessly savage MacBeth for Roman Polanski and isn't an attractive person here either. The fact that he's innocent of the infamous necktie murders seems beside the point -- we don't identify with him so the usual "man on the run" thrills just aren't there.

Frenzy does have plenty of tension, and it's much more intense than anything Hitch did in his declining years, from Marnie to Family Plot. Anthony Shaffer's screenplay is tight. The only really flat aspect is the film's attempts at humor, especially the food jokes that just sit there.

Thanks to the ton of publicity generated for the big 1972 release, Laurent Bouzereau's docu (he appears briefly on the banks of the Thames) has plenty of on-set film to show, with Hitchcock looking hale, hearty and eager to be a bad little boy with his mischievous movie murders.

Family Plot -- amily Plot is Hitchcock's final film and a decidedly mixed bag. Depending on a heavily plotted and rather lightweight script by Ernest Lehman (of North by NorthWest), it has plenty of charming moments provided mostly by Barbara Harris' personable psychic. She and her cabbie boyfriend Bruce Dern have cooked up a scheme to make $10,000 by finding a lost heir, not realizing that their target (William Devane) is the mastermind behind a number of slick kidnap-ransom crimes. It's engaging as far as it goes; the actors are allowed to stretch a bit within the narrow parameters of the story and the movie finishes in the plus column ... barely.

The problems with the film are totally unnecessary. Devane and Karen Black's 'brilliant, perfect' crimes are like something out of an episode of Batman, with hidden identities and getaway schemes that couldn't possibly work. And Hitchcock is again far too literal in his storytelling. Devane and Black kidnap a Bishop right out of his own church, a fairly nice nod to the old British period, when Hitch would joke about groups of people being so stupid they'd do things like applaud a man being taken away in handcuffs. But the kidnappers ruin everything by discussing why the Bishop's congregation didn't react to the crime unfolding right in front of their eyes. It's as if Hitchcock were stricken by 'explain-it-itis', the fear that audiences will no longer connect with things they see happening right in front of their faces.

The DVD has a very good Laurent Bouzereau docu in which we're told that Hitchcock was so physically limited, the one action scene involving a runaway car was done by a second unit. The bluescreen views of Harris and Dern flipping out in the brakeless car are intercut with a speeding POV shot, which doesn't work particularly well. It might have, if poor Ms. Harris wasn't directed to act like a nut case in a Three Stooges comedy.

Since Family Plot doesn't build to any spectacular climaxes, what's left are some amusing plot hijinks as amateur sleuths Harris and Dern stumble into the path of the slick professionals. The film is engaging and passable but since we always expect something exceptional from Hitchcock, we're bound to be disappointed. Savant saw the film at its 1976 Filmex premiere in Century City, with an audience that was distinctly underwhelmed. That's the curse of making half a century's worth of riveting movies ... one is expected to keep it up forever.


Content: 4.5/5
Video: 3.5/5
Audio: 4/5
Extras: 4.5/5
Replay: 4/5

Recommended

Glenn Erickson (DVDTalk.com)