One Hundred Years of Hitchcock

To celebrate his 100th birthday, Alfred Hitchcock makes an appearance in kamera. In an extract from his new book, Paul Duncan explains why Hitch's films will survive into the next millenium

Alfred Hitchcock pervades our consciousness. There is no doubt in my mind that virtually everyone in the Western world has seen at least one of his movies. We have seen the world through his eyes and we find it frightening. Alfred Hitchcock was afraid, and he was able to communicate his fear through the use of situation.

His films are scary, not because the people are scary, but because they are nice, even attractive. Awkward, shy, gawky Norman Bates? He wouldn't hurt a fly.

His films are scary, not because they take place in the dark shadows of the night, but because they are situated in bright sunlight, in plain sight, amongst the crowd.

His films are scary, not because he is explicit, direct, but because his world view is coded in abstraction. The Birds ends with the world in chaos, and the people having to tiptoe through the rest of their lives because, at any moment, the world will turn on the humans. At the end of Vertigo, a man possessed of obsession for a woman, sees the thing he loves killed all over again. Life not only puts the knife in, it twists it as well.

The reason why people are uneasy about watching Hitchcock is because they know he may actually kill people off. He knows that their experiences in the story may damage or cripple them forever. Janet Leigh is killed in Psycho; Mrs Thorwald is killed and chopped up in Rear Window; Vera Miles ends up in a sanatorium at the end of The Wrong Man. People are killed in virtually every movie he made. Worse than that, Hitchcock shows you the killing and the killers but you do not avert your eyes. You want to see it all.

Hitchcock is not Hitchcockian. When people describe a Brian De Palma or Richard Franklin or whoever film as being Hitchcockian they are usually referring to certain camera movements and angles. They refer to the visual language that Hitchcock used. People are then confused when they see Hitchcock's movies, because they're never quite the same as the modern movies. The reason for this is because Hitchcock's visual language is developed from story, and the story is one of suspense.

Suspense is the art of telling you that something bad is going to happen in a specific timeframe, but you do not want the bad thing to happen. This tension is held by Hitchcock, who strings you along, plays you like a fiddle. His most ambitious, sustained and, it must be said, successful attempt was Psycho. After Janet Leigh is killed we are not let off the hook until the end of the film, over an hour later. However, the Hitchcockian directors mostly concentrate on the shock aspects of Psycho rather than the suspense elements.

After looking at quite a few films, I began to develop a view of Hitchcock as a cubist film-maker. What I mean by this is that he places the characters within an imaginary cube and moves the camera along the sides of the cube. This gives his films a uniquely formal quality. Think of the following angles:

When seen from the back, we are discovering, seeing the world from the protagonist's point of view.

When seen from the front, we are seeing the protagonist's reaction to the world they are seeing.

When seen from above, we are seeing the ironical, detached point of view, without emotion.

When seen from the side, we are seeing someone else's point of view of the character, usually sinister because there is no eye contact, then the character turns to look at us and we are afraid of them.

Control

Hitchcock controlled his life with obsessive detail. He never liked to leave his office during working hours. He wore the same type of suit and tie so that he didn't have to think about clothes. He took the same suites in hotels around the world, so that he knew where he was, felt comfortable, safe.

He controlled his films in the same way. Trained as an artist, he drew the film before filming. Film is a visual medium after all. Just as an artist collects fruit or models to paint, Hitchcock collected actors. Does an artist depict the feelings of the model, or does the artist project the sympathetic part of themselves upon the model? I think the latter is the case.

To Hitchcock, actors represented a style of person, in the way that buildings represented a style of architecture. A balanced and directed combination of elements result in a whole vision. To Hitchcock, the actors were part of both the image, the story, and the subtext.

Although critics tend to lump the James Stewart films together, or the Cary Grant films, and imply obsessions with actors and actresses, they forget to tell you that Hitchcock constantly switched from one actor to another as the style and content of the stories dictated. James Stewart appeared in films in 1948, 1954, 1956 and 1958. Cary Grant appeared in films in 1941, 1946, 1955 and 1959. This is not obsessive behaviour from a man who made 21 films between 1941 and 1959.

All the evidence seems to point to Hitchcock being obsessed with the main female protagonists in his films. The theory of many critics who analyse his work is that onscreen Hitch liked to perform sadistic acts on his actresses, yet many of the actresses themselves (except Tippi Hedren) said that Hitch was a perfect gentleman, sometimes over-protective, and almost fatherly in his concern. Whatever the truth, it has to be said that most of his films feature very strong female leads or, at least, the stories are about troubled women. There are many Hitchcock films from a female perspective: Sabotage, Rebecca, Spellbound, Suspicion, Shadow Of A Doubt, Marnie. And the female characters in the others are more than a match for any man. In his films, women are independent, opinionated, qualified and often quite aware of their sexuality.

Experimentation

It is something of an understatement to say that Hitchcock was an accomplished storyteller. One can see that after, say, twenty films or so, it could get boring unless you stretched yourself every now and again. Hitchcock stretched himself with some amazingly minimalist films. Lifeboat was a film about a group of people in a lifeboat. That's it. That's all the production designer had to do: a few bits of wreckage, the odd hull, a sky and some choppy water. Rope is a series of eight 10 minute takes set in one apartment room. Rear Window's set is James Stewart, in a wheelchair, leg in plaster, in a room, watching and listening to people in and around a courtyard.

Hitchcock was constantly striving to tell stories in as imaginative a way as possible. The phenomenal number of visual ideas he had in his work, especially in his early films, are heavily influenced by the German expressionistic films of the 1920s, which used trick photography and symbolic images to tell stories. Add to this the rhythmic editing of Sergei Eisenstein, D W Griffith and others.

As his style and confidence grew, Hitchcock abandoned the symbolic images, and only used trick photography and special editing techniques for key moments in his films. Another reason for this is because, with the introduction of sound and music, a lot more fact and emotion could be conveyed without the need for visual symbolism.

Story

Much is made of Hitchcock's acute visual sense, and the spectacular set pieces he concocts. Yet, they must have plot, and they must have characters, although the measure of each varies depending on the type of film Hitchcock made.

The best writers in the world wrote for Hitchcock: Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Evan Hunter, Brian Moore.

Although not bad, the source material was never brilliant. It is significant that Hitchcock never adapted a literary masterpiece to the screen. This was because he believed, quite rightly, that if a genuine masterpiece had found its definitive form as a book, Hitch couldn't improve on it. Hitchcock only adapted those stories which leant themselves to visual interpretation. Furthermore, he had no hesitation in completely jettisoning scenes and characters from his source material in order to service the film. Raymond Chandler, when working on the script for Strangers On A Train, complained that Hitchcock had already completely visualised the film in his head, so Chandler couldn't add anything but dialogue to progress the film from one visual to another.

It is not generally known that Hitchcock's greatest collaborator was his wife, Alma. One day older, she had begun work in movies at the age of 16, working her way up to the post of continuity girl and editor a long time before Hitchcock had doodled his first title for the silents. She was credited on many of his films from Hitchcock's first in 1925 up until Stage Fright in 1950, but she had far more of an impact than those credits suggest. Alma had a sharp brain and she wasn't afraid to use it. Each day, as Hitchcock returned home, he would discuss the day's script with her and together they would tighten it, then come up with new visual and verbal ideas for the next day's session with whichever world-famous writer he was currently employing. His collaborators often complain (to biographers) that Alma's name was on the credits, citing Hitchcock's predilection for extra cash as the reason for Alma's credit, but they miss the point entirely: she was an unseen part of the team.

For Hitchcock, the film was a continuous series of images which resulted in a physical and/or emotional response. His rollercoaster ride of The Man Who Knew Too Much is repeated in The 39 Steps, Young And Innocent, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, etc. right up until North By Northwest. He left the field open for action heroes from James Bond to Arnold Schwarzenegger to exploit.

He rearranged the plot to set up either surprise or suspense situations. Mostly he selected suspense. The novel The Living & The Dead by Boileau & Narcejac, the basis for Vertigo, tells two stories concurrently, one in flashback, which reveals in its closing passages that the woman in both stories is one and the same. That is a surprise saved for the end. Hitchcock rearranged the structure, telling one after the other, so that the first story is about the dead woman and the second is about the living. Early on in the second story, he reveals to the audience, but not to James Stewart's character, that the woman is one and the same. This has two effects. Firstly, the woman and her motives become real and understandable. Secondly, we are held in suspense for an hour, waiting for James Stewart to find out the secret, and wondering what he'll do next.

It should be recognised that Hitchcock made more than one type of film. People talk as though they are all the same, as though they were supposed to elicit the same emotions from people all the time. This is blatantly untrue, although it is true to say he did make similar films, as the following list makes clear: Man-On-The-Run (The 39 Steps, Saboteur, North By Northwest); Spy Thriller (Secret Agent, Notorious, Torn Curtain, Topaz); Horror Suspense (The Lodger, Blackmail, Psycho, The Birds); The Wrong Man (The Wrong Man, I Confess, Frenzy); Psychological (Spellbound, Strangers On A Train, Vertigo, Marnie); Murder Mystery (Murder!, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window); Black Comedy (The Trouble With Harry, Family Plot).

The problem with making such a list is that everyone is going to disagree about placing the film in a certain category. I sympathise, because many of Hitchcock's films can be placed in several categories, depending on your point of view. For example, Frenzy lurks somewhere between horror suspense, the wrong man, the man on the run and black comedy, depending upon whether your point of view is the killer, the man accused of the killing or the policeman investigating the case.

Horror

Suspense is the feeling of being afraid for one or more characters in the movie. Ooh-err, that boy is going to get blown up in Sabotage. Crikey, Teresa Wright is going to get offed by Uncle Joe Cotten in Shadow Of A Doubt.

Horror is a kettle of a different colour. Horror is being afraid for yourself as much as for other people. In film, the horror moments are often triggered by surprise or by images which are unacceptable to society.

I suggest that a horror film, by definition, is one with a supernatural basis. Who can forget Nosferatu, Frankenstein and The Haunting? They, and most horror films, are great fun, they give you a fright, you release lots of pent up emotions and then you forget them. These films use distorted views of reality (light and sound), but they always return to reality in the end. Horror tales are morality tales. They are adult versions of children's fairy tales. Far from being disruptive and a bad influence, they reinforce a white, Christian view of the world.

Hitchcock marked a change of approach to the suspense thriller film, by turning it into a horror thriller film. He did this with Psycho, financially his most successful film. Significantly, it was made as a cheap little experiment by Hitchcock's TV crew, not his usual film crew. It is also much more like his TV series, the Roald Dahl, Tales Of The Unexpected, sting-in-the-tail type of story. The texture of the film is grainy, realistic, almost documentary, like The Wrong Man, as opposed to the smooth, luxurious images of his big-budget films.

The surprising and unacceptable images? Well, showing people in vests or underwear, sweating, going to the toilet, Janet Leigh getting killed off a half hour into the movie. Take your pick.Two other films must be mentioned here. Two years earlier, Dennis Weaver appeared as a thin, nerdy motel man who menaced Janet Leigh in Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil. Peeping Tom, written and directed by Michael Powell, dealt with the viewer's relationship with the film-maker. Basically, in Peeping Tom, the central character is a nice boy, whom everyone thinks is a little strange but likes anyway. Our hero goes out and kills women, as a sort of revenge for his mother not being around as a child. Worse than that, this monster films the women as they die. Worse still, he makes them watch themselves die. The subtext seems to be "Why do you like watching other people die?" with the extrapolation being "If you like watching other people die, then you'd like to see your own death even more."

From very early on in his career, Hitch put the viewer in the position of his characters. You see a character on the screen looking at something, you see what they see (you in their position), then you see the character react to that something. It's simple.

In The Lodger, the Bunting family look up at their ceiling to see the light fittings shake, then we are looking up at the ceiling, at the light fittings shaking, the ceiling made of glass and watching the lodger walking up and down. Hitch made that in 1927.

In Rear Window, we are in the position of James Stewart, realising something is wrong, but not being able to do anything about it, being helpless in the wheelchair, as we are helpless in our cinema seats.

In Psycho, we are Norman Bates, looking through a hole in the wall, at Janet Leigh undressing (beautiful, forbidden Janet Leigh!) In this film, more than any other, we are both the villain and the hero, able to switch sides, to satisfy both our civilised and uncouth instincts.

Glass Half Empty

Ultimately, Hitchcock's world view was more pessimistic than optimistic. His films give a satisfying physical resolution (the baddie dies, the accused man does not get put in jail) but the mental anguish and consequences continue (the mastermind is still at large, the central character has to live with their mistakes, people are dead). Fry falls off The Statue Of Liberty at the end of Saboteur, yet the upper class mastermind and his associates remain free to plot against the US Government. At the end of Blackmail, the girl and her detective boyfriend walk off into the distance, but they do not embrace, hold hands or show any affection, connection. Their trust in each other has gone, and may never be repaired. The same can be said of Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion.

This is why Hitchcock's films will survive, because they give food for thought. They unsettle us and we don't know why. They do not assume we are morons, they let us work things out for ourselves. Eventually, we work out that Hitchcock is telling us that there are no pat solutions to life, that things don't necessarily work out right in the end.