Tag: Alfred Hitchcock

September 12, 2008 / / Film Notes

PSYCHO and Hitchcock’s Macabre Sense of Humor

Psycho – 1960 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock

I have a tremendous amount of respect and affection for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, easily one the director’s best-known and most influential films, and certainly one of my favorites. It remains a study in the successful undermining of audience expectations (cannily using what we know about genre and even film stardom against us), and on a personal level, it was one of the first films to get me thinking about the structures and strategies that filmmakers use (it also may well have taught me the meanings of the words “inordinately” and “aspic.”) Yet while it has a well-earned reputation as an exemplary thriller and an indispensable horror film, the sly humor of Psycho is occasionally overlooked.

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September 4, 2008 / / Film Notes

REAR WINDOW

Rear Window – 1954 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock

If you have seen Rear Window before, you already know the treat that lies ahead and if you haven’t, well then we envy you; you are in for viewing one of the few masterpieces cinema ever produced.

Made by the great Alfred Hitchcock in 1954, this thriller is jam-packed with multi-layered stories, tensions and performances, all meticulously executed by the master. In the hands of most directors, it might have been an unholy mess but Hitchcock superbly pieces it together like a clockmaker putting together a Swiss watch from scratch.

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September 4, 2008 / / Film Notes

VERTIGO

 

Vertigo – 1959 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Upon its release in 1958, Vertigo was neither a critical nor a popular success. It was, in fact, a bomb. Small wonder; it tackled taboo themes not discussed in the sanctity of people’s homes much less on the silver screen: sexual obsession, reincarnation, mental illness, dark desires. Today, it is regarded not only as Alfred Hitchcock’s finest film but also one of the best films ever made.

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March 18, 2008 / / Film Notes

VERTIGO

Kris Tronerud

Universal, 1958 Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

The great French director René Clair once remarked that moviegoers, as they sit in the darkness watching a film, enter into a “dreamlike state”; and over the years, many great directors, from Melies to Bunuel to Fellini to Lynch have aided in that process by gleefully plunging their viewers into the human dreamscape. But no film has ever so straightforwardly, simply, and seductively taken on the actual form and structure of dreaming than Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. From its first throbbing arpeggios, Bernard Herrman’s brilliant score carries us, with the impatience of a dream, from ominous threat, to lush, romantic calm, to tense confrontation, to resolution… and back to fear again, as the late great Saul Bass’ credits likewise dissolve from the glorious Black and White of Kim Novak’s absurdly lush lips and tear-welling eyes, to the rich VistaVision color of Bass’ iconic spiraling motifs, culminating in an extreme, Psycho-presaging close-up of one terrified eye. With its disorienting changes in mood, color and visuals, this brief and brilliant credit sequence leaves no doubt: We are entering the ever-shifting, primal world of the dream.

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August 17, 2006 / / Film Notes

THE BIRDS

THE BIRDS

Donald Spoto, in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, traces the director’s long bird fixation, culminating in 1960’s Psycho (“You eat like a bird,” Norman tells future prey Marion Crane as they sit in a room full of taxidermized owls): that film marked the Master of Suspense’s first venture into outright horror, and his greatest popular success. Add to that two previous Daphne du Maurier adaptations–Jamaica Inn and his first American film (and only Best Picture Oscar) Rebecca–and it is hardly surprising that he would base his next project on du Maurier’s nightmarish short story “The Birds.” What is remarkable is that out of these familiar elements, Hitchcock would come up with the most experimental film of his career, both artistically and technically.

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July 31, 2006 / / Film Notes

REAR WINDOW

Written by Sean Rogers

USA, 1954. 115 min. Paramount. Cast: Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter with Raymond Burr; Music: Franz Waxman; Cinematography: Robert Burks; Produced by: Alfred Hitchcock; Based on a Story by: Cornell Woolrich; Written by: John Michael Hayes; Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Rear Window was Alfred Hitchcock’s first film at Paramount following a stint at Warner Brothers that had ended only months prior with the 3-D chamber piece Dial M for Murder. For this new project, the director returned not only to Dial’s confined setting and control over its viewers’ vision, but also to its female lead, Grace Kelly. Some few years removed from both her career’s commencement and its premature end, and scant months away from an Oscar win, the future princess would share the screen with Hollywood’s favorite everyman, Jimmy Stewart. While Kelly’s star was about to go supernova, Stewart’s had been shining more darkly since his return from the war. We remember him now, of course, for his role as the thwarted, suicidal George Bailey, but he further complicated his onscreen persona in those years through collaborations with Anthony Mann – in whose westerns he played troubled, vulnerable, and sometimes quite bitter heroes – and Hitchcock. In Rope, Hitchcock’s first picture with both Stewart and Warners, and another chamber drama concerned with visual tricks (the film seems to be one continuous take), the actor portrays an intellectual who espouses the righteousness of murder. Few other Hollywood stars could depict such moral confusion so convincingly and so genially.

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July 31, 2006 / / Film Notes

NORTH BY NORTHWEST: Quintessence of Hitchcock and Rarified Genre

Written by Christine Bamberger

U.S.A, 1959. 136 min. MGM / Loew’s Inc. Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis, Martin Landau; Music: Bernard Herrmann; Cinematography: Robert Burks; Produced by: Alfred Hitchcock; Written by: Ernest Lehman; Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

During the 1950s and early 1960s there arose a type of film that I nebulously think of as the “cheerful Technicolor sex comedy.” Including such points on the spectrum as Daddy Long Legs, the Doris Day-Rock Hudson vehicles, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Bell Book and Candle, and I’d Rather Be Rich, these films have dated noticeably, but that’s part of the fun of watching them. Their particular brand of romance, especially if it had a cat-and-mouse quality, was found to blend nicely with an element of adventure. If you imagine a tale of such ilk crossed with an ultra-stylish suspensor of the noir mien, you get North by Northwest.

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July 28, 2006 / / Film Notes

Fear of an Empty Nest: Maternal Anxiety in THE BIRDS

USA, 1963, 119 min. Cast: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Plushette, Veronica Cartwright; Produced by: Alfred Hitchcock; Original Music: Bernard Herrmann; Written by: Daphne Du Maurier; Screenplay by: Evan Hunter; Cinematography: Robert Burks; Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock.

One of the most striking reoccurring figures in the films of Alfred Hitchcock is that of the overbearing mother who seeks to control her grown son. Overbearing mothers appear as supporting characters in both Notorious and North by Northwest, while Psycho takes the characterization to a shocking extreme. Another Hitchcock horror film, The Birds, also features a conflict between mother and son that should not be overlooked. There is a good reason why discussion of mother Lydia Brenner’s possessiveness regarding her son Mitch dominates as much of the film’s dialogue as the titular birds do. A close examination of the mother-son relationship in The Birds reveals Lydia’s fear of abandonment as a central source of conflict in the film; one that lends even the mysterious behavior of the birds a greater meaning.

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July 28, 2006 / / Film Notes

PSYCHO: Hitchcock and the Politique Des Auteurs

U.S.A., 1960. 109 min. Shamley Productions. Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire; Music: Bernard Herrmann; Cinematography: John L. Russell; Produced by: Alfred Hitchcock; Written by: Robert Bloch and Joseph Stefano; Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

The steamy shower, the shadow behind the shower curtain, the raised, knife-wielding hand, that shrieking soundtrack and a screaming Janet Leigh have not only become legend in film, but also legend in parody. The scene has become so recognizable in modern times that when it is parodied I can sense young people nodding their heads in recognition even when they have no idea about its origins.

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June 26, 2006 / / Film Notes

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Written by Jeremy Quist

US, 1956. 120 min. Cast: James Stewart, Doris Day, Brenda de Banzie, Bernard Miles, Ralph Truman; Music: Bernard Herrmann, Ray Evans, Jay Livingston; Cinematography: Robert Burks; Written by John Michael Hayes; Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

One of the most curious aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much is that the man the title refers to spends most of the film not knowing much at all. What he does know is that a statesman is soon to be assassinated in London. But the reasons for this are not important; this is merely the MacGuffin – Hitchcock’s famously irrelevant plot device that serves simply to get the story going. All that really matters is getting the boy back.

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