Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock

One of the most celebrated innovations of the twentieth century was the art of movie making. It was properly named the 7^th art, which continues to this day in its original form and variations, whether on the wide screen or on a computer, television, or even on a cell phone monitor. Acting is an old profession, but having it accessible and watching it whenever or wherever one desires is what movie, film, and clip technology have brought to us. A movie director is the brain behind the film. Checking the history of movie making from the beginning, we don’t know the first director, as it started in several countries and spread out to the rest of the world rapidly. However, we know of famous movie directors at the time that a motion picture was in its infancy. The most known movie directors of all times are those who pioneered many of the movie making standards, such as D.W. Griffith and Fritz Lang. Many of the techniques of cinema and the art of movie making were as a result of innovations by these two, and some other internationally known movie makers of the time such as Sergei Eisenstein of Russia, Lumières brothers of France (who invented the art) and Alfred Hitchcock of England, to name a few. However, Hollywood’s fame is indebted to some early movie makers, such as Fritz Lang who started in Germany, and the British born genius Charlie Chaplin, whose films still bring smile to viewers’ lips. However, when one speaks of suspense in movies, the name that comes to mind is Hitchcock.

Hitchcock’s education and talent was originally in writing and drafting. Because of his love for the new entertainment media, motion pictures, he started working in the industry early on, as a title card designer. Years later in America he had a long running TV series titled “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, the title logo of which was drawn by himself; a caricature of him consisted of only nine line strokes.

In his early career while designing title cards, Hitch (the name he was called by his friends) worked with other directors on the sets as well. In an interview, the interviewer asked Hitchcock if it was true that the reason he became a director was that the director he was working with in early 20s did not want to work with Hitchcock any longer and the studio commissioned him to make a movie on his own. Hitchcock corrected him: “that is not true; the fact is that the director in question did not want me to work with him”! The first movie that he independently directed, ironically titled “Number 13”, did not finish due to financial considerations. According to Hitchcock, his first completed film, The Lodger, was shelved for months before they showed it on the screen. However, after screening the movie, it was widely viewed and it became very popular, and as a result, Hitchcock was trusted by the studio to direct more movies. Considering his innovative techniques and skills he had learned from masters, many of his subsequent movies became a success. From the late twenties throughout 1930s, he directed more than two dozen movies. By the end of the decade, he was the most famous and the highest paid director in England. He directed a score of silent films. His last silent movie was also his first talkie, the first talking movie in England, as he made the movie with and without sound. However, it was as if he missed the silent era, since he was very much accustomed to silent movies. Once in an interview he stated that the only problem with silent movies was that mouths were moving without any sound coming out of them. As a result, his movies communicated to viewers through pictures more than sounds. He said more than once that words should not tell the story, but the pictures. He called himself a “purist”, meaning that he tried to convey his message to the viewer through picture rather than words. His early sound movies followed the same genre as his silent ones; the hero is on a run from the law (mistaken identity) or the mob, accompanied by an opposite sex accidently. The fugitive is exonerated at the end, and the two main characters fall in love and come together. In some of his movies, the hero and the heroine are in conflict with each other at the beginning, but the resentment turns into love at the end. These two story lines became subject of many other movies by other directors. Hitch said many times that he did not like cliché, not knowing that his techniques were copied so many times that they became cliché in the industry. As it was just mentioned, he liked to communicate to his audience through pictures. The audience receives information through actors’ facial expressions, and for this reason, many of the future events are understood by the audience predisposed to impressions made when the camera has zoomed in the actors’ face. For instance, the camera zooms in the face of the actor or the actress, when he or she is looking at something. The camera starts from the eyes of the subject and makes a round to the object that the person is looking at. If the person moves towards the object, so would the camera. Of course another camera is zoomed on the subject’s face to show the audience his or her reaction to what he or she sees. In “Rear Window”, the whole movie was made of this type of filming, as all the scenes of the movie were from the viewpoint of a voyeur who watches people from the rear window of his apartment. Why? Because he is a photographer and he has a keen sense to observe. The first few minutes of the movie is a tour of his apartment and tells us that he is a photographer for magazines, who has a broken leg, and bound to wheelchair, and even his girlfriend is introduced to us through her picture on the table. This is all done without a word and only through pictures, in the first few minutes of the movie.

Hitchcock was little known in America in the 30s, only perhaps in critics’ circles, where they would screen some of his movies privately. Until David O. Selznick approached Hitch for a seven year contract starting in 1939. The negotiation lasted for about a year before they agreed on a contract for Hitch to make several movies for Selznick, starting with the “Titanic”. For the reason that is not clear, the studio dropped the Titanic project and decided on a different project based on Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca”, a British novel that Selznick thought it had to be directed by a British director as well.  If Hitch made “Titanic”, would that become as successful as it was when made several decades later, is not known. However, “Rebecca” was nominated for eleven Academy Awards including the best director of the year, and won the last one, in addition to the best film of 1940 by a committee of 546 critics. Hitchcock continued making movies in the U.S., each time creating new standards and inventing radical methods to transfer his vision. At the time when censorship was officially applied to the industry, sidetracking the censorship became Hitch’s innovative style, beginning with his first American movie. There is an underlying, untold, but clear sensual relationship between Joan Fontaine, who does not have a name in the movie and she is referred to by her husband’s name, and the housekeeper in Rebecca. In another movie, Notorious, there is a three minute intermittent kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, when according to Motion Pictures Production Code, a kiss was not supposed to last for more than three seconds. Hitchcock would always push the envelope to the limit, and move beyond that in a way that could not be captured by those watchful of them. There has been a lot of talk about Hitchcock and his sexuality. In a biography of Hitchcock he confesses that he had not had sex for half a century. Whether that is true or not, sexuality and crime are intermixed in every Hitchcock movie, the perfect case is the shower scene in Psycho. This leads to his emphasis and interest in psychology of people. If we accept the premise that those attracted to psychology are the ones who always think outside of the box, Hitchcock would easily fall into that category. There are personal clips of him in his early career touching female actresses in a humoristic way, acting as a homosexual, in addition to several other practical jokes he liked to play and record. And, humor is another genera, but in his own style that can be categorized as dark humor, the best examples being “The Trouble with Harry” and “Family Plot”. Sex, humor, and horror will be discussed further.

Rebecca was followed by five other movies made in the next five years, such as “Foreign Correspondent”, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”, “Suspicion”, “Saboteur”, and “Shadow of a Doubt”, which are either spy movies or thrillers in a suspenseful environment, each with box office success. In 1944, he created “Lifeboat”, which differed from all movies of the time as almost the entire movie was filmed on a boat. He starred a controversial actress, Tallulah Bankhead, whose negative publicity the studio had to go through extensive effort in order to prevent, due to her openly uninhibited sexual adventures with both sexes, a taboo at the time. Whether Hitchcock hired her considering such a reputation, is not known. The movie was a failure in the box office regardless. Four years and five movies later he made the first Technicolor film, “Rope”, another box office failure. This movie was also different for two reasons. First, Hitch started experimenting something that had never been done in movies before, and since. He filmed the movie from beginning to the end continuously. As the camera could hold only a ten minutes film at the time, he would zoom into a surface at the end of each reel, in order to change the film. If anything went wrong during the filming of a scene, the whole ten minutes had to be filmed from the beginning again. Second, as Hitchcock always had fascination with human psychology in his movies, and as someone said about him that he always looked for uncommon traits in people, the main characters of the movie were two homosexual men, still a taboo subject. Although their relationship was never mentioned, but one could easily infer from the actions. Hitchcock made six other movies before he started on “Rear Window”, which he liked the most among all his movies (in addition to “Shadow of the Doubt” for its melodrama mixed with suspense) because of the cinematic values he noted this film had. Two years later, he made a movie based on a real case. His usual cameo appearance is different in this movie, as the movie starts with him while only his silhouette and shadow are on the screen, introducing the movie and emphasizing that the movie was based on a real story. He was able to film the movie in actual locations as well, even the court where the actual person was sentenced, while the actual judge on the case was sitting next to Hitchcock as a consultant. Although this movie turned out to be a flop in the box office, the movie that he made four years later, “Psycho”, made Hitchcock not only globally famous, but rich as well. It was a financial risk for him to make the movie on his own, the risk that paid off handsomely as he spent about $800,000 on the movie and the return was a few million. As in most of his movies, he explores the psychology of people, and in this case, a person with a very psychotic mentality. The rest of his six movies could never obtain the same reception as Psycho. His last film, “Family Plot” goes back to the style of dark comedy he created twenty years before with “Trouble with Harry”.

Keeping with his graphic designing talent and his early profession as title card designer, Hitchcock had a unique way of directing movies. First, he made sure that he had full control of the movie he was making, which he was able to achieve after he completed his contract with Selznick. He would pick up a scenario and change it, and/ or add details to make a story of his liking out of it. He then drew every scene on the paper to the minute detail. He said many times that before making a movie he knew exactly what the outcome would be. Before filming, he consulted his actors what he was expecting from them to do, and at the time of the filming he would just sit down and watch, with minimum direction. There are several scenes or events one can see in his movies that make them recognizable as a Hitchcock movie. His cameo appearances, which he started early on from 1928 with “Easy Virtue”, are a concrete signature of his movies. Most of his movies contain a scene filmed in a landmark. Picture is an important element in his movies. For instance, the movie that he claimed to have made it for himself and it was a flop in the box office, “The Trouble with Harry”, has the most beautiful scenery in an autumn in Vermont.

Some of the famous scenes of his movies were carefully constructed. For example, the famous shower scene in “Psycho” that lasts for 45 seconds had taken a week to film. There is always a shocking moment that not only jolts the audience, but a moment that changes the direction of the story, and in most cases rescues the main character. A scream in a music hall is a common occurrence. Of course, there is anticipation with the audience as a strong suspense is built up from the beginning of the film. Characters of his movies are not different from ordinary people. They are mostly common people in extraordinary situations. In “39 Steps” when the main character arrives at the house of the “bad guy”, the host is celebrating his daughter’s birthday with family and guests. In the “Lady Vanishes”, the spy is an older woman. It is most apparent in “Shadow of a Doubt” when an ordinary family in the little town (at the time) of Santa Rosa has Uncle Charlie visiting them, while we as the viewer know that Uncle Charlie is a criminal. Sometimes he shows how difficult it is to commit a murder, as in “Torn Curtain” around 40^th minute of the movie, when Paul Newman and his accomplice attempt to kill an agent by stabbing him and suffocating him by the fireplace’s gas. It is interesting to know that the point of struggle in the story, which he referred to as “Macguffin” was the least important subject of the movie. He explained that Mcguffin “might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that's a Macguffin.’ The first man asks, ‘What's a Macguffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands’, and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that's no Macguffin!’ So you see that a Macguffin is actually nothing at all.” What seems to have fascinated Hitchcock was the psychology of people, which is described perfectly in his masterpiece “Vertigo”. Lastly, Hitchcock is the only director who made a movie from a story he considered interesting, but did not like the movie that he made, and used the same story with a change in scenario, and made another movie with the same title 22 years later, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.

None of his pictures could make him known to movie fans, until he stepped into the world of television. No one knew any of the directors of the time such as William Wyler, Frank Capra, Joh Ford, Michael Curtiz, Howard Hawks, Elia Kazan, or Billy Wilder, except for movie critics. Of course directors such as Joh Houston or Orson Wells were known by movie goers, as these directors played in movies as well. Through the TV shows, not only Alfred Hitchcock became a household name, his dark humor along with the suspense he created made his half an hour films very popular. His drawl voice when he said “good evening” before every show, and his unique facial features with beady eyes and double chin were imitated many times during those years. He would introduce each episode with his style of humor, and that was probably the only contribution he made to those films, as they were produced and directed by other people. As it was mentioned earlier, the graphic title at the beginning of each episode was drawn by Hitchcock himself. From 1950s through his death in 1980, he was the most famous director and his films were the most viewed on television or cinema.

There is no doubt that Hitchcock was a genius who made 53 films in his life, majority of which were unique and separate from others, and at the same time, his style could be traced on each one of them. He tried different genre such as musical or melodrama, before he realized that suspense was his forte. He mastered the art of suspense in movies which were quite new and provocative. However, his own character was extremely complicated and it is almost impossible to put him in a certain characteristic category. He mentioned in more than one occasion that he had not had sex for several decades and he was a celibate. In spite of, or perhaps because of that, he was able to capture sensual moments with his leading ladies. He was comfortable with many of the taboos of the time, such as homosexuality and nudity. Hitchcock’s movies were also famous for featuring blond women in leading roles. Any actress he discovered he tried to mold her “My Fair Lady” style. Of course it could not work, and usually after a few movies, the relationship would be ended for various reasons. Some of these women, such as Grace Kelly, Vera Miles, and Tippi Hedren were known to be his favorite characters, which some termed as “frigid and cool icy blonde”. In some strange way, each of these women suffered physically, and sometimes for real, in his movies.  Many of his former actresses regarded him as a gentleman, but some such as Tippi Hedren claimed that Hitchcock had a different relationship in his mind with her, and as she did not approve it he ruined her career. In many occasions, he called actors “cattle”. He invited Grace Kelly to play in the movie “Marnie” when Kelly was married to the prince of Monaco. Kelly responded that he should find different cattle! Hitchcock also had a sense of humor, although some of his jokes were outlandish, such as the man who eats his wife or the man sleeping with a leper. He also enjoyed practical jokes, and he retold two of his favorite practical jokes many times, the dinner he prepared for his guests where all the courses and drinks were blue, and the feast for his wife’s birthday when he asked the studio to dress up some unknown person as a lady to sit at the head of the table and everyone wondering who that lady was. He had a long story to justify the entertaining values of his movies, the short version of which goes like this: this woman is washing dishes when her husband comes home from work and asks her to go out for dinner and movies as a break to her long house work. The wife agrees and they go out for dinner and then go to a movie. The movie starts by showing a woman washing dishes! He had another story that reflected his style of comic suspense, as follows: Maria Callas is performing in a music hall. While she is singing she reaches a high note. She lifts her head while singing the high note, as they usually do, and sees a man in the balcony stabbing another man on the back. While she is singing, she becomes horrified with what she sees and continues her high note with a shriek in horror. This lasts for so long that people start clapping for her, while she is still screaming in horror! His sense of humor is also evident in many interviews he made throughout his life. He was politically aligned with governments’ lines (British or American) and he made several propaganda movies for both governments. Some of his movies such as “Topaz” and “Torn Curtain” were politically pro-western camp during the cold war. He was born in a Catholic household and went to a Jesuit school. He made a movie about a priest in “I Confess”, who was protecting the women he had loved before priesthood, and would not disclose a confession due to his integrity, although this puts his life on the line. Outside of that, not many religious traces can be found in his movies, except in some occasions. For instance, in “The Wrong Man”, when the main character (Henry Fonda) is totally disappointed and desperate, he listens to his mother’s advice and starts praying. His picture of praying overlaps another scene of the thief (that he was mistaken with) attempting a robbery, leading to his arrest and confessing and exonerating the leading role. There are some religious symbols in his movies as well, although he denied having intentional symbols to convey a message, and would quote from Samuel Goldwyn that “messages are for Western Union”. However, there are always items or scenes or facial expressions, as it was mentioned earlier, that would guide the audience to what the director was conveying to them.

Whoever Hitchcock was and whatever he lived for, his movies will live forever and his unique style will always be exemplary and unforgettable.