Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) Vincent Candy "Hittchcock always produced surprise" Wilmington Star-News May 1980 Κινηματογραφικά

 

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

Vincent Candy “Hitchcock always produced surprise”

Wilmington Star-News [Sunday Star-News] May 1980

Κινηματογραφικά

Hitchcock always produced surprise

 

   Hitchcock’s first films were silents. When sound came in he quickly adapted himself to it, then to color, to wide-screen, even to 3-D.

   Hitchcock never became locked into a particular technology as Charlie Chaplin did, nor was he especially flummoxed by the so-called new permissiveness of the late 1950s and 1960s.

    Though Hitchcock pretended to consider himself a prude as movies became increasingly gamey, I suspect that the sex in his films will never look prudish. Hitchcock was a romantic. He loved sexual euphemism – the sudden burst of fireworks in “To Catch a Thief”, the train barrelling into a tunnel in “North by Northwest”.

   That he didn’t deny the sexual side of romantic passion, even when the old Production Code was most strict, is apparent in films like “Rebecca” (1940). It’s quite clear in the middle sections of the film that the heroine played by Joan Fontaine is attached to Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) by something far more desperate and exhilarating than gratitude – she thoroughly enjoys sleeping with her husband.

   All of his films are sexually aware. That’s very different from being sexually explicit, which is often the mask of profound ignorance.  

 

   At a Hollywood press conference in 1947, Hitchcock was quoted as saying, “I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks. Civilization has become so protective that we’re no longer able to get our goose bumps instinctively. The only way to remove the numbness and revive our moral equilibrium is to use artificial means to bring about the shock. The best way to achieve that, it seems to me, is through a movie.”

 

   To shock us, Hitchcock devoted himself largely to three kinds of films – the international spy thriller (“Saboteur”, “Foreign Correspondent”, “Notorious”, “North by Northwest”, etc.),  the film about ordinary, down-home folks suddenly caught in a real horror story (“Shadow of a Doubt”, “Strangers on a Train”, etc.), and the film about elegant but recognizable people confronting some outrageously anti-social behavior (“Rear Window”, “To Catch a Thief”, etc.).

 

   No Hitchcock film can be so neatly classified, though. He was always shifting things around. Just when you think it’s possible to say he depended rather heavily on psychotic behavior (“Psycho”, “Marnie”, “Frenzy”, etc.), you remember “Family Plot”, one of his sweetest, most gentle films (as well as his last), and “The Birds”, one of his scariest and, technically, his most awesome.

   There are no psychotics in either “Family Plot” or “The Birds”. The quality they share with all of his greatest work is the way they manage to implicate everyone who watches them. This, I suppose, is what suspense is. It’s what most people mean when they speak of a film by someone else as being Hitchcockian, though too often they are describing a movie that deals in unrelated surprises that make you jump in the seat.

 

 

    Such shocks are not difficult to achieve. A lot of directors do this sort of thing quite well, including Brian De Palma (“Obsession”, “Carrie”, The Fury”) and John Carpenter (“Halloween”, “The Fog”) but they are still a long way from being Hitchcocks.

 

   The difference between a Hitchcock film and a Hitchcockian film is more often than not, Hitchcock’s civilized irony, the courtly, discreet way he persuades us to watch the grisly shower-murder in “Psycho”, which prompts us to laugh even as we gasp.  

   Irony: To say one thing and mean another. In a Hitchcock film irony is the director’s showing us one thing that has, for us in the audience, a dozen meanings not anywhere visible in the film frame. Hitchcock could load the audience with such information that, in “Shadow of a Doubt”, a few bars from “The Merry Widow Waltz” become a death knell. We all know too much to be able to watch the film passively. The agony is exquisite.   

 

 

 

Wilmington Star-News, [Sunday Star-News], Wilmington, North  Carolina, (U.S.A.), Sunday, May 11, 1980, p. 1-B.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

Vincent Candy “Hitchcock always produced surprise”

Wilmington Star-News [Sunday Star-News] May 1980

Κινηματογραφικά ]