Alfred Hitchcock would have celebrated his 100th
birthday last year, but for a director whose movies were so often concerned
with death, and whose last film bore the title Family Plot, it seems
more fitting to me to commemorate the anniversary of his departure from this
world, which occurred on the 29th of April, 1980. Viewed from a present day
point of view, probably the most amazing thing about Hitchcock is the way his
reputation has continued to steadily rise since that time, although he was
clearly headed for cinematic canonization in the last years of his
life--perhaps the only kind that would have really excited him, in spite of
his Roman Catholic upbringing. In the 1940's and 1950's, the director was
mainly regarded as a kind of gifted prestidigitator of the screen by most
critics, while in the 1960's he became one of the main bones of contention in
the paper wars between auteurists and their antagonists that raged in those
years. But today I do not think that many serious film scholars would doubt
that Hitchcock, far from being only a brilliant entertainer--not that he
wasn't that too--was one of the major artists in the history of the cinema,
worthy of a place along side D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau, Carl
Dreyer, and Sergei Eisenstein. Probably more books have been published on
Hitchcock's work than that of any other director, and it seems to me unlikely
that he will be subjected to a revisionist interpretation that might topple
him from that position in the near future. Nevertheless, such a profusion of
critical literature is no guarantee of a corresponding degree of critical
insight, and the following article is intended both as a homage and an attempt
to raise some questions about the significance of his career.
Few directors in the history of the cinema have created such
a totally coherent imaginative world as did Alfred Hitchcock. Yet this world
does not seek to rival the quotidian one, as often happened in the films of
Josef von Sternberg or Fritz Lang, the first director offering the viewer a
paradise of art and the second a severely purified formal construction.
Hitchcock's films do not constitute an "anti-world," but one
disturbingly parallel to our own. This world sends back a reflection sometimes
uncanny in its mirror-like accuracy, yet unlike the work of Jean Renoir or
Roberto Rossellini, that of Hitchcock does not aim at producing an effect of
total immersion in the life around it that makes the spectator gasp with
astonishment. In the most remarkable films of his American period, in pictures
such as Shadow of a Doubt,
Strangers on a Train,
Rear Window, Vertigo, and
The Birds, Hitchcock pushed a certain kind of
verisimilitude--achieved with all the resources of highly skilled studio film
production--to the limit not for the sake of realism but in order to mock our
naive expectations. In his hands, the more "real" the image on the
screen became, the less it resembled what the audience wanted to see there. A
famous example of this method occurs in Strangers on a Train, in a shot
in which the viewer sees the villain, Bruno (Robert Walker) standing on the
steps of the Jefferson Memorial from the viewpoint of a taxi carrying the
duplicitous Guy (Farley Granger) and his fiancee (Ruth Roman). Critics have
rightly commented on the symbolic value of this shot which in the words of
Donald Spoto, presents "Walker...as a malignant stain on the purity of
the white-marble Jefferson Memorial, as a blot on the order of things."
Unfortunately, in his haste to impose a moral content on the material, Spoto
overlooks its more subtle effect: by placing a psychopathic killer in front of
a famous public monument, Hitchcock accentuates the façade nature of the
building. Even more than a "malignant stain," Bruno functions as a
catalyst who precipitates out all the violence latent in "the order of
things" itself. His very existence calls into question the stability of a
system of values, not merely the values of American society, but those of
Western civilization as a whole--represented by the classical marmoreal
edifice--by suggesting what darker, less praiseworthy forces that façade both
masks and thrives upon.
According to famous dictum enunciated by Claude Chabrol and
Erich Rohmer in their groundbreaking monograph on the director, Catholic
doctrine played a dominant role in the creation of Hitchcock's imaginative
world. I do not wish to challenge their thesis at this moment, but I would
like to set it momentarily aside. Simply on the face of it, taking a survey of
his total production, it would seem less accurate to describe that world as
Catholic--or even Christian--than as Hobbesian. In Hitchcock's fictional
world, human life is the bellum omnium contra omnes, and nearly
instantaneous regression to the state of nature always lurks in the background
of the most apparently tranquil, orderly setting. The Hitchcockian villain is
not a Dostoevskyian sinner who breaks the law in order to demonstrate the
goodness and righteousness of God, but a cunning predator intent upon
capturing its prey at whatever cost. In the closest he ever came to inserting
a "message" into one of his films, in the scene in Shadow of a
Doubt in which Charlie (Teresa Wright) confronts her Uncle Charlie (Joseph
Cotton) with his past as the "Merry Widow" killer, the latter
angrily counters, "How do you know what the world is like? Do you know
the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd
find swine?" The opening sequence of Psycho, which starts with a
series of neutral establishing shots of downtown Phoenix before moving into a
cheap hotel room in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John
Gavin) have just previously consummated a midday scene of passion on the sly,
could serve as a paradigm for all of Hitchcock's films. But this confrontation
between the façade and what it masks only works where there is a real tension
between the two, where the initial "effect of reality" is credible
enough to provide a contrast.
Yet some people seem to never get the point. In an
unbelievably obtuse article by James Wolcott entitled "Death and the
Master" that appeared last year in Vanity Fair, the author
informed his readers that "Hitchcock's work was always glitchy."
Among other evidence, he cites the opinion of Camille Paglia who
"considered the New England accent of the shopkeeper in The Birds…'a
major gaffe.'" In a film whose basic premise is the highly improbable
event of birds eliminating the human species, this seems to me to be a rather
niggling criticism. Why not complain that it's possible to hear traces of an
Australian accent in Rod Taylor's voice or that the actress (Ethel Griffies)
who plays Mrs. Bundy sounds suspiciously English? The town is supposed to be a
microcosm of American society in a rural town such as Hitchcock had
experienced it when he kept a residence in Scotts Valley, outside of Santa
Cruz. This twisted line of reasoning leads up to the rather startling
declaration that "Hitchcock's greatness is as a pictorial showman…not
as a conscientious realist." Hitchcock certainly did have great gifts as
a creator of images, but I have some difficulty in seeing the point of the
comparison. Does it matter at all whether or not he was "a conscientious
realist"? Hitchcock's few ventures into realism belong to his earlier
career, in films like The Ring or The Manxman, or in adaptations
of stage plays such as Juno and the Paycock or The Skin Game,
but these are only small deviations in a trajectory that goes from The
Lodger down to Psycho. Even in a quite realistic film such as The
Wrong Man, based upon a true story, the location photography of New
York--surprisingly similar to that of contemporary productions like On the
Waterfront or Sweet Smell of Success--mainly provides a derisive
contrast to the waking nightmare Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is living
through. What makes The Birds so much more effective than most recent
end-of-the-world movies is how carefully Hitchcock establishes the setting
before unleashing his avian apocalypse.
Continue
to Part 2: Hitchcock's Family Plot