Theme Review - Alfred Hitchcock

Theme Review – Alfred Hitchcock

Carla Cooper - Review Writing Fall 2013

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in London, England in August, 1899. After his father’s death when he was 15, Hitchcock left the school he was attending and went to school to become an engineer. After dabbling in the arts, writing short stories for a local publication, Hitchcock moved from worker as an estimator to writing for the advertising department.  He then took an interest in photography which would later lead to film.

Hitchcock Having made over 50 years during his six decade career, he began working in films in 1920. It took him only five years to work up to directing films. After directing more than a dozen films in the UK, Hitchcock decided to make the jump across the pond to the US. In 1939, Hitchcock left for Hollywood. During his career he was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Director and four films were nominated for Best Picture. I was surprised to learn that he never won an Oscar, but that his very first American film, Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1940.

Dubbed the “Master of suspense”, Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite film Directors by far. His style combines intelligent characters with a suspenseful plot that takes the viewer on a roller coaster ride of mis-directions that usually leads to an unforeseen ending. I love the ride and love all the detail in his films.

For instance in the “Rope” with Jimmy Stewart, the rope literally becomes your focus as it is used as a murder weapon and then used to tie up a stack of books. The two murders think they’ve out smarted everyone else and hold a dinner party with the body hidden in the room. Watching Stewart’s interaction with these two is like watching a psychiatrist analyze a “functioning” crazy person.

In “Suspicion”, after a scene that leads the audience to believe that the main character, played by Cary Grant, does not intend to murder his wife for the money, we are left with a final impression of the character. He ascends a long staircase on his way to deliver a glass of milk to his wife, who is resting after he rescued her from falling off a cliff. Hitchcock uses light bulb to illuminate the milk, to cast suspicion that it is tainted with poison. The scene is quiet, with no words spoken, which makes it even more eerie. I’m still not sure if he poisoned his wife!

Not known to be “warm and fuzzy” with actors and actresses, Hitchcock was quoted as saying were like cattle. When an actress brought cows onto the set of the movie they were filming, he said he was misquoted and that he actually said that “actors had to be treated like cattle”. This I’m sure did not make him any friends with the actors’ guild, but his success with movies made it hard to turn down an opportunity to work with him. Creative in every detail, Hitchcock invented the film term “MacGuffin” to ‘illustrate that the object the villains were after needed no explanation; it was just something used to drive the story’. He felt he didn’t need to explain everything to the audience. The term is still used in modern film making.

Some of Hitchcock best known movies are “The Birds”; “Notorious”; “Rear Window”; “Suspicion”; “North by Northwest”; “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and of course “Psycho”. Psycho is considered a classic suspense/horror film. It is the standard by which other films in the horror genre are judged and that many attempt to emulate.

In considering which Hitchcock film is my favorite, I found it hard to choose. My top four are “Rear Window” with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly; “The Man Who Knew Too Much” with Jimmy Stewart; “To Catch a Thief” with Cary Grant and “Notorious” with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.

Although it was one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, I never watched Psycho until this year as I was afraid to watch the shower scene. I thought it was more graphic than I can tolerate in a film, but it turned out to be more suspenseful than gory. Psycho having the reputation as being the quintessential horror movie was enough to keep me away. Imagine a film made in 1960 that still has that kind of reputation and power 50+ years later. Psycho does. Most notably, it had considerable influence over the horror movie Halloween. In both films the serial killer feels betrayed by a female character he thought of as pure. In Psycho, the mother takes a lover and the son feels abandoned. In Halloween, the brother witnesses his older sister having sex with her boyfriend and feels betrayed. In both films the betrayer and their lover is murdered by the betrayed.

Even less subtle is the use of the name of the hero from Psycho in Halloween. Sam Loomis in Psycho saves an innocent woman from the psychotic Norma Bates dressed as his dead mother and Dr. Samuel Loomis saves an innocent girl from the enraged Michael Myers, who disguised himself by wearing a mask.

Hitchcock uses music, lighting, heights; characters ascending or descending slowly up or down staircases and much more to make the audience experience fear or suspense; and to sometimes distract or misdirect their attention.

Hitchcock died at the age of eighty in April 1980. Considered one of the greatest film makers of the twentieth century, Alfred Hitchcock has forever changed the way suspense and horror films are made. He has set the standard so high, that I do not believe many will ever surpass his cinematic genius.