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Film Comment (1974) - Alfred Hitchcock - Prankster of Paradox

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[...] VERTIGO and REAR WINDOW and NOTORIOUS and NORTH BY NORTHWEST and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and STAGE FRIGHT and THE 39 STEPS and SERRET AGENT and the two versions of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and a few dozen more "suspense" classics sustain repeated viewings without becoming stale or withered. Unfortunately, this faith in the immediacy of inspiration is based on nothing more substantial than an atavistic aversion to homework. The late French film critic André Bazin traces his disenchantment with the director to an impression of Hitchcock's indifference during the shooting of a scuffle on a Riviera location for TO CATCH A THIEF.

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ALFRED HITCHCOCK: Prankster of Paradox

In recent years Alfred Hitchcock has been granted an honorary degree from Columbia University, an honorary Oscar from the Motion Picture Academy, and now-on Monday, April 29th-an honorary evening with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The irrepressible spoil-sports among us may argue that such honors are ill-advised for a "mere" entertainer, however masterly. This argument reflects both a puritanical resistance to any manifestation of the pleasure principle, and a condescending solicitude for the supposedly sacred triviality of the motion picture medium. Let's not spoil the fun of movies by admitting them to Academe, and, in almost the same breath, let's not soil Academe with the trivia of the screen.

Certainly, Hitchcock's reputation has suffered from the fact that he has given audiences more pleasure than is permissible for serious cinema. No one who is so entertaining could possibly seem profound to the intellectual puritans. Furthermore, did not Santayana once observe that complete understanding extinguishes pleasure? Hitchcock himself seems to have absorbed Santayana's sentiment by focusing attention on the stylistic surfaces of his films rather than on their spiritual depths. He tells us the how, but we must determine the why. By contrast, most modern filmmakers bend our ear with the why before they have figured out the how. The result: An Art Oozing with Obfuscation.

No wonder then that for Truffaut, the greatest Hitchcockian virtue is clarity. Teresa Wright once told me that the difference between Hitchcock and other directors was that when Hitchcock sat down to tell you the story of the movie he was about to make, it was the same story you later saw on the screen. With other directors, it was one story before the shooting, and another after. The picture story that Master Alfred had told to Teresa Wright was, of course, SHADOW OF A DOUBT - itself the quintessentially Hitchcockian title, reflecting, as it does, both the expressionism of his style, and the ambiguity of his attitude.

Curiously, Hitchcock's formal elegance seems to pertain to a realm far removed from the precincts of pop art. One can like Hitchcock without liking much else of popular culture, and one can dislike Hitchcock without disliking Hollywood movies on principle. Thus Hitchcock need not necessarily be taken as a prime example of the popular entertainer, and certainly not in the sense of Raggedy-Ann aesthetics. Consequently, the category that Manny Farber once designated as "termite art" applies less to Hitchcock than it does to such burrowing directors as Walsh and Hawks and Wellman and Hathaway.

Indeed, Hitchcock is as much his own genre as Kafka was his. That is why Raymond Durgnat's recently published anti-Hitchcock articles are beside the point when they seek to enshroud Hitch within the film noir. Only on the most superficial level of narrative development is there any genre affinity between, say, Hitchcock's PSYCHO and Clouzot's DIABOLIQUE. For most viewers, however, Clouzot's climax is scarier than Hitchcock's the first time around, what with Vera Clouzot's stereophonic gasps of terror virtually inducing coronaries. But once is enough. Repeated viewings of DIABOLIQUE only verify the efficiency of the director's fright techniques. Quite the contrary with PSYCHO: each successive viewing only deepens our appreciation of the spectacle. The first time I saw the shower scene in PSYCHO I screamed with authentically Freudian fright. (Mother invading my shower with a knife?) I have witnessed this scene many times since, and have even "taught" the scene in a classroom, and now regard it as one of the most profoundly affecting religious expressions of this century. Similarly, VERTIGO and REAR WINDOW and NOTORIOUS and NORTH BY NORTHWEST and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and STAGE FRIGHT and THE 39 STEPS and SECRET AGENT and the two versions of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and a few dozen more "suspense" classics sustain repeated viewings without becoming stale or withered.

How then can Hitchcock be designated (and dismissed) as the Master of Suspense? If suspense were all that mattered in Hitch's universive, how could we look at his movies again and again and again without becoming bored by the unvarying mechanisms of the plot? There's a hitch there somewhere, and I'm sure that it isn't Hitch. Take the scene in NOTORIOUS in which Gary Grant accidentally breaks the wine bottle containing uranium: A contemporary critic complained that Grant showed himself to be too clumsy to be a plausible spy. The critic was concealing his own exasperation behind the flimsy veil of "realism," and I can understand his exasperation. Grant seems unduly reckless in this scene, but only if we see him exclusively in the role of the stout-hearted spy. The spilt uranium happens to be Hitchcock's McGuffin, his mere pretext for exposing the more passionate concerns of his characters. As the betrayed lover, however, the Grant character makes this same scene of professional incompetence vibrate with romantic self-destruction. He wants to be caught, he wants to be compromised, and he wants to be killed, just so long as he can share these dire fates with the deceptive love of his life.

On the first few viewings the screen is saturated with the trappings of melodrama: Good Guys and Bad Guys, Them and Us, Fear and Loathing, Formulas and Poisons. Then, gradually, massive archetypes appear on the screen: Mothers and Sons, Husbands and Lovers, Deceivers and the Deceived. Circles are redrawn as triangles, and sympathies shift back and forth between the bright stars and their dim satellites. Nothing is what it seemed at first glance. Thus, Hitchcock is not merely an entertainer for the moment, but a fitting subject for eternal retrospectives.

One final paradox concerns Hitchcock's alleged passion for premeditation. The director makes no bones about it. The movie is finished once he has finished preparing it in his mind and in the shooting script. He never looks through the viewfinder, and he often seems abstracted on the set. Where then is his instinct for improvisation? (Film students are generally hyped up on the ineffable virtues of improvisation. Unfortunately, this faith in the immediacy of inspiration is based on nothing more substantial than an atavistic aversion to homework.) The late French film critic André Bazin traces his disenchantment with the director to an impression of Hitchcock's indifference during the shooting of a scuffle on a Riviera location for TO CATCH A THIEF. François Truffaut, perhaps Hitchcock's most persuasive admirer, once acknowledged that as highly as he ranked Hitchcock, he still preferred Renoir and Rossellini because they allowed "a greater shareof God" in theirfilmmaking, again an invidious reference to Hitch's supposedly cerebral modus operandi.

I disagree on this issue with Truffaut. Whereas Renoir and Rossellini are presumptuous enough to exploit the accidents of nature for their own artistic ends, Hitchcock submits to these same accidents with a clear conscience. If a player is not precisely right for a part, he modifies neither the player nor the part, but incorporates the discordance within the design of the film. The original plan remains intact, but the film itself is generally enriched by the collision between the immovable conception and the irresistible day-by-day, moment-by-moment reality on the set. Not always, but generally. Hitchcock has had his share of failures, but not nearly as many as there seemed to be at first viewing. Some films age, and some films date. Hitchcock's films, good and bad alike, belong to the first category.

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