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If North by Northwest was a roller coaster ride, then To Catch a Thief was a slightly more sedate roller coaster in a ritzier neighborhood. About as inconsequential as a movie can be, this third collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant succeeds effortlessly on wit, scenery and star power. Continue reading
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Alfred Hitchcock had a rare distinction in 1940, when two of his films, Foreign Correspondent and Rebecca, were both nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. The better of the two, Rebecca, won of course, but this humorous, entertaining wartime potboiler definitely has its charms.
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The last Alfred Hitchcock film, 50 years after the first, showed that the director had not lost his macabre sense of humor. Family Plot may lack the taut, intricate story line of his more famous works but it succeeds well for what it attempts to be, a light comedy-thriller. It’s a fun, unassuming film, especially compared to the R-rated Frenzy and the cold-war machinations of Torn Curtain and Topaz.
My original memories of this film, from viewing it perhaps 20 years ago, told me that this film was styleless, that Hitchcock’s setbound directorial style gave it the ambiance of a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week. I was wrong, perhaps due to the fact that my previous experience was with a VHS copy of the film, projected on a large screen in a college lecture hall. That sort of presentation is never going to do a film justice.
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Frenzy marked several returns for Alfred Hitchcock. First, he was going back to his native England where he had not worked for decades. More significantly, he was filming in the marketplace at Covent Garden, where his father had worked as a green grocer. It was also a return to the basic theme that had informed he best work, that of the innocent man wrongfully accused. The final return was to the top of his form that had seemed to be missing for several years. After two films dabbling with international intrigue, Torn Curtain and Topaz, Frenzy was the sort of more grounded and personal suspense tale at which he had always excelled.
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Topaz plays more like a Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Leon Uris‘ novel than it does an Alfred Hitchcock film. Long, deliberately paced and mostly lacking the dark humor that typified his other movies, Topaz demands patience of its audience. That patience is rewarded with an intelligent, if subdued motion picture experience.
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By 1966, Alfred Hitchcock had been working in film for 40 years and he was most certainly one of the few filmmakers, maybe the only one, still working regularly whose career stretched back to the silent era. Unfortunately, the director’s stubborn adherence to his old school ways, particularly his aversion to filming on location, had begun to catch up with him.
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Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage.” With Alfred Hitchcock, you might rephrase that to “Most of the world is a soundstage.” The director had a rather agoraphobic approach to filmmaking, preferring the controlled environment of the set whenever possible. However, in a time of films like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and even the new James Bond movies, when audiences were accustomed to seeing actors performing against the backdrop of real, exotic locales, the seams of Hitchcock’s stage-bound style were beginning to show. Never was this more apparent then in his 1964 film Marnie, especially with the obvious painted backdrop behind the street where Bernice Edgars lives.
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How many of you have ever looked up to see a large concentration of crows perched somewhere nearby and the first two words to come to your mind are Alfred Hitchcock? The director’s fourth and final adaptation of a Daphne Du Maurier work, as much as any Hitchcock film other than Psycho, has left a vivid and indelible impression on the collective memory of film lovers.
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Psycho has, somewhat inaccurately, been credited with being the ancestor of what we now call the “slasher” film, despite having virtually nothing in common with modern horror films, in plot, theme or tone. It’s more of a godfather to that genre. At the very least, it gave birth to the horror movie tradition of the audience shouting to the characters on the screen, “Don’t go up those stairs!”
Rather than being a horror film in the traditional sense, Alfred Hitchcock‘s first film of the 1960’s is really a blood-soaked character study and that character is Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who single-handedly gave “momma’s boys” a bad name for a generation or more.
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North By Northwest is one of Alfred Hitchcock‘s glossiest, most strictly entertaining films of his career. After the brooding study of obsession that was Vertigo, this film doesn’t seek to probe the depths of the human psyche. It’s content to be a superbly-crafted roller coaster and better for it.
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Vertigo is the archetype for the later Hitchcock films through the mid-60s. The cool, aloof blonde at the center of the story is as dangerous as she is alluring. It is simultaneously Hitchcock’s most romantic film while being primarily concerned with self-destructive obsession. I don’t think any film more accurately summed up the director’s cynical attitude toward male-female relationships. Hitchcock did not believe in happily-ever-after, at least not as this stage of his career.
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Almost every Alfred Hitchcock film has something that makes it stand out from the rest of his work. In the case of The Wrong Man, it’s the simple fact that the director has elected to tackle a true story. A movie like Rope was inspired by an actual murder but doesn’t claim to tell the story of Leopold and Loeb. While Hitchcock’s assertion in his opening monologue that it’s completely true, “every word of it,” is a bit of a stretch, the film does conform to the basic facts of the real case.