Jonathan Romney
Sunday 24 June 2012
It's been a long time since anyone claimed
that Alfred Hitchcock was simply a man who made thrillers. Now a comprehensive
BFI season aims to put Hitchcock properly on his plinth as a modern great. A
three-month retrospective covers his entire oeuvre, including "the
Hitchcock 9" – restored prints of nine of his seminal silent films. Here,
then, are a few of the many things that the protean, portly genius was – and
some of the reasons why film-watching could never be the same after him.
1. Master of espionage
Look at any modern spy film and you'll
see Hitchcock's stamp. He defined the espionage premise: people chasing
after an all-important but often nebulous object of desire – the
"MacGuffin", as he called it. Hitchcock was the father of the modern
spy film, but not its inventor: that would be Fritz Lang, who made Spione in 1928, and whose early work was
closely watched by the English director. But Hitchcock went on to make a host
of espionage-themed films of various colours – from the John Buchan yarn of The 39 Steps (1935) to the downbeat Cold War drama Topaz (1969). He declined approaches to make
the first James Bond film, but he'd already created a template for the 007
series in his quintessential sex-and-travel thriller North By Northwest (1959).
2.
The silent artist
It's
often forgotten that Hitchcock made classics in the silent years too – which is
partly the point of the BFI season, to highlight early achievements such as Blackmail (1929), which Hitchcock made both as a
silent and as a ground-breaking sound film. Another early landmark is The Lodger: A Story of the London
Fog – a 1926 film that looks
back to Jack the Ripper, and forward to the chills and apprehensions that would
provide suspense cinema's basic language for decades after. As for The Mountain Eagle, it's
still missing, and top of the BFI's Most Wanted list: you might call it the
Hitchcockians' ultimate MacGuffin.
3.
The Englishman
Perhaps
it's not true that Hitchcock's dark humour could only have come from an English
background; after all, his French acolyte Claude Chabrol had a similar streak.
But what seems quintessentially English about Hitchcock's absurdism is the love
of extracting strangeness and menace from the mundane – something he inherited
from writers such as G K Chesterton. Take the sound version of Blackmail, in which the word
"knife" keeps jumping hysterically out of idle breakfast chatter. Or
take the counterpointing of high drama against the blathering of two Englishmen
worried about the Test match scores in The
Lady Vanishes.
4.
The Svengali
Hitchcock
created one of cinema's enduring female archetypes in the elegant, composed but
inwardly simmering "Hitchcock blondes" of the 1950s and 1960s –
although arguably the first was the rather larkier Czech actress Anny Ondra in
the 1920s. Among the classic Hitchcock femmes were the already established Grace
Kelly and Eva Marie Saint – while Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie) appeared to have
sprung fully formed from the master's libido. Hitchcock liked to act the
admiring gent – "A woman of elegance," he declared, "will never
cease to surprise you." But the darker, more brutal resonances of the
master/ muse relationship were dramatised in Vertigo,
in which a deranged James Stewart re-moulds Kim Novak as the star of his
personal cinema of obsession.
5.
The director as brand
"I'd
put my arse on the poster if it made people see the film," Claude Chabrol
once told me about an ad in which he owlishly puffed a pipe. Chabrol learned a
lot from Hitchcock, including the art of imposing your own auteur stamp. Few
directors perfected their identity as a "brand" as thoroughly as
Hitchcock did – it comprised a clownish, drily jesting persona on and off
screen, in interviews, and on television, as well as an instantly identifiable
cartoon silhouette, even a theme tune. His appearance in trailers for his later
work was a way of branding the films with his authority, ensuring that viewers
would see them the way he wanted them to.
6.
The joker
There's
no surer way to make people take you seriously than to make the odd joke – the
darker the better. Among Hitchcock's grimmest and juiciest gags is the
bickering between Norman Bates and his "mother" inPsycho:
"No, I will not hide in the fruit cellar! You think I'm fruity, huh?"
But Hitchcock was his own best joke, notably in his signature cameos. His
self-mockery went furthest in his intros to the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in
which no hat was too silly for him to wear, and in which he even played himself
as loser in a Hitch lookalike contest. Johan Grimonprez's 2005 docu-essay Looking For Alfred contains a treasury of such
appearances, proving that Hitchcock's favourite disguise was as himself.
7.
The conceptualist
Hitchcock
liked to set himself steep technical and imaginative challenges – an entire
film set in a small vessel bobbing at sea (Lifeboat, 1944), or telling
a story in what seemed to be one single extended take (Rope, 1948).
The success of Psycho (1960) was so dependent on keeping
punters in the dark about what they could expect to see – Hitchcock engineered
a public relations and exhibition campaign to keep the secret – that the whole
film was a sort of conceptual project, in which the act of conditioning viewer
perceptions was the artwork as much as the film itself.
8.
The anti-typecaster
Hitchcock
liked to use stars in ways that must have startled their fans – and given their
publicists conniptions. He liked to cast perennial nice guys in dark roles – like
ever-affable Joseph Cotten, an avuncular killer in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Hitchcock was even capable of
making a sunny Doris Day performance crackle with narrative tension ("Que
Sera Sera" in 1956's The
Man Who Knew Too Much). Casting against type was an Alfred Hitchcock game
right from the start – ever since he cast the 1920s matinee idol Ivor Novello
as a fog-skulking murder suspect in The
Lodger.
9.
The student of obsession
One actor
that Hitchcock cast brilliantly against type was much-loved drawler James
Stewart; he'd already played desperate men in Anthony Mann's Westerns, but
Hitchcock took him further still in Rear
Windowand Vertigo.
Both films are about morbid erotic fascination, and have been a boon to
psychoanalytic film criticism. In fact, Hitchcock introduced Hollywood to Freud – and to Salvador Dali – in Spellbound (1945). The cycle of films about
mental aberrations also included Marnie, Psycho and Frenzy.
Hitchcock was supremely aware of cinema as a psychic process: in interviews he
talked less about what his films were about, than about their effect on the
viewer's mind.
10.
The artist as entertainer – and vice versa
Another
inescapable Englishman, Graham Greene, labelled some of his novels
"Entertainments" – so diverting attention from the fact that, while
the themes were lighter and the tone seemingly casual, deep down the resonances
were just as formidable. Hitchcock too blurred the distinctions between what
appeared to be "just" entertainment and complex art. He often
pretended to offer the cheapest of thrills, so as to disarm the audience:
thinking we were just getting an efficient scare was the only thing that made
the seismic experience of Psycho bearable. Little wonder that
Hitchcock's oeuvre offered prime evidence for the French critics' case that it
was when cinema seemed most innocent that its deepest poetry was really at
work.
"The Genius of Hitchcock" runs
till October: bfi.org.uk/Hitchcock. The book '39 Steps
to The Genius of Hitchcock' is published by the BFI
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