Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows - Being Alfred Hitchcock

Claude Chabrol's The Bridesmaid still hangs on this week, playing on one screen, having earned less than $100,000 in its United States run, despite mostly warm reviews. I can't say what it is people don't like about this movie; I think it's one of Chabrol's best.

It tells the story of an enterprising young man (Benoît Magimel) who meets the mysterious and eerily sexy "Senta" (Laura Smet) at his sister's wedding. She begins making pledges of love and devotion to him, and he responds with enthusiasm and even borderline obsession, but no one knows exactly how far the pairing will go. Chabrol masterfully carries us through the plot, but also delves headfirst into the story's more human, more erotic aspects.

Certainly there was once a time when a new movie by Chabrol would cause a cinematic stir. In the 1950s, he led his French New Wave colleagues by making Le Beau Serge a year before Godard made Breathless and Truffaut made The 400 Blows. He bookended the 1960s with two great films, Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) and La Femme Infidele (1969); Adrian Lyne considered the latter worthy of a remake (Unfaithful). In the 1970s, he made his great and popular Le Boucher, and in the 1980s he began a fruitful series of collaborations with Isabelle Huppert, with Story of Women. In the 1990s, he made La Ceremonie, which many consider one of his masterpieces. It was based on a crime novel by British writer Ruth Rendell -- who also provided the source material for The Bridesmaid.

More than anything Chabrol is probably cursed by his consistency. He has made several great films over his long career, and many mediocre ones, but there is no single standout, no single film for which he is recognized. Not to mention that he mainly works within the "thriller" genre, which, like Hitchcock, prevents him from year-end accolades.

However, Chabrol has never had to endure criticism for the fact that he makes Hitchcock-like films. As a critic for Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, Chabrol saw and studied Hitchcock in his prime (he even authored a book about the Master, co-written by Eric Rohmer). He took this knowledge and put it to good use many times over many films.

In America, Brian De Palma has done the same, and yet his allusions to Hitchcock have drawn nothing but harsh condemnation. In fact, people still blame him for this, even though his last Hitchcock-influenced film came out over 20 years ago (Body Double). Since then, he has made pure De Palma pictures, almost every one of them misunderstood in some way (except The Bonfire of the Vanities and Mission to Mars, which are truly awful). His new The Black Dahlia is gone after only six weeks in theaters, surely a big flop in a year full of them. Nearly everyone who saw The Black Dahlia complained of the same thing: the story, the script and the dialogue. None of which was De Palma's fault. The director threw himself into this obsessive, sexy, deviant material and turned out a dark mirror of his own soul. Critics and audiences used to three-act structures and Hollywood programming failed to see what was truly great about this film. It's perhaps the year's only truly personal work, and certainly one of the year's most cinematic works (in terms of using the camera to represent emotional states).

In any case, this complete misunderstanding and abandoning of both De Palma and Chabrol might lead one to believe that Hitchcock himself is dead and gone. But he's not. His tricks still work, as shown by Kevin Macdonald in The Last King of Scotland (95 screens). Macdonald doesn't do the tricks particularly well, but he does them. Witness the scene in which Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) fingers his little bottle of poison pills, while Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) nervously watches.

But here's the rub: The Last King of Scotland has received nearly universally enthusiastic reviews and Oscar buzz, with nary a mention of the Hitchcockian devices. The film annoyed me because I figured out all the tricks, and saw that this jumble of true story, fiction, Oscar bait and thriller was a desperate combination to appeal to a wide audience and win some awards. But -- perhaps enthralled by the story, acting and script -- critics went crazy for it. (It has scored an 88% at Rotten Tomatoes.)

My point is this: There's far more to movies and moviemaking than story, acting and script. Hitchcock understood that, and that's how he made masterpieces out of thriller plots without having to throw in "true stories" or important life lessons. He understood that everyone has his dark side, and it's always, always fascinating to watch when someone succumbs to it. De Palma and Chabrol also know this, as well as a desperate, dwindling group of others. I worry about the future of cinema, and the possibility that more films will be based on Syd Field and screenwriting seminars than on anything real, anything from the soul.