Directors We Love: Alfred Hitchcock

This is a no-brainer, right? Everyone loves Hitchcock. But it was not always so. The great director, whose North by Northwest comes out on a new, 50th Anniversary DVD and Blu-Ray on Tuesday, was once considered a populist panderer with little artistic value in his work. Even if you were a film critic, it was not the done thing to explore the mood and structure of a film. And even the rare critic that did that, such as Manny Farber or James Agee, tended not to go crazy over Hitchcock's work. (He was too popular and supposedly did not need defending.) At the time, it was more important in film to have a strong moral message, or to impress audiences with size and scale. Hitchcock worked in the lowest genres, telling stories about creeps and murderers and kidnappers, none of which had any benefit to society. Yes, Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director five times, so it's clear that other filmmakers at the very least acknowledged his skill, but he was mostly nominated for his biggest hits, like Rebecca, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho (just as George Lucas was nominated for Star Wars) and he never won.
In the 1960s, when Andrew Sarris read about the French auteur theory and began practicing it in the United States, he became one of Hitchcock's first and strongest critical champions. He acknowledged the complete skill and command it took to pull off any one of his films, not to mention the consistency and high quality Hitchcock showed throughout his entire career, regardless of his screenwriters, cinematographers or actors. However, not even Sarris understood the merits of Vertigo in 1958; he omitted it that year from his very first top ten list as a working critic. Today, Vertigo is considered Hitchcock's greatest and most personal achievement and is routinely placed on lists of the ten best films ever made, but at the time it warranted only two Oscar nominations, for sound and art direction, and lost both. It's amazing to consider that Hitchcock was 60 when he made Psycho two years later, scaled down and shot on a much lower budget than any of his previous works, and yet somehow tapped into the public consciousness with it. His age was not a factor and the film's smaller scale was a personal choice rather than a financial necessity. Psycho seemed to be the apex of Hitchcock's popular and critical appeal. Sadly, as auteur critics rose in the 1960s, Hitchcock's star fell. His later-period films like Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976) were seen as stodgy and out of touch with a society that had embraced hippies and youth culture. And even Sarris' passionate defense of these films didn't help much.

In our defense of Hitchcock, we should also consider his so-called "misfires," or films that just didn't catch on, and there are more than just a few. Just about everyone can name about half a dozen Hitchcock classics, and that's a lot of classics, but he made more than 50 films in his career. We could start at the dawn of his American period with his wonderful screwball comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), starring Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, about a couple that finds out their marriage is not legal and decides to test one another's loyalty and affection. Hitchcock had a clear knack for comedy, which is easy to see in his little introductions for his television show. He understood the cruelty inherent in the best humor, and it comes out with this film. But, sadly, he only made one other comedy during his entire career. That was The Trouble with Harry (1955), a much more colorful, yet darker film about a dead body that causes no end of confusion. I fell in love with this one the first time I saw it and could never understand why it wasn't more successful or well-known.

What about Hitchcock's courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947)? I like it but it's hard to find many encouraging words about it. Rope (1948) has many fans, but many more consider it a "failed experiment." The full-color Under Capricorn (1949), which is kind of a period, costume, psychological drama, works beautifully in the way it uses its atmosphere to slowly build dread, but hardly anyone has seen it. I Confess (1953) has many passionate defenders, the Cahiers du Cinema crowd among them. The film has some of the most flat-out gorgeous cinematography of Hitchcock's career, but Montgomery Clift's stiff, passive portrayal of a priest who hears the confession of a murder and cannot disclose the information, keeps the film inactive. The Wrong Man (1956) is more like a Fritz Lang picture, and it's one of Hitchcock's grittiest and most intense works. And even after he reached age 70, he took a fresh approach to his film Frenzy (1972), returning to England for the first time since the 1930s and incorporating (fairly) graphic sex and violence for the first time. The thing is that all these films were, and still are, effective in some way, despite their lack of success and attention. Hitchcock knew what he was doing.

That brings me to North by Northwest, which Warner Home Video is re-releasing this week in a brand new video transfer (and two new documentaries). It's one of Hitchcock's most popular, most universally beloved works, but for a long time I considered it a lesser film, and a step back. If you consider that it comes after the psychologically rich Vertigo and just before the daring re-invention of Psycho, it seems like a lightweight creampuff. But now that I've seen it again, I have come to love its attitude. Cary Grant plays the lead role with such class and good cheer that it's almost relaxing to watch him go through his ordeal. Moreover, the film has such a wide-ranging array of spectacular settings that it seems ridiculous, but that also adds to the film's good nature. The setup is silly: Roger Thornhill pokes his nose in the wrong place at the wrong time and is mistaken for someone else. There's nothing actually at stake for him; he's completely uninvolved. And when the bad guys try to kill him, what do they do? They fill him full of booze and send him driving down a hill. Why? So that Cary Grant can play a funny drunk scene. The film is huge, and very long and almost totally weightless, and yet Hitchcock infuses every frame with impeccable skill and expertise. He practically wills the film to life, and yet it all seems effortless. It's one of his purest exercises in dexterity, and of all his films, perhaps the most fun.

Ultimately, I think that's why Hitchcock continues to fascinate and continues to be one of the greatest of all film directors; his films work on a physical, gut-level; you grip your seat and scream and squirm as characters get themselves into unspeakable situations. But at the end, his style is ripe for interpretation. It's fascinating to analyze the films and find out what makes them tick. (How many film scholars have taken apart the Psycho shower scene, cut by cut?) And then, when you actually sit down to watch them anew, they work their magic all over again.