Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Did Not Love Women

So, yes, Truffaut was right, Hitchcock was a great artist and a great moviemaker, one of the 25 greatest of all time. But after watching him non-stop for a couple of months, I think he's almost certainly not one of the five greatest. Why? Frankly, because he let his talents run away with him, constantly focusing on technical problems to the detriment of other elements: character, plot, theme. For one thing, Hitchcock started out with writers like Daphne du Maurier and worked his way down. Well, of course, bad books were what Hitchcock made his good movies from because Hitchcock was in the alchemy business, taking what the English call "penny dreadfuls"--heavily plotted, convoluted thrillers--and turning them into visual masterpieces. Why did he like them? Because they were easy for the audience to sink their teeth into. Bad fiction writers churn out plot, plot, plot, replete with tricks, gimmicks, tricks, mistaken identities, tricks, subterfuges, and more tricks--anything to keep the action moving. You can film that stuff.

Hitchcock's decision to give the masterpieces of literary history a wide berth may have been a wise one, for, with rare exception, the great books have stymied the great directors. That's because it is virtually impossible to externalize internal activity, as David Lean found out in his elegant but unsuccessful A Passage to India. John Huston made a bunch of great movies, but Moby Dick is not one of them. Moby Dick is a mess. So are the The Castle, The Scarlet Letter, and any number of War and Peaces.

To his everlasting credit, Alfred Hitchcock made movies that were supposed to be looked at. Watching those two score films I was amazed by how many specific scenes from Hitchcock's movies are riveted inside my brain, including movies I had not seen in 20 years. They include the bell tower scenes from Vertigo, the strangling in Dial M for Murder, the shower scene from Psycho, the playground scene from The Birds, and the Mount Rushmore scene from North by Northwest.

Hitchcock started off by making visually arresting silent movies and he kept making them the rest of his life. Oh, the dialogue is great--superb, hilarious, pick your encomium--but it's what the viewer sees that makes these films so unforgettable. Thus, all that Freudian chatter in Spellbound doesn't amount to a row of beans next to the scene where Gregory Peck drinks the milk while holding a razor blade. (In fact, there is genuine irony in the fact that Hitchcock hired Dali for Spellbound's cornball dream sequences, because Dali enjoys much the same reputation as Hitchcock: a stunning visual artist with an aggressive self-promotional streak who has always been criticized for pandering to the masses by going heavy on the special effects but light on the subject matter.)

The visuals were ever so important because they got the audience over some of the rough patches. The plots, for example. Yes, one aspect of Hitchcock's movies that has not received sufficient critical attention is the fundamentally idiotic nature of his stories. Come on, now--if you were Ingrid Bergman and your boss, the head of the Green Manors loony bin, told you that he was stepping down and handing over the reins to a famous psychoanalyst no one had ever met or even seen a photograph of, wouldn't you find that a bit strange? If you were a timid dumpling being slowly driven insane by a psychotic housekeeper with overtly lesbian tendencies, mightn't it occur to you to corner Laurence Olivier and say, "Look, honey, if it's all the same to you, couldn't we just can that bitch?" Hitchcock simply had no equal in making the most absurd plot lines seem plausible, perhaps even realistic.

Of course, we musn't overlook the distinct possibility that Hitchcock himself thought this was all one big joke. He was a master of self-parody; his very last film, Family Plot, is a small jewel of self-mockery largely centering on the fact that Bruce Dern has to keep going to work as a taxi driver. But there are many other moments of delicious winking. When Claude Rains's mother in Notorious lights a cigarette after learning that Ingrid Bergman is a spy, Hitchcock gave us one of the crowning Oedipal shots of all time: Jocasta with a Lucky Strike. (She was one of the few blondes Hitchcock didn't get to rough up.) In The 39 Steps, when Mister Memory, who knows just about everything, appears before the audience, the question that keeps getting hollered out is, "How old is Mae West?" In Rear Window, when one of Stewart's neighbors discovers that her dog has been killed, she delivers a hilarious soliloquy, concluding with the lines, "Why would anyone want to kill a little dog? Because it knew too much?" And for major-league chuckles, how about the scene in Lifeboat, where, after the Nazi captain has blown up an unarmed vessel, torpedoed the lifeboats, caused a baby to freeze to death and its mother to commit suicide, and has murdered William Bendix, one character wonders, "What do you do with people like that?" Well, gee, let's think about that a minute. You know, destroying Dresden might be a start.

Hitchcock also knew that his movies were going to be seen more than once, and that the jokes people didn't get the first time around would be hootfests the second. "There are plenty of motels in this area," the sinister state trooper tells Janet Leigh when he finds her dozing in her car early in Psycho, "Just to be safe." Tony Perkins mentions, "My mother...she isn't quite herself today..."

Alfred Hitchcock was one sick pup. Nevertheless, he had the goods, because when God gives out talent, He doesn't care who He gives it to. Hitchcock was so good, and was good for so long, that his achievement calls into question the very notion of what art actually is. Because, no two ways about it, looking at those 36 movies for two months was a whole lot more uplifting than locking myself in with the complete works of Merchant and Ivory or Michelangelo Antonioni. But what does it all mean? When unknown actresses get slashed to ribbons in Friday the 13th movies we recognize the films as the trash they are. But we think they're trash not because of the sadistic element but because the films have low production values. When hack directors butcher females in slasher movies it's called garbage, but when Hitchcock does it with style in Psycho it's called art. And it is art. It's weird, creepy art. It taps into something primal: the need to have the bejesus scared out of us, the need to be reminded that this is a very strange planet where unexpected things can happen. As Tippi Hedren says to Rod Taylor after the first brutal onslaught on the kids in The Birds: "Mitch, this isn't usual, is it?"

It was in Alfred Hitchcock's neighborhood.

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Joe Queenan writes for Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal. He wrote our April feature on Martin Scorsese.

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