A Disjointed Ramble about Hitch.
Yesterday was Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday. I caught this toward the end of the day, but was running on fumes, and whatever I would’ve wrote would’ve been, in a best case scenario, unreadable. The pictures of Alfred Hitchcock are, of course, an institution. Most anyone with a serious interest in films has gone through the Master’s filmography, or at least the major high points, by their fifteenth year or so. This sort of thing can lead to taking a major artist for granted simply because he’s been rammed down your throat by cultural osmosis.
Alfred Hitchcock’s work is still undeniably incredible, and he made some of the most personal popular films that I’ve ever seen: think the kink of David Lynch crossed with the audience grabbing savvy of a Spielberg film, and you’re close.
Notorious in terms of lean, mean economy, is possibly Hitchcock’s greatest film. It’s not his most obsessive or personal (I still vote Vertigo) but it does imbue a very conventional war time espionage story with a gripping, breakdown of the house unit paranoia. This film is another Hitch expression of blue balls, of repressed fury at not being able to screw the starlets or legends who did their best work under his supervision. Make no mistake, Nazi or not, Hitch sympathizes with the Claude Rains character here.
Notorious is a great, great movie, (it helps that it actually moves) with a finesse, a sexiness, that is rarely encountered in big movies today. Cary Grant is terrific, and Ingrid Bergman is moving and vulnerable in the way everyone except me found her to be in Casablanca.
I really loved the Friedkin on PCP pyrotechnics employed by Paul Greengrass in The Bourne Ultimatum, but Hitch wrung more excitement out of three people walking down an excruciatingly long flight of stairs.
Vertigo is also as good as the populace would have you believe. The film is perverse in a Lauraish kind of way, but more romantic. Vertigo has long been said to represent Hitch’s fascination with (and perhaps Svengalish manipulation of) his leading ladies, and I can support that, but I think Vertigo may also be the supreme example of the warring artistic temprements of Alfred Hitchcock: the cynic and the romantic. Hitchcock wants to be the romantic, but he can’t ever quite believe in it enough to really commit to it (though Rear Window is pretty close: a lovely, conventional romance that happens to be draped in anonymous urban despair.)
Notorious, Vertigo, Rear Window and the smart, entertaining, iconic North by Northwest are probably my favorite Hitchcock pictures. This week watch something of his that you’ve never seen, or that you haven’t seen in a long time. As good as they are, leave Psycho and Rear Window on the shelf for the time being. I think I’m going to finally catch up to Rebecca or maybe Family Plot (Hitch’s last film) to commemorate the birth of the man who defined many people’s idea of the thriller for four or five decades.
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