Watching Hitchcock's Downhill.

Film Just over ten years ago I set myself the task of watching all of Alfred Hitchcock's films in order and writing about them on the blog. A couple evaded me for reasons to do with no longer existing (The Mountain Eagle) or not being able to find a copy, which was the case with Downhill, his 1927 film riches to rags tale starring Ivor Novello.  Lately, I've been trying to catch up with films I hadn't gotten around to by selecting a random year (via Alexa) each night and finding something at home or on a streaming service and wouldn't you know 1927 popped up and I was reminded that Downhill is available on the BFI Player.  Time to fill in the gap.

As with most of his films from the silent era, Downhill doesn't really have much in common with his later work in narrative terms.  The BFI's synopsis suggests its "an early variation on his fabled ‘wrong man’ plot" but in all of the later examples, it's the spark for a propulsive suspense narrative whereas this is more of a morality or cautionary tale - it's Novello's choice not to reveal the truth.  But it is an excellent example of episodic storytelling in which a character finds themselves in a series of increasingly difficult situations, in this case through pride and fear, betraying its stage origins.  It was originally a west end play written by Novello himself and the actress Constance Collier.

Nevertheless Hitchcock's visual storytelling agility shines through.  One famous scene begins with Novello in a tux but as the camera pulls backwards he's revealed to be a waiter in a cafe, no, no, he's a thief, no no, he's actually standing on a stage set and he's part of the chorus.  The director has taken the audience's expectations of what they're seeing and turns it on his head, breaking our suspension of disbelief before putting is back together again.  He also repeats the symbolic motif of having Novello's character descend, down steps in school, an underground escalator (see above) and a lift after each emotional setback, literally going "down hill" only going up when he emerges into the light from the cargo hold of a ship.

I wanted it to be a summation.

Film I began watching Family Plot with mixed emotions. Hitchcock, himself, of course, didn’t know this was to be his last film; he wasn’t interested in career commemoration or summation. As ever he wanted to produce an entertainment for his audience, this time subverting the caper plot by presenting two couples with the same goal neither of which are particularly likeable, kidnappers and confidence tricksters, testing our expectations of what makes for a loveable rogue. But I wanted it to be a summation. I wanted it to gather together all of his favourite motifs, be shot in the old style, to be as solidly funny, to takes its cue from an overwhelming sense that you should be like Cary Grant and be polite to the world no matter what it’s throwing at you or expect sinister happenings around every corner like Jimmy Stewart. The funerial aspects not meant, inadvertent.

Instead, though it is witty in parts and the performances of the four leads especially Karen Black and Bruce Dearn capture some of the rag-tag sense of screwball mayhem, throughout you’re gripped with a sense that Hitch’s final film is one of his experiments outside of his comfort zone, this time an attempt to ape Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? or a Blake Edwards comedy, his equivalent of Woody Allen's Anything Else which expected people to turn up because it featured the piefucker (that joke (c) Kevin Smith). As the minutes tick by, you wish that some of his brilliance will assert itself, that outside of his cameo he’ll give us (or if I’m being honest, me) a final wink and a thank you for enjoying his work. But it doesn’t happen and my lasting impression is that Hitchcock’s final film was really Frenzy, just as The Tempest was spiritually Shakespeare’s final play. Both worked beyond that, right through to their deaths, but there wasn’t much more that needed to be said.

he was forced to work in unfamiliar territories

Film On the dvd for Hitchcock’s penultimate film, Topaz, Leonard Malton offers a spirited defence of the director’s most maligned work. He talks about how by now Hitch had been shawn of the crew which had been his family for so many years, how he was forced to work in unfamiliar territories with foreign crews on an adaptation of rather pulpy novel that he didn’t know what to do with, but that it still features some wonderful sequences such as when a lady is murdered and as she drops to the floor her dress spreads about symbolically replacing a blood splatter.

What he fails to mention is how gruelling it is otherwise. Everything he says is true, and yet, between the confusing story about a defector and an assassin and the comedy Cuban stereotypes (every one a Castro) and the horrifyingly slow pacing and the aesthetic that reminded me of the 70s mini-series that used to clog up the schedules of ITV last time they had no money for programmes (and didn’t care about where they got them from) and the tasteless music and the on the nose performances which are essentially the dramatic chipmunk (see below) over and over and over again …



… it’s basically unwatchable. I know because I watched the first half one evening, got bored, my attention wandered, turned it off and then watched the whole thing again the following morning, knowing that I wouldn’t truly feel as though I’d completed this j-word unless I’d seen every frame Hitchcock directed, at least for the cinema, even the bad ones. As we reach the end of this marathon (one week to go), it seems as though I've criticised and praised the master's work in equal measure, which is a surprise. But it's a salient reminder that no matter how hard you try, sometimes you just fall short. But at least he was always interesting.

receiving a knock

Film With Hitchcock’s reputation receiving a knock when both Marnie and Torn Curtain were hit with indifference, the director returned home to a project which had the whiff of someone working for themselves. Frenzy is the rather nasty story of a strangler at work on the then contemporary streets of 60s London, with the usual narrative engine of the wrongly accused man. In the hands of someone like Michael Winner this could have been an atrocity. But Hitch knows that your job is to keep the audience interested and the methodology doesn’t have to be gratuitous.

He runs a food motif runs through the film. The murderer hides a body in a potato van. Some of the action occurs around a vegetable market. When the police detective chats to his wife about the case to aid the audience’s understanding of the plot, the rather staid expositionals over the dinner table that you usually find in thrillers become instead a series of hilarious sequences as she repeated tries her gourmet cooking out on him and we see after meal of being presented with increasingly inedible food which he can’t cut, can’t chew and give him the collywobbles.

There’s also a rather remarkable sequence in which the strangler is invited into a lady’s flat and having already seen his work we know what to expect, we anticipate it. Instead, Hitch cuts away to the corridor outside her door and as she screams, the camera dollies backwards, back down the stairs, and out of the front door into a street, the sound of her death throws submerged in the every day hustle and bustle. Which is fine. Except the flat was on a sound stage and he somehow manages to seamlessly shift (with the help of an cart passing by in both locations) into some location filming, something I’ve seen done in recent film with the aid of green screen and CGI and probably costing a whole lot more.

tip over

Film Even at this late stage in his career Alfred Hitchcock experimented with what’s possible and how the audience can be misled, especially in relation to narrative technique. Torn Curtain is essentially split into three sections. At first the story – of the wife (Julie Andrews) of a US scientist (Paul Newman) who discovers that he is defecting to the Soviet Union – is presented almost exclusively from her point of view which means that we’re as bewildered as she is. Then, when we find out why he’s gone over to the other side, that point of view switches to Newman so that the main exposition of the story can be revealed, with the last section joining them together on the usual dash through the countryside now that we understand what is at stake.

Hitchcock originally wanted to see Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint to repeat their North by Northwest partnership for Torn Curtain, but Grant was nearing retirement and the studio all but forced him to go another way, so he was “stuck” with Newman and Andrews who were the two biggest film stars of the period. Predictably there was tension on set and in places it does seem to tip over onto the screen. Newman clearly wants to be giving one kind of performance but is self-consciously blasting himself elsewhere with Andrews taking some of the collateral damage. But it’s nearly impossible to imagine Grant in the farmhouse scene just as it’s exciting to see Andrews in one of her first straight dramatic roles almost acting him off the screen.

horrendously miscast

Film It has been remarked that the finale of this summer's sci-fi spectacular Torchwood: Children of Earth was replete with Hitchcock references, not least in scene where Gwen and Rhys were helping the children to escape their estate and take refuge in the barn, which if you added a mass of feathers and squawking you have a pretty good recreation of the scene in The Birds when the schoolkids are running for their lives. Of all the films in Hitchcock’s canon, this is the one which seems to have been borrowed from most extensively by other directors, from the heroes being trapped in a confined space and being menaced from the outside to the tonal impression of nature revenging itself against the human race for some unconscious crime – replace the gulls and ravens with zombies and you have a George Romero film. Contrary to her reputation, Tippi Hedron isn’t awful though she does bare a striking resemblance to Paris Hilton which if you’re in the wrong mood can make the scenes were city girl Melanie Daniels is being viciously pecked unintentionally funny.

No such fun with Marnie, which doesn’t work. In 1995, director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) made Miami Rhapsody, a film which seems designed to copy Woody Allen, from the titles to the shooting style to casting Mia Farrow in a lead role. It has none of Allen’s wit, gives Naomi Campbell an acting role and it’s a travesty that its deemed worthy of a dvd release when Ken Branagh’s rather more subtle homage, In The Bleak Midwinter remains deleted. Marnie gives the impression of being a similar attempt to create a Hitchcock film by a different director who doesn’t quite understand the director’s style (unlike, say, Paul Verhoven). The reasons are numerous; it’s too long, Hedron’s blank performance does nothing to engage our sympathy, Connery is horrendously miscast, it’s too long, the story about a confidence trickster who gets caught is predicated on too many coincidences which the director doesn’t justify well enough in thematic terms. And tossing out his rulebook on suspense, the director drops in a surprise at the conclusion which though surprising is also anticlimactic. Have I mentioned that it’s too long?

usually murder

Film There’s a wonderful moment in the lifelong interview between Truffaut and Hitchcock in which the young director points out to his hero that he always tells the same story. And it’s true – nearly every Hitchcock film is about mistaken identity of one form or another most often with someone being accused of a crime they did not commit, usually murder and often the hero is aided and abetted by a blonde foil. And here it is again in North by Northwest. But what makes Hitch the great director is that with all of the fireworks, the performance and funny dialogue, we simply don’t notice, helped by the fact that each time he increases the complexity in some areas whilst simplifying others. Eva Marie Saint is effectively the same figure played by Priscilla Lane in Saboteur, Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps and Nova Pilbeam in Young & Innocent; but this being late Hitchcock, the ‘companion’ is apparently working for the opposition and none of her actions can be taken at face value. Yet the mcguffin, the reason for the adventure, why Cary Grant is on the run, amounts to little more than ‘some plans’ or whatever, underscoring just how uninterested the director was in such things by this stage.

Psycho is wrong, just wrong. The reasons are well documented already but it’s worth listing them again. Spoilers ahead. Janet Leigh’s character is presented as being the main character then Hitch has her murdered by Anthony Perkins’s Oedipal hotel owner Norman Bates, knocking the chair out from under the audience’s expectations and the language of cinema. When she is killed, we’re given the impression of a stabbing even though the blade never punctures her skin in a scene which took days upon days to film, risking Leigh’s mental health. Whilst the rest of the cast still betray the signs of the very formal acting style we expect from old Hollywood cinema, Perkins’s performance is shockingly naturalistic and about ten years ahead of the curve, precalling a young Jack Nicholson. Shot on a budget of fourth-fifths of a million dollars, miniscule in comparison to the director’s other work, it has a spare, deliberate style in which every shot has meaning, and you’re constantly aware that you’re being fed expositional red herrings in which items and dialogue which in other films would be vitally important are purposefully ignored to show what happens when a life ends. And Perkins’s final look into the character, which with its superimposed skull gives the impression that he’ll be wanting to have a chat with us next.

Spoilers down below.

Film Having watched Hitchcock’s career, it’s quite easy to see what Alfred Hitchcock was trying to do with The Wrong Man. Just as Saboteur was a summation of his British talkies, The Wrong Man seems like a late reconfiguration of three of his earliest films: The Lodger, Blackmail and Murder! In challenging himself by selecting an outrageous true story, Hitch wanted to make the film look at realistic as possible and to achieve this, either consciously or not, he recalls the framing, shading and directorial flourishes of those previous classics, especially Blackmail as he often simply rests the camera on, in this case, the titular shadow chaser Henry Fonda, whose sullen face constantly reminds up of the unfolding injustice. No wonder the director himself turns up in the opening moments to explain what he was trying to achieve (his most obvious cameo!) and why the film did particularly well in Europe (Jean-Luc Godard wrote volumes of criticism about it). It’s particularly noteworthy that Hitch tells the whole film from Fonda’s point of view, even in the courtroom scenes were the proceedings continue about him in the middle distance, the legalise deliberately heightened so as to become the foreign language it must seem to him.

The psychological games continue in Vertigo, a film I didn’t really understand until university where I had to study it in conjunction with the modern French work Place Vendôme (by Nicole Garcia) which was visually heavily influenced by Hitchcock’s film, with Catherine Deneuve’s character in particular sporting Kim Novak’s hairstyle and fashions. In her seminal essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", feminist theorist Laura Mulvey talks about ‘the gaze’. Put simply, that’s the moment in a film when a nice lady appears and the director cuts to a bloke whose very impressed with what he’s seeing and it’s through him that our appreciation of the woman is defined. In Vertigo, we’re offered a window into Jimmy Stewart’s mental state by the look he gives Novak at various points in the story – from chaste attraction to dangerous obsession making Vertigo Hitchcock’s most complex film. It’s also a perfect example of what the director talks about when he says he prefers suspense to surprise; a hack might have withheld the secret of Novak’s duality through to the end; Hitch takes time to explain what has occurred to the audience so that we instead agonise over what Stewart’s reaction will be and how this single piece of information will either save him or tip the lapsed police officer over the edge.

a kooky place

Film The Trouble With Harry is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s late experiments. If you’re looking for modern films with which it shares some kinship, it’s Fargo or Mumford or on television Northern Exposure or Eureka, comedy dramas which portray small town America as a kooky place filled to the brim with eccentrics enjoying a slightly relax somewhat askew approach to life. The difference in Hitchock’s film, is that there’s no Joel Fleishman, no one to offer the outsider's perspective on the story.

A disparate set of townspeople all think that they’ve killed titular corpse, found at the opening of the film, and spend most of the duration playing the blame game. Droll rather than laugh out loud funny, as is often the case with Hitch, the best scenes are surprisingly those having nothing to do with the main plot, in particular between potential couple, solid John Forsythe and a luminous Shirley MacLaine making her screen debut, as they negotiate the terms of their relationship.

Hitch told Trauffaut (during their lifelong interview) that he thought the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much was his favourite – the earlier version the work of a talented amateur (so modest), the latter of a professional. I think he's being unusually harsh on his younger self; the earlier film is thick with a musty atmosphere lost in the technicolor of the later model, but the remake's longer duration allows for more complex storytelling.

The latter also offers the surprising appearance of Doris Day in one of her few early dramatic roles. I love Doris Day. Always adorable, and watchable even in the most middling of films, a bit like a 1950s Zooey Deschanel or if we're being honest Julia Roberts. Trust Hitch to not only have her sing (well why would you cast someone like her and not give her at least one song) but make that integral to the climax.

As I also said in my comments about the original film, none of the antagonists have quite the same charisma as Peter Lorre though to a degree their bland normality probably increases their menace. Of all the films in Hitch’s canon, it’s quite surprising that this hasn’t been served with a remake – it would seem the perfect vehicle for Tom Hanks – though I suppose that’s true of all Jimmy Stewart’s films as we found out with You’ve Got Mail. On second thoughts …

it’s very difficult to believe

Film My copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder begins with a BBC announcer suggesting that fans of Columbo will be in for a treat. She’s not wrong; just as Forbidden Planet begat Star Trek, it’s very difficult to believe that the producers of Columbo hadn’t seen this before knocking out their first scripts, so structurally similar are the two. Like Columbo, the film opens with the arrogant murderer carrying out his plot (and in this case explaining it) and we then spend most of the rest of the picture watching the detective bring himself up to speed. He even has a moment were he dips back in and says “Just one more thing…” before indicating the vital clue that blows the whole mystery wide open which had been on-screen already, but we’d simply missed in our fear for Grace Kelly’s safety.

Aaah, Grace Kelly. I think she’s my favourite of Hitch’s famous blondes. He apparently liked her repressed British sexuality, and its true that there’s a china doll aspect to her which is probably why the moment in which she’s attacked in Dial M is so potent – she looks like she could break. But Rear Window and To Catch A Thief both demonstrate her comic ability; neither Kim Novak or Tippi Hedron could sustain the screwball elements of both films which is all the funnier because we can’t believe someone with that face and figure could offer us the kind of Zooey Deschanel like eye-boggles her character gives in Rear Window when Jimmy Stewart’s character is talking crazy and later when she’s heading across to the apparent murderer’s apartment. Similarly, earlier in the later film, Hitch actually attempted to pitch his shots in such a way as to deglamourise her because our attention has to be with Cary Grant. It didn’t really work.

When I was at college, Rear Window was used to demonstrate the difference between diagetic and non-diagetic sound. The whole film was lensed on an elaborate set, and looks like it (perhaps inspiring the ediface Caden Cotard’s theatre director creates in Synechdoche, New York) though for much of the film we can suspend our disbelief because the director fills the soundtrack with noise seeping in from the rest of the city – that’s non-diagetic sound – the sound which has been added in and isn’t being created on screen. Diagetic sound is the click of Stewart’s flash, the bark of the dog, the piano music, anything which is apparently happening within the viewable space. Between the two, despite the artifice, you believe that Jimmy’s apartment, though we only leave once (when we see the death of the dog from the neighbour’s perspective), exists within a much larger space, that the potential murderer and companion are going somewhere other than craft services.

The opening of To Catch A Thief is a demonstration of Hitchcock’s restraint. He’s showing that all of the rich ladies in the local area are having their jewellery pinched by a cat burgler, but he doesn’t want give away the characteristics of the fiend yet – and we don’t discover their identity until the very end of the film. So he reduces each burglary to six or seven shots. An establishing shot of the home; a shot of a black cat heading in its direction, a shot of whatever’s being stolen, shot of the cat leaving, shot of the scream of the victim, shot of the space where the jewellery used to be. Repeat three times and we already know more about the scenario than most modern films what resort to elaborate action sequences, voiceovers or scrolling text. With the possible exception of the rooftop climax, all of To Catch A Thief is as restrained, the minimum number of shot choices for maximum effect; when the director later describes it as a fancy, something he dashed off between more interesting projects, he’s being modest; the same care and attention is at play here as in his more respected projects.

tipping over into psychosis

Film There was a bit of gap between watching Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train; having seen the Patricia Highsmith adaptation before and found it uncomfortable I wasn’t looking forward to watching it again, even in sequence, so I kept setting it to one side. Parts of it make me physically ill; not because it isn’t a powerful, well directed piece of work, but because of Robert Walker’s presence. He reminds me of the bogeyman I used to conjure up as a child, that initial misanthropic kindness tipping over into psychosis. Sure enough, I found it extraordinarily difficult to sit through so I suppose it had the right effect, since the director often said that he was in the business of unsettling his audience and often he achieved that through performance alone.

Performances are also the key to I Confess, in which a young father of the religious kind, Montgomery Clift, who looks like Tom Cruise morphing into Mark Harmon, spends most of the film in mute contemplation as after taking confessional from a murderer, he’s fingered for the same crime. His religious conviction is shattered since he can’t speak up to defend himself without jeopardising his sacred compact. Shakespeare covered similar themes in Measure for Measure – to what extent should your faith interfere with your mortality? Some preview audience members were dissatisfied because they couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t talk, though that misses the point. The man has a code and he’s unwilling to break it, because it wouldn’t just reflect badly on him, but also the organisation he works for. Why would anyone else trust him with their secrets if he’s liable to blab them to everyone afterwards?

Spoilers ahead.

Film Almost as soon as Stage Fright opens with Jane Wyman and Richard Todd fleeing from somewhere by car, it cuts to an extended flashback with explains exactly how Wyman and Todd got themselves into this mess. For much of the film, our knowledge of the characters is tempered by the information we’re given, about how Marlene Dietrich’s actress asked Todd to cover for the accidental murder of her husband. Then in the final moments, the rug is pulled from under us when its revealed that everything Todd has said is a lie, that his narration was unreliable. It’s a revelation, not just to Wyman’s character who’s trusted him through much of the film, and to us too because it seems so unlike Hitchcock to employ an unreliable narrator.

Reflecting on the decision later, he thought he’d cheated the audience by creating surprise rather than suspense and some critics agreed with him, but with respect to the Master, he’s wrong (and should have more courage in his conviction) and they’re wrong too. We’ve come to expect this kind of unreliable narration in recent years – The Usual Suspects being the most prominent example. But to do it in this kind of setting is perhaps one of his greatest twists, and shows what could have been a different sort of director – the confidence trickster. Instead he became the suspense director – we find out about the switcheroo in Vertigo half way through the film so that it then becomes about Jimmy Stewart’s reaction. Psycho’s an interesting case, but I’ll talk about that when I get there.

that’s pretty much what I was thinking

Film Under Capricorn is a mess. Some French critics (Trauffaut included) thought it to be Hitchcock's masterpiece and there has been some recent critical re-evaluation in relation to his use of long takes and how they express the inner life of the characters with their own spaces (wiki) which is all fine, but it's the first film since Jamaica Inn that I’ve simply wanted to give up mid-stream, uninterested in the characters, the story and impatient about the rotten, slow pacing. If I’m spotting a pattern in Hitch’s career, it’s that when he strays away from something with an overtly suspenseful scenario, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the material. Much like Rope he uses ten minute takes, except here they feel like ten minutes because they simply don’t suite the domestic love triangle playing out before us. If he was trying to make us desperate for a cutaway but wanting to keep us painfully within the room, he succeeded.

Still, there is some curiosity value in seeing the subject of the formation of Australia turned into a film just over a hundred years after the original events in 1831, and how convicts were essentially being used a slave labour. These people lived in relatively isolation, ships taking months to travel too and from the motherland which is difficult for us modern apes to conceive of at a time when geopolitical information bounces around the planet instantly, and a quick glance at Google News can tell us the hot story in the Antipodean parliament. They wouldn’t have known that Darwin was heading in their direction on the historic cruise that would lead to his theory of Evolution, the Battle of Ostrołęka was happening in Poland and Victor Hugo was publishing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. They might have noticed The Sydney Morning Herald being founded. None of which has anything to do with the film, but that’s pretty much what I was thinking about as Ingrid Bergman went into another one of her alcohol induced fits.

As ever, Hitch knew when he’d produced a clunker and said as much again to a disappointed Truffaut in those interviews. He was apparently riding on a career high and had in his mind the moment when he and Bergman, who was the one who really wanted to do the picture, stepped onto the tarmac at Heathrow into the awaiting photographers, the most famous director in the world and the most famous actress. He’s sheepish about his own vanity and acknowledges that it had a knock on effect on the final product which was begun without a completed script which had elements he wasn’t sure how he was going to deal with them – which was risky considering it was a self-produced independent picture. The film sank at the box office and was repossessed by the banks leading to it being unseen for many years.

we dislike him so much

Film Rope is a film of firsts. The director's first use of technicolour, though trust Hitchcock to have been given the gift of technicolour then use it in a film completely set in a drab apartment with characters wearing muted colours. First appearance for Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock film, as the professor of the murderous boys or eventually figures out the mechanics of their scheme, here resting just between a Capraesque everyman and morally ambiguous figure of Rear Window and Vertigo. First time Hitchcock manages to make a film in which the suspense develops even without the need for fast cutting and the reduction of information. First time that a director intended to give the impression of one continuous shot running right through the film (a subject covered in some detail at the wikipedia).

It’s a technical tour-de-force. In these days of digital-cameras in which Mike Figgis can shoot four whole feature films simultaneously in real time and have them all interact with each other and then repeat the process daily over a whole month (which is how he shot Timecode), it’s perhaps difficult to accept the effort that went into stitching together the eighty-minutes of Rope. But these were heavy cameras; furniture and parts of the set had to be pulled in and out and silently too since he was actually recording naked sound from the stage and blocking everything out so that the end of each ten minute reel of film matched the right point so that the next one could pick up hassle free. And on top of that, having to reshoot the second half of the film again because the director of photography had misunderstood what was needed to show the on-creep of dawn though the sky-light.

The actors have said they appreciated the opportunity to develop their roles over a longer scene without too much directorial interference. The cast of Timecode said much the same thing. Except in Rope, there’s no improvisation, everyone has to stay on-script, since to dawdle, to throw in some new element would ruin the timing, which makes the performances all the more impressive. True, there’s an element of stage acting, but even in a theatre (and in a television studio) there’s latitude to move about. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been to not only have to remember Patrick Hamilton’s dialogue but also the blocking, especially John Dall, who is in nearly every scene. It’s arguably his sneer that makes moments like the famous one in which the camera stays on the wooden chest work, because we dislike him so much we’re desperate for Stewart to realise where the body has been left.

stifled by the restrictive legal process

Film One of the problems with the recent London Law & Order series was that although it was filmed in the UK, with British actors and was about the UK justice system with its wigs, the pacing of the material, shooting style and general structure constantly reminded the viewer that they were watching adaptations of older material, almost to the point that you could hear a hammer thumping away trying to flatten the script to work in a different context. The underrated Basic Instinct 2 similarly brought the Hollywood aesthetic to the streets of London, director Michael Caton-Jones offering his best Verhoven-alike.

I had much the same impression of The Paradine Case; that the story might have been served better by being set in the US; I appreciated that some of the point is about watching Gregory Peck’s lawyer slowly becoming stifled by the restrictive legal process, unable to right for wrong, unable to confirm when he needs to what evidence or witness statements he’ll have to deal when in court. And we might have been denied Charles Laughton’s delicious performance as the Judge, whose permanent expression of disgust ranging against anyone who doesn’t share his world view is, I’m sure, the image of what many people now expect some MPs to be like now that we know how they’ve been spending our money.

But compare Peck’s performance here with his tour-de-force as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Granted the material in the later film is more electric and relevant and the overall approach is towards creating a work of prestige, whereas Hitch as ever is more interested in entertainment, yet his actor looks uncomfortable; Hitch himself says to Trauffaut in no uncertain terms: “I don’t think that Gregory Peck can properly represent an English lawyer” he wanted Lawrence Olivier or Ronald Coleman. But the production had been rewritten by his then producer David O. Selznick and he had his own ideas about who should cast to say his words and so, like many of his earlier British silents, he was working with elements that were not of his choosing.

Perhaps the curious sense of dislocation also from the film actually having been shot in the US with Selznick rewriting the script in the UK and sending the pages to Hitchcock who was meant to try his best with them. I had assumed it was the other way around. The directors says he lost track of the shape of the piece. He’s talked about how he was never entirely sure how the original murder was committed, the geography of the house, and that is confusing, though I did think whilst watching that this was a deliberate choice to show how our memory can play tricks and reshape events to fit our point of view. Now and then, I wonder if Hitch was adding layers to his work that even he wasn’t aware of.

romantic handler

Film Truffaut says that Notorious is his favourite of Hitchcock’s black and white films suggesting that it’s quintessential Hitchcock; he doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks that is, but it is another example of a lead character hemmed in by duty and circumstances. Ingrid Bergman is the daughter of a Nazi agent who’s forced to go undercover in Rio de Genero to flush out a nest of Nazi refugees, ultimately marrying one of them. Carry Grant is her romantic handler, Claude Rains her quarry. It’s Rebecca remade as a spy film, with Rains playing a version of the Oskar Homolka from Sabotage.

In a reaction to screen violence, Hitch makes the threat as low key as possible; though Rains is in love with Bergman you’re constantly concerned about what he’d be capable of if he ever found out he’s been betrayed by her, especially with his hectoring mother constantly in the frame. And it’s true that watching Bergman being poisoned slowly always on the edge of salvation is excruciating, a domesticated version of the man on the edge of a cliff, his fingers slowly losing their grip.

As ever there’s an excellent sense of place in the film; set in Rio de Genero, something of an alternative to Hitch’s usual stomping grounds, it’s rather like watching those episodes of Doctor Who in which the film elements have been shot abroad. I’m constantly amazed at how often Hitch gets away with having the actors working in the studio against plates filmed in locale or stock footage. He’s able to connect us to the story and characters so successfully that more often than not we don’t realise the artifice until after he’s moved on.

the Bond-like skiing adventure

Film Day four. I might be going to Coventry today or Warwick. I haven't decided yet.

I’m aware that sometimes when I’m criticising the master’s work, I can sound like Oliver Peyton picking over some inedible lump of goop cooked to perfection by a chef with a Michelin asterisk on the Great British Menu and probably just as wrong sometimes, but to my eyes and ears, Spellbound is a disappointingly uneven and often dull film, the most attractive reason to watch being the central dream sequence created by Salvador Dali, in which the artist relishes the opportunity to transfer the elements of his painting into a moving picture format. To save you the time, here it is:



Unlike his paintings (and to some extent his earlier film collaborations), Dali’s work is being pressed into service to help explain Gregory Peck’s character’s psychological quagmire and all of these exciting elements are explained at the climax, the theory being that all unconscious elements of the human psyche, especially dreams can examined and interpreted.

Though there’s undoubtedly some excellent performances and the usual quota of surprises, my main problem with the film is that Hitch is repeating himself – the wrongly accused is on the run again. I’m guessing that the director is keeping these elements formulaic because the overall subject, psychiatry, is somewhat outside of the mainstream and he’s attempting to keep his audience on side. Except the execution is weirdly anticeptic and there’s a lack of chemistry between Peck and his leading lady Ingrid Bergman, who also seems uncomfortable with her part as his doctor and lover.

The director himself lists many of these problems to Truffaut in their interviews together and notes that he wanted to use a realistic approach because of the psychoanalysis. He was reluctant to fantasize and wanted to use a logic for once. Odd, then that best sequence is clearly the Bond-like skiing adventure and you can’t help but wonder if a much more interesting film might have come from setting the whole thing within the Daliscape, with Peck’s character trying to escape his dreams metaphorically instead of literally, in other words, an early version of the old Amiga game Weird Dreams or Richard Linklater’s animation Waking Life with Bernard Hermann writing the soundtrack.

the decency of the resistance fighters

Film Hitchcock worked as a propagandist during the war working with the UK’s Ministry of Information to produce a couple of shorts as a morale booster for the French Resistance.

The first, Bon Voyage, is a neat bit of suspense about an RAF who has escaped a prisoner of war camp and describes how he returned home. His story is presented in flashback, the events described from two perspectives Roshoman-style, Hitch demonstrating that there are always varying degrees of truth and that you shouldn’t believe everything you see. Clearly made on a budget and featuring few locales, it’s still more purely entertaining than many war films because the director isn't afraid to emphasise small details at the expense of the epic gestures, such as the decency of the resistance fighters. A scene in a farmhouse (between a soldier and a resistance fighter) has a clear antecedent in The 39 Steps, and the overall impression is that if he’d had the time and inclination Hitch would have been able to stretch the material over a longer duration.

Aventure Malgache has a similar flashback structure, but it’s the much clearer, more straightforward story in which an actor explains to his colleagues how he escaped from Vichy controlled Madagascar. The BFI have an incisive discussion of the political implications but my favourite scenes are the brief moments between the actors in their dressing room; Hitch returned to the theatre throughout his career, but this seems to be the most accurate presentation so far of what it is like, the friendly banter between actors just before subsuming themselves in character before going on stage. There’s also a wonderful moment within flashback in which a picture is replaced which could have been dropped in from Casablanca. And that’s that for the war period.

the fragile edges of a tiny vessel

Film As I greet each Hitchcock film, my admiration for his work increases. Everyone talks about the various motifs of the director (here’s a big long list of them ) but for me, it all boils down simply to a willingness to work outside of the norm, to flout expectations, and above all to experiment. Having tackled the lead up to conflict in The Lady Vanishes and Foreign Correspondent, Hitch could have tried his hand at a stereotypical war film, a genre-rich re-enactment of a fight against the odds. Instead, in Lifeboat, he plays out the war within the fragile edges of a tiny vessel, of civilians buffeted by events beyond their control.

A pleasure cruise is torpedoed and the survivors gather together on a lifeboat, drifting in a seemingly endless ocean awaiting rescue. A propaganda element is injected when a survivor from the U-boat (which was destroyed in the skirmish) is pulled on to the life-raft and we watch the rag tag group first reject then accept his presence, before, predictably he repays their ‘misplaced’ trust. It’s the stuff of the later indie movement, a bunch of strangers collected in a room (or in this case a boat), and on reflection the Cube trilogy is a near remake. They live, they die, they fall in love, they argue and all within a confined space.

For my sins, I’ve not encountered Tallulah Bankhead who plays the temporary matriarch Constance "Connie" Porter before; it’s fairly understandable since she was mostly known as a stage actress and mired by controversy about her private life for much of her career which mitigated against film roles. It’s said that Bette Davies took some inspiration from her, but for my money she’s more like a younger, aristocratic Susan Sarandon, that ability to be earthy yet still rise above. The rest of the cast are a mix of Hitch’s repertory and as ever they’re impeccably chosen, especially Walter Slezak whose generally placid, good natured demeanour, counters expectations and continues Hitch’s theme that the enemy is just like us.

What stops the film from becoming stagey – a risk since the whole piece has been filmed on a sound stage – is Hitch’s use of close-ups and editing which at times reveals information to us and only some crew members, suspense created then in their ability to communicate the discovery to the rest of the crew. We’re also never given an establishing shot of the whole boat; we’re constantly on-board the vessel, never given respite from the intoxicating grimness that pervades the scene. Which isn’t to say there are lighter moments, but this is the blackest of comedies.

the potency of her own sexuality

Film Shadow of a Doubt was Alfred Hitchcock’s own favourites because it captured exactly what he was repeatedly trying to do in cinema, bring strangeness to the familiar. A long lost uncle, Joseph Cotton, returns to his family who, with the exception of the eldest daughter (played with an almost pathological level of golly-gee by Teresa Wright), are oblivious to the fact that he's essentially a serial killer, marrying widows for their money before bumping them off to claim the inheritance.

Hitch is back to his genre games here and I think he was more aware of it than in Foreign Correspondent particularly in the use of photography (created by Joseph A. Valentine who previously worked on Saboteur). Cotton is a figure straight from noir territory bringing his dark presence to the quintessential 1940s small town America of Frank Capra. When the family meet him at the station, the platform is bathed in sunlight until the train pulls in bringing with it a shadow that hints at the darkness to some.

As the initially innocent Wright, understands the situation she's be thrust into and the potency of her own sexuality, its almost as though this noirish cinematography of Cotton is spreading like a virus which everyone but Wright is immune to. Often it seems to change in the same scene from the sweetness of her younger siblings to her own troubled shoulders, a constant reminder that she alone has the ability to protect her family, Hitch demonstrating how little would be required to unpick the fabric of this mini society.