Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

As a contemporary viewer familiar with war-time films of the forties, Shadow of a Doubt is a disturbing and relentlessly modern look at the corruption of small town American life. In an era when the movies all but had to portray only positive images of this country, Alfred Hitchcock was testing the limits of decency and morality as defined by Hollywood’s Production Code. Hitchcock takes the all-American family and introduces malice so true it consumes.

The horror is, of course, Uncle Charlie. He visits his sister and her family in Santa Rosa, California, and develops a strange relationship with his niece, Charlotte, affectionately referred to as Charlie in honor of her uncle. She soon suspects her Uncle Charlie of being the Merry Widow murderer and is plunged into turmoil over her family obligations and the vulgarity of his acts.

The director’s previous American films had had a distinctly English feel: gothic, elegant, mild-mannered, even Saboteur, the American remake of The 39 Steps. Hitchcock was keen on capturing the America he’d been seeing, and Thornton Wilder was hired to script the original story that was, by Hitchcock’s own admission, his first American film.

Hitchcock would often advise his actors on a technique he called negative acting, where an actor would be smiling at the beginning of a scene and then lose the smile after a dramatic blow, capturing the extremes of human emotion. He was working in archetypes, presenting clearly made movies to mainstream audiences. The structure of Shadow of a Doubt unfolds similarly. When we’re first introduced to the Newton family, it’s a kind of clichéd look at bucolic family life. Everybody is nice and genteel and pleasant to an almost cartoonish degree, or at least to a laughable one. This might appear dated when we, less as Americans and more as human begins, know that this isn’t the reality of daily life. But the light atmosphere Hitchcock cultivates in the film’s early scenes heightens the dark aspects of the story to follow, dark like the column of smoke snaking behind Uncle Charlie’s train.

Perhaps the most glaring detail of the film is the Young Charlie’s relationship with her uncle. Throughout, Hitchcock connects the two Charlies with similar visuals, setting up the recurring Hitchcockian theme of doubles. Young Charlie is always saying how alike they are... like twins! There is even a disturbing scene where Uncle Charlie gives to his niece a ring from one of his victims. While the thought is innocent enough I guess, the Uncle slips the ring onto her finger not unlike in a marriage ceremony. In the end, Young Charlie is forced into becoming like her Uncle because of her Uncle. I was always struck by Young Charlie’s line, “Don’t touch me, Uncle Charlie,” after she confronts him with her beliefs. This is the moment when Charlie has lost her innocence. She later threatens to kill her uncle if he doesn’t leave the family.

Originally it seems their relationship was to take an even edgier turn. In Hitchcock’s own story outline, dated May 11, 1942, he writes, “...her (Young Charlie) being attracted to him (Uncle Charlie) is going to possibly upset the humorous state of affairs between the Uncle and the family.” Is Hitchcock detailing their relationship as it exists in the finished film, or is this a direction the director would have liked to travel with his unconventional family drama? It reads to me like the latter, and while it is clear that Young Charlie has very confused feeling towards her Uncle, the family never is bothered by their friendship. Of course the extreme relations would never have been allowed to continue into a second draft of the screenplay back in 1942, but this idea gives us excellent insight into Hitchcock’s lifelong obsession with unusual sexual behavior.

(The outline for Shadow of a Doubt is published in Dan Auiler’s invaluable book, Hitchcock’s Notebooks, which gives a full understanding of Hitchcock’s working methods from conception to release. The book is a patchwork made up of materials covering Hitchcock’s entire career.)

The performances in the film are among the best in all of Hitchcock’s work. In a marked detour from his usual mother figures, Emma Newton (Young Charlie’s mother) is not just the sweet and doting martyr expected of the era. One gets the feeling she’s on the verge of a breakdown, and Patricia Collinge gives a complex and heartbreaking performance that perhaps went beyond the call of the script. Teresa Wright is perfect as Charlie. She expels the structure of the story exactly; acting naive by way of Shirley Temple in the beginning, then tortured and conflicted at the end. Though it is the showiest part, it should not be overlooked: Joseph Cotton as Uncle Charlie, for a 1940s movie killer, is unique. When I first saw the film and even now, I was surprised by how much Anthony Hopkins’ performance of Hannibal Lector mirrored Uncle Charlie, especially when Cotton gives the speech at the dinner table about “those silly wives.” His voice is emotionless and monotone, as if he’s slipping into his compulsion. It’s a remarkable portrayal not only for its time but now. It elicits a response from today’s audiences that maybe they were not expecting from such an old film.

An unsuccessful element of the picture is the recurring image of the dancers’ waltz. It is shown after moments of great tension, almost the euphoric release of a satiated killer. The image can be seen as Hitchcock’s visual attempt at Uncle Charlie’s unstable mind, but I’m afraid the technique is just bewildering. It is not a dated element of the film; I can’t see it working in the 1940s either, but we’ve seen the director use this technique in his silent days. It feels like the weak cousin of the famous shot in The Lodger of the fade-away glass ceiling. Since Hitchcock could not dramatize the footsteps from the floor above in sound, he simply showed us the suspected villain walking over the heads of the innocent family below. The similar theme in Shadow of a Doubt never works as the director intended, and in fact feels like a copout. Instead of showing us the emotional resolution to very intense scenes (the finale on the train, for example) this shot quickly fades up, accompanied by the tune of the Merry Widow’s Waltz.

The Waltz was infused into the dramatic score by frequent Hitchcock composer Dimitri Tiomkin. The score itself is melodramatic and evasive, and indeed Hitchcock’s scores were the typical European sound the Golden Age is remembered for. It is an unsettling sound for this picture, one that distracts too much from the action onscreen without support. It wasn’t until the director teamed with Bernard Herrmann in the mid-fifties that the Hitchcock film found its music. Herrmann’s music would take on narrative dimensions that would have served well a film like Shadow of a Doubt, but taken on its own Tiomkin’s score is very good. He himself is an underappreciated composer from the era, and his score for Hitchcock’s I Confess is actually very good.

Ultimately, Shadow of a Doubt remains one of Hitchcock’s best movies because it is a clear example of the director’s sense of the world. From out of the censored studio era, it’s refreshing that an artist could commit to celluloid a personal, cynical voice. Nothing, it seems, is as it should be in a Hitchcock film, and I’m not talking about genre. While his films are certainly nail biters, I believe the reason Hitchcock was so great was because he understood the human condition and its flaws. Psycho is not a horror film. It’s a complex study of trapped souls. Nor is Shadow of a Doubt simply a suspense film. It’s a story of morality and of people trapped within themselves, almost certainly a parallel of the repressed social conditions. To call Alfred Hitchcock’s films shallow is to ignore the complexity that is bubbling beneath the surface of his facades.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Thornton Wilder
Stars: Joseph Cotton, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge

USA

In English

Runtime: 108 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036342/

Birds, The (1963)

The Birds begins like a sitcom, or at least like a low-rent TV project from the 60s.  We’re introduced to the pretty girl, Melanie Daniels, played by Hitchcock’s final cool blonde Tippi Hedren, as she is kept waiting for a pair of birds from a bird shop.  A handsome, mysterious man who knows all about her plays a prank, sort of payback for Melanie’s infamous practical jokes.  The man is Mitch, a lawyer, and Melanie is a playgirl with a rich newspaper tycoon father.  She buys a pair of love birds for Mitch’s sister, Cathy, and secretly brings them to Mitch’s family home in Bodega Bay, California.  Their playful banter is disrupted by a swooping seagull who takes a peck out of Melanie.  We meet Mitch’s mother, Lydia, who would disapprove of any woman Mitch brings home.  Just ask the town’s schoolteacher, Annie.  When Mitch’s father died, he broke off their relationship, and she moved to Bodega Bay just to remain close.  That was four years ago, and she and Lydia are now friends.  It seems Lydia hates the idea of being abandoned.  Melanie and Annie become accidental friends when Melanie lies to Mitch, insisting she was coming to Bodega Bay to visit her old college chum.  Annie’s name she got from the general store.

Ordinarily in a Hitchcock film, this material would be the real story, and indeed it is in The Birds.  The bird attacks are merely the MacGuffin, but there is a superficial quality to this film.  The characters are thinly sketched and merely archetypes.  Mitch is the strong handsome lead, Melanie is Hitchcock’s heroine, the character through which the story will unfold; Lydia is a dominating Hitchcockian mother, selfish, violent even, and Cathy is the innocence that was intended to really jab at the audience once the horror starts.  Annie is the only human being in the cast.  We can understand her pain.  She sticks close to the man she loves because that is all she can have.  This character is similar to Norman Bates and Marion Crane from Psycho.  The others are quite frankly boring, and the performers can’t save them.

A weakness of the picture is usually something that saves Hitchcock’s subversive characters: the actors.  Here the two leads are a letdown.  Tippi Hedren is fun to watch.  She’s beautiful but not typically so.  There’s an odd quality to her.  Her voice is high-pitched, raspy, and awkward, and as a movie personality she does well.  She’s very curious, though.  Sometimes she delivers her lines well, other times, more often than not, she is unconvincing.  I can’t really fault Rod Taylor as Mitch.  I just wasn’t interested in him.  Hitchcock should have chosen Rock Hudson, someone who looked younger, more boyish and possessed more charisma.  Mitch and Melanie’s relationship was not organic.  It felt forced.  I wonder why disasters are always aphrodisiacs in the movies.  There’s an embarrassing scene on the sand where we learn something of Melanie’s back story.  We find out her playgirl days have made her a mature woman, that the lifestyle ruins reputations and she is devoting herself to good causes now.  We also learn of her deadbeat mother, and partly due to Hedren’s delivery but mostly to the script, the sentiment is false and truly laughable.  It’s predicable, and Hitchcock is too good to be predicable but there you have it.

The supporting performers are fine.  Jessica Tandy chews the screen in subtle ways as the mother.  Of course Suzanne Pleshette is fantastic.  She brings a rare quality to a Hitchcock role: grittiness.  Annie is a real woman: attractive but not glamorous, frank, honest, and a little bit depressed.  I personally found Veronica Cartwright very effective for her generation.  I guess I must say this because when I saw the film with an audience, everyone was laughing at the portrayal of all the kids.  It’s just too old-fashioned for modern viewers.  I may be being a bit grumpy but why then were these people in the theater?  They know the film is old—grow up!

Actually I was very upset when I left the theater.  There was too much laughter during the screening.  An old couple sitting next to me said that the great thing about seeing a film like The Birds with an audience was hearing the nervous laughter during the tension-filled scenes.  I did not contradict them but they were out of touch.  No one respects the movies anymore.  I saw the film at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA, the Boston area’s most well known independent theater.  Their programming is often banal, showing the more ordinary independent stuff.  I’ve noticed that the audiences typical of Coolidge are kind of would-be movie snobs, the sort who prefers to drop various names and titles during discussions but who have no true understanding or appreciation for the cinema.  There was a lot of laughter during the area premiere screening of the complete Metropolis and there was laughter at The Birds.  Moments like the attack at the birthday party.  There’s a shot of a little girl face down on the grass as a seagull pecks at her head.  I didn’t find the image funny.  There was one moment where the film shut the audience up.  It’s probably the most well-known shot in the film, where Lydia wanders into her friend’s house and finds him dead with his eyes plucked out.  You could feel the audience was disturbed.  It was a thick atmosphere, but people still found things to laugh at.  Perhaps the idea of birds run amuck just isn’t believable.  I grant you that while walking down the streets of Boston it is ridiculous to imagine that the common pigeon will start attacking.  But this is the movies—this is a Hitchcock movie!  Suspend your disbelief otherwise stay home.

The moment I expected laughter (and was actually dreading because I found the constant laughs inappropriate) was met with silence.  It’s the semi famous moment when Melanie watches as a trail of spilled gasoline catches fire.  Hitchcock chose a strange series of parallel action, where the shot of the encroaching fire is disrupted by freeze-frame images of Hedren with her mouth agape.  The problem with it is that her shots are held too long and the people behind her move at normal speed.  The silence from the audience is probably due to the very palpable scene Hitchcock had staged.  It is one of many of the film’s later moments that are filled with tension and dread.

The Birds was ahead of its time in one way: it is the first of the modern-day disaster pictures.  In fact, I found parallels with two very popular and effective ones: Night of the Living Dead and Jurassic Park.  Spielberg’s movie is reminiscent because, like The Birds, it has innovative special effects and is terrifying about Earth-bound creatures attacking humans (granted dinosaurs are long extinct), but both also lack seriously developed characters, leaving the only points of interest with the attacking animals.  Night of the Living Dead is a more apt companion film, and it is easy to see that George Romero took the structure of Hitchcock’s picture and many of the ideas as well.  In both films there are languorous openings that suggest a different kind of story will be told instead of the one we’re given.  Both feature characters terrified by the danger outside their home, boarding up the place, and then turning on each other once the terror becomes unbearable.  They both also succeed as brilliantly claustrophobic and downright depressing exercises, though Romero’s film is much more shocking and sophisticated.  Though it was made only 5 years later, Night was made in a different time in American film.  The Birds begins carefree, with hope and promise for its characters but all joy is robbed by birds.

Where Hitchcock succeeds is also where he fails.  The Birds was a film Hitchcock almost never made.  After Psycho, another accidental project, Hitchcock was developing Marnie as a return vehicle for Grace Kelly.  The Birds was made instead because Kelly regretfully turned down Marnie, and with Psycho’s unbridled success the director turned out another devastating horror film.  It feels to me that Hitchcock gave up with The Birds.  He was cashing in on the audience’s expectation of his moniker but he failed to find the key to his success: a tight script and convincing characters.  The Birds never feels like a work of cinema.  It feels like a cynical exercise, even though it is technically well made and possesses some great cinematic moments from The Master.

The film is innovative too in its sound design.  It is very effective, and apparently much of the credit goes to composer Bernard Herrmann.  Herrmann is the greatest, most important composer of the 20^th Century, but The Birds exists without a note of music.  The composer, Hitchcock’s creative partner for nearly a decade, convinced the director that the film would work better with only the sounds of birds.  In comes a machine called the Mixtur Trautonium.  Along with the Theremin, it was one of the early electronic musical instruments, and this machine, a precursor to the synthesizer, created the shrieks for the birds.  I noted, however, that we seldom hear actual birds in the attacking scenes.  I recognized cats and chimpanzees, but in the chaos these were believable sounds.  In fact, the sounds probably caused much of the chaos.  Hitchcock must have been appreciative as Herrmann received onscreen credit as “Sound Consultant”, but this may be equally due to their friendship.  Another nice bit of sound is during the final scene, the massive shot of the exterior of the house littered with waiting birds.  There is the sound of wind, of pressure, something almost subliminal that suggests unease.  This reminded me of the great electronic score for Tarkovsky’s Solaris.  There was a problem, though, and it might have been unique to the print I saw, but the bird attack scenes were way too loud.  The dialogue and other scenes were at a normal volume, but the frightening scenes could have been turned down.

I do regret that Herrmann did not write music for the film.  I think it would have helped cement the film, made it tenser and its characters seem less simple.  The example to go by is Hitchcock’s own Torn Curtain.  Herrmann wrote a score but Hitchcock rejected it.  The film with its current score is good but like The Birds weakly sketched.  Herrmann’s score would have shaded in the characters, and I feel he could have only helped the film.  His and Hitchcock’s collaboration is legendary, and together they created the best American films of the 50s and 60s.  One artist fed off another, and their work is probably the definitive example of a director / composer relationship.  If nothing else, Herrmann’s score for The Birds would give us one more Herrmann score.

I’ve never been impressed with The Birds.  When I first saw it in high school I felt cheated by the ending.  Now I accept it and even think it’s the only way the film can end, but as a film it does not succeed.  The Birds showed Hitchcock failing by clinging to a formula that made him very wealthy in 1960.  While there are great moments of terror, the characters in The Birds are not compelling enough to carry us through scene to scene.  Because it is Hitchcock we stay, but you take away the birds and there is no film left.

Birds, The (1963)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: Evan Hunter

Stars: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette

USA

In English

Runtime: 119 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/

Under Capricorn (1949)

Alfred Hitchcock was once called the greatest director of screen melodramas by the British press.  This was during his first period in England, probably in relation to the 6 thrillers that constitute his best British work.  A forgotten and very hard to find film (in retrospectives, at least) made in the US, Under Capricorn, is probably Hitchcock at his melodramatic best.  It is not a suspense picture, though it resembles one.  This might be one reason for the film’s commercial and critical failure.

Under Capricorn isn’t a great film, but it is not boring.  I’ve seen it three times in maybe 5 years, and it’s most effective the less often you see it.  Hitchcock’s best pictures can be viewed over and over again, but Under Capricorn is preposterous and over the top, laden with actors with incorrect accents (the two leads!) and a soap opera plot.  It tells the cruel history of the colony of Australia, once used by the British as a detention camp for criminals.  The society, such as it is, is limited, and many of the colony’s most prosperous citizens were themselves inmates, many often sentenced falsely accused.  Sam Flusky, an Irishman from the time when the UK ruled with violence, is such a citizen, a man who with his first freedom made himself a success.  Into the colony comes Charles Adare, a carefree cousin of The Governor’s.  Charles is warned against keeping an engagement to Flusky’s home, but against reason he visits the haunted mansion and partakes of wine and dinner.  It is here we meet Flusky’s wife, Henrietta.  Their love affair resulted in scandal, and the death of Henrietta’s brother.  Because he did not fire the first shot, Sam got 6 years at the colony.  Henrietta, madly in love, fled to Australia to be near her love.

In the first of the many story conveniences Charles knew Flusky’s wife, Henrietta, back in Ireland; his sister was good friends with her family.  Henrietta is obviously drunk when we first meet her.  She stumbles into dinner barefooted with nightgown.  She solemnly refuses a drink from Charles.  Charles, with permission by Flusky, is determined to cure Henrietta of her malady and make her popular among the socially aware and mistress of her own house, which is currently run by the pushy maid, Milly, who carries a secret passion for the Mister.

Under Capricorn was Hitchcock’s second color film and a project during a quasi-experimental phase in the director’s career.  He was brought to America by producer David O. Selznick.  The two did not get along.  Selznick, a tyrannical producer, allowed the director little freedom, and when the contract expired Hitchcock became his own producer.  His film solo film, Rope, was technically brilliant but nearly put an end to Hitchcock’s newly formed production company, Transatlantic Pictures.  Rope is a film that exists with very few aesthetic cuts.  Hitchcock wanted the feel of a stage play by having 10 minute sections of the film shot in real time, and all but two “cuts” are seamlessly dissolved to create one single-take picture.  Under Capricorn might have been Hitchcock’s realization that his desired technique couldn’t work as cinema, so while he still peruses it in Under Capricorn, the image is livelier with cuts and more visually pleasing camera glides and pans.  The approach suits well the material of Under Capricorn.  When Charles and Flusky speak of Henrietta on the porch, the camera glides effortless up the house, into Henrietta’s room, showing the audience her in drunken turmoil.  The very first extended take, Charles walking into his cousin’s room, has grace and well-meaning, but the limitations of Technicolor technology, namely the heavy weight of the camera, are evident as the camera bounces to the cameramen’s walking motion.

This brings up a point I would like to discuss.  When I saw Under Capricorn at Harvard recently, filmmaker Morgan Fisher introduced the film, speaking beforehand about how 35mm negative can only run for 11 minutes in the camera, and allowing for roll and slate, slightly less.  He noted that if one of the long takes is fouled up 4 minutes in, more than likely the roll of film would need changing because the time allotted for the shot was in direct conflict to the remaining time left on the used reel of film.  It’s an interesting piece of info.  Also, when Hitchcock’s camera moves from one part of the set to another, every area has to be lit perfectly in advance.  Unlike Rope, which took place in one apartment in two different rooms, Under Capricorn moves all about, into previously closed doors, up the sides of buildings and stairs, and that each section of the set needed to be factually constructed and pre-lit is an enormous undertaking for the crew.  Fisher suggested that while watching these films, the audience is made aware of the life behind the camera.  I don’t agree.  Hitchcock was a skilled filmmaker.  Not only did he take risks, he knew how to make them work.  I think the whole of his artifice blends away when he puts the pieces of film together, no matter how long each segment.  Only film people might be aware of how Hitchcock shot this film.  Average viewers unfamiliar with the inner workings of filmmaking won’t be conscious of Hitchcock’s efforts.  I certainly wasn’t.  After studying the man and his work, I am still suckered into to his stories and cannot see the seams.

I won’t linger on it but Technicolor is stunning.  The print I saw was a BFI restoration and it was beautiful.  Most DVD production companies when working on three-strip Technicolor alter the tone and intensity of the color to make it look contemporary.  Technicolor is supposed to have a subtler palette than we’re used to.  Most of Under Capricorn has a grayish look, partly because of set and costume design, but the palette was softer than I was expecting.  Only The Criterion Collection’s Technicolor releases retain a film-like look among American DVD production houses.  Thankfully, Image Entertainment’s excellent DVD of Under Capricorn does, too.  Until seeing the BFI restoration on screen I was convinced Image used a bad print, but their DVD seems to have used the same restoration.  I noted only two differences: the blue introductory titles cards regarding the restoration are missing on the DVD, and overall the film has a slightly more faded look than the 35mm print, but fans eager to see Hitchcock’s rarest Hollywood film should not hesitate in purchasing Under Capricorn on DVD.

It’s melodrama and it’s rip-roaring.  It’s silly and fun and gothic.  In many ways it reminded me of other sources, most notably the novel Jane Eyre.  Rochester is a cursed man in a castle both shunned by and shunning society.  He is closed off from emotion and depressed at the reality of his situation.  Henrietta represents both Jane, the new servant girl who gives Rochester life after so much darkness, and Rochester’s long-suffering wife.  This parallel, at least in cinematic circles, becomes even more appropriate when considering the various 20^th Century adaptations of the novel, and of the novel Rebecca.  Rebecca was Hitch’s first American film and one of his greatest and best surviving films.  Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of “Rebecca” was scored by Bernard Herrmann, a composer who would make the greatest contributions to 20^th Century music working in film, and specifically with Hitchcock in the 50s and 60s.  Herrmann scored the greatest film adaption of Jane Eyre, starring Orson Welles, and adapted his radio score for Rebecca for that picture.  Under Capricorn is in the gothic tradition, where morality and social obligations counted more than one’s happiness.  Flusky wants his wife cured of her illnesses so that she may be happy, but that she cannot help herself weighs heavily on him.  Milly, the maid, doesn’t help.  This is another throwback to Hitchcock’s Rebecca.  Milly is very much like Mrs. Danvers, obsessed over the person she serves and willing to kill those who threaten her own happiness.

One thing I felt the film did terrifically, or at least as honestly as the Production Code would allow, is show what’s it’s really like for someone dependant on alcohol.  Ingrid Bergman’s Henrietta is a slave to her drinks.  In her early scenes it’s the only thing that brings her happiness.  It’s quite alarming to see alcoholism so seriously depicted on the screen.  The Lost Weekend by Wilder is kind of a joke, but it is like Hitchcock to take a serious subject in a less than serious script and treat it with due seriousness.  It is Hitchcock’s much-overlooked strength to supply his movies with honest character portraits.  Even in melodrama they are relatable.

Joseph Cotton and Ingrid Bergman are terrific actors.  Both had been better in other Hitchcock films but given the limitations of the material they do just fine.  One thing that initially took me out of the picture was their accents.  Both are supposed to be Irish.  Cotton, an American, speaks his lines with his normal New York voice.  Bergman fares even worse because of her thick Swedish accent, and on top of that she attempts an Irish brogue.  It’s kind of amusing at first, but Bergman was great with screen melodrama.  In fact all classic Hollywood actresses could figuratively bleed on screen.  Maybe it was the era.  Bergman could turn her head away in shame or heartbreak as good as anyone.  It sounds like I’m making fun, but Bergman was a dynamic talent, especially with terrific scripts.  She always is convincing in love, but every time she calls her husband’s name in Under Capricorn I kept thinking of another Sam...  The supporting cast is superlative, another Golden Age staple.  Margaret Leighton as the villainous Milly and especially Cecil Parker as the governor are simply fun to watch.  Parker has a way of delivering lines as only an old-fashioned Englishman can.  The least impressive is Michael Wilding as Charles.  The role is boring and he matched it.  It was easy to see why Henrietta was always passionately devoted to Flusky, even if for the majority of the film their relationship remains a mystery.  Supporting the material is the great score by Richard Addinsell.  Not to use the word again but it is in the melodramatic tradition: lush, full orchestra giving it all.  His music is intrusive in some of the quieter moments but he has some terrific themes and more importantly orchestrations.

I recommend Under Capricorn to all eager to see Hitchcock films.  It belongs to a series of non-suspense pictures that really come to define the director’s career.  We expect the Psychos and North by Northwests but films like Lifeboat and Under Capricorn really showcase the stories and characters that Hitchcock was most interested in.  It’s wonderfully over the top.

Under Capricorn (1949)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Hume Cronyn (adaptation), James Birdie (screenplay)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotton, Michael Wilding and Margaret Leighton

USA

In English

Runtime: 117 minutes

To purchase Under Capricorn on DVD from Image Entertainment, visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Capricorn-Ingrid-Bergman/dp/B000093NSH/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302731065&sr=1-1

Under Capricorn is available for viewing via online streaming at The Internet Archive:

http://www.archive.org/details/UnderCapricorn

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042004/

Rear Window (1954)

I noticed a great migration heading towards the theater.  As I took my seat I recognized a few people from the train.  Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo was playing before the feature, and there was a lot of talk about film and specifically about Hitchcock.  The lights came down and Rear Window started.  This is one of the most romantic experiences I’ve ever had at the movies.  We were all here to see the master’s work.

On the surface, Rear Window is a movie about someone looking outside of his window.  Jimmy Stewart plays Jeff, a photographer temporarily bound to a wheelchair.  He has a fabulous view of the apartments across the way and each window is, if you will, a movie screen.  Each screen is a different show.  His would-be girlfriend Lisa grows impatient as Jeff refuses to settle down, alluding to his “characters” for examples of why not to marry.  He soon comes to suspect that a man has done away with his wife.  He tries to convince everyone in his life, Lisa, his nurse Stella, and his friend, Detective Doyle, but Jeff is the only one with the knowledge of all the strange comings and goings of Mr. Thorwald across the way and the unexplainable disappearance of the man’s wife.  People simply refuse to believe that someone would commit murder in plain sight.

Hitchcock’s films are almost always art.  All are entertaining, but his skill elevates many of his pictures into another realm.  Rear Window’s central theme is looking, not just Jeff looking but we the audience watching the film are exposed to the way that the cinema looks objectively and subjectively into its own world.  Hitchcock’s editing style throughout his career was simple.  Using only three separate shots, the man could display, purely pictorially, the psychological process of his characters.  “The look” is an objective shot, a shot from no particular point of view.  This shot orients the audience, and is the image of the character looking, in this case Jeff looking out his window.  “The POV—what is seen” follows, and this shot is the character’s point of view.  With Hitchcock, these shots always align to the eyesight of the character in the previous shot.  A lesser director would take the POV from an objective angle but in the language of cinema this shot has to be subjective.  Hitch knows to put us into the perspective of his characters, making us implicit in the story.  “The reaction” is a follow-up on the first shot.  Having seen whatever, the character reacts.  It seems simple, almost preposterous, but this three shot technique encompasses what I refer to as the psychology of the cinema.  We know how characters see things, and their reactions tell the story.

Hitchcock was not the great innovator of this technique.  It was apparently set forth by the Russian film theorist and director Lev Kuleshov.  As described by Hitchcock, you take a shot of a man looking, then cut to a shot of a baby.  Now cut to a shot of the man smiling.  What is he?  He’s a kind hearted figure.  Now, take the middle piece of film out and replace it with a shot of a woman in a bikini—keep the same shots of the man.  Now what is he?  A pervert.  Kuleshov went darker, suggesting the image of a dead baby, still with the man looking and smiling.  He now becomes a sadist.  This idea is unique to cinema.  No other art form can encompass the human thought process so clearly and artfully.  It is proof that movies can be art.  This technique is why Rear Window remains one of Hitchcock’s most important films.  It is the clearest, most definable example of his artistic technique.

The director is almost cheating because the set-up of Rear Window—Jeff confined to a wheelchair looking out his rear window—leaves little directorial options for a master filmmaker.  Even when bricks between window panes block our view, we use our imagination to fill in the gaps.  A less talented director would have used an omniscient point of view.  Throughout the film, it is Kuleshov's technique that builds suspense and generates so much of our understanding of these characters.

Hitchcock breaks his own editing rules several times throughout the picture.  Some breaks are logical to create suspense.  Jeff beings suspecting Thornwald at night, and he keeps watch as long as he can but falls asleep around 6am.  We are now given a piece of info unknown to the main character: Thornwald leaves his apartment with, for all intents and purposes, his wife.  When later Jeff accuses Thornwald of murder we somewhat doubt him.  The next time Hitchcock takes us out of sync is after a neighbor’s dog is murdered.  By now Jeff, Lisa, and Jeff’s nurse Stella believe Thornwald has done something wrong.  While everyone is paying attention to the dog’s owner’s impassioned speech about neighborly relations, Hitchcock shows us Thornwald in his darkened apartment coldly, almost erotically, enjoying a cigarette.  It’s arguable if Jeff saw this or not.  I don’t think he did because the last we saw of Jeff he was looking at the grieving woman.  Hitchcock makes numerous curious decisions in this scene.  We see the characters of the various apartments from angles not possible in Jeff’s.  We see close-ups, high and low angle shots, perspectives previously unavailable to us.  I was jarred.  Having become accustomed to the rhythm of editing in Rear Window, I was taken aback by these unusual images.  I don’t know why Hitchcock chose this.  If I had to guess he needed different kinds of shots to carry over the neighbor’s dialogue.  But we even see Jeff and Lisa inside his apartment from a viewpoint across the way.  Their shots had all been objective, and this particular shot felt like someone was looking into them.  We can forgive Hitchcock who is like the Shakespeare of cinema.  His reasons need not be known to us; they are studied and revered.

I realize I’m not critiquing the film.  When talking Hitchcock I have a tendency to speak more formally, often in the third person, and discuss his technique more as a scholar.  I have a long relationship with Hitchcock.  Even before graduating college I had seen all of his movies several times each, and even took a class called Hitchcock and American Experience, examining Hitchcock’s view of American life via his films.  I’ve written extensively about him, and now find it difficult, being so familiar, to give an honest reaction to how I feel about a particular Hitchcock picture.  I find myself, like many movie snobs, praising even bad Hitchcock films, though there are only a few.  Most of his silent films are unbearably slow and horribly conceived, being adapted from talky stage plays.  To Catch a Thief is boring and incomprehensible (though I should watch it again before being so definitive), and regarding Rear Window, I’ve always preferred Hitchcock’s previous film, Dial M for Murder.  Both are cinematically and atmospherically confined in a stage-like way and feature terrific roles for Grace Kelly.  Truth be told I’ve not cared as much for Rear Window as I did seeing a 35mm print with an audience.  Perhaps it was the romantic movie experience, or the energy of an audience watching a taut suspense film filled with humor that allowed me to loosen up.  Regardless I saw a perfect movie.

With each successive viewing I’ve noticed faults towards the middle of the picture.  I always felt the scenes with Detective Doyle were distracting and stopped the movie dead.  Today I realized Hitchcock’s and screenwriter John Michael Hayes’ reason for a detective character.  The story is allowed to continue with ease.  With his character known to the audience, Jeff doesn’t constantly need to be calling the cops to explain the plot.  We get it once and the detective becomes a witness to many things, and adds a bit of humor and puts, by his doubts, Jeff and Lisa closer together.

In fact, the real story of Rear Window is not whether or not Thornwald killed his wife but if Lisa and Jeff will marry.  I really focused on this romantic tug-of-war more so than on any of my previous viewings.  Jimmy Stewart and Kelly are fantastic, but Hitchcock always got terrific performances, and Stewart did his best work for Hitch.  So did Kelly, and she was Hitchcock’s definitive leading lady, though I prefer Ingrid Bergman and Kim Novak.  Their relationship is unique among classic Hollywood films because there is real bickering and disappointment in their conversations.  They get mad and react realistically.  Whenever Lisa makes a move, like bringing a warm dinner from New York’s popular 21 restaurant, Jeff bitterly comments that everything is too perfect.  A rugged photographer, Jeff can’t be tied to a classy fashionista.  Lisa, for her part, can only prove Jeff right by her disgust at the thoughts of not bathing and eating raw foods.  It is their interest in Thornwald (Jeff’s being genuine, Lisa’s possibly encouraged for Jeff’s affections) that begins to change the tone of their relationship.  When Lisa returns to Jeff after breaking into the Thornwalds’ apartment, he gives her such a serine look of love; it is one of the most effective images of love in movie history.  The more adventurous Lisa is, the more Jeff is allocated the dominated figure in the relationship.

It’s interesting to note that each of the windows Jeff watches concerns a different stage of marriage.  Let’s begin with two lone figures, the frustrated Composer and the lonely Miss Lonelyhearts.  They represent Jeff and Lisa respectively.  The Newlyweds represent the impulse for many to marry, at least during the 1950s: the sex!  The Newlyweds draw the shades and make love for several days.  This is the euphoric stage of marriage.  The couple that sleeps outside on the terrace to escape the heat has come to a physical and emotional impasse.  The Thornwalds despise each other.  Obviously.  These two stages are blurred, but concern the disillusionment of the idea of marriage and the resentment that follows begin trapped by your spouse.  It’s quite sadistic of Hitchcock to paint perhaps the grimmest picture of marriage in film history.  The next “phase” as seen from outside Jeff’s window is murder.

Logically not all marriages end in murder, but not all marriages end happily ever after.  While Miss Lonelyhearts and the Composer find each other and love, the Newlyweds now fight over money.

In the end Jeff and Lisa come to a compromise.  They are together, and Lisa is reading up on the Himalayas, a sign she is becoming more adventurous.  But not quite; as Jeff sleeps Lisa picks up her trusty fashion magazine.  This relationship is doomed.

P.S. Thelma Ritter cannot be over praised.  She always brought something to the films she co-starred in.  In Rear Window she isn’t relegated to comic relief, though she is funny.  Ritter’s persona had always been a street wise woman with a sharp tongue and honest insight.  Her character Stella offers all this.  Ritter always gives an easy performance.  Even in lesser films like The Mating Season, in which she stars, she is excellent.  Under Hitchcock’s hands she is allowed to be great in a great film, and though often not talked about in connection to Rear Window she adds to it something extra and steals every scene.

Rear Window (1954)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: John Michael Hayes

Stars: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Wendell Corey

USA

In English

Runtime: 112 minutes

To purchase Rear Window on DVD, visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Window-Universal-Legacy-James-Stewart/dp/B001CC7PPI/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302237980&sr=1-2

If you want the best DVD collection of Hitchcock films, get Universal's 14 film Masterpiece Collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchcock-Masterpiece-Collection/dp/B000A1INJE/ref=sr_1_9?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302237980&sr=1-9

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047396/