Alfred Hitchcock

(On Cable TV, November 2020) Considering a career that spanned slightly more than half a century, there are some really weird things in Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography that are seldom mentioned in the same breath as his acknowledged classics. I have a really soft spot for his 1941 screwball comedy of remarriage Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but his final feature film Family Plot is no less quirky. A comedy thriller pitting two teams of criminals against each other thanks to clashing schemes, it almost works as an apology for the unbearable bleakness of his previous film Frenzy. I’m not suggesting that Family Plot is a barrel of laughs: it’s often surprisingly long, hits a few very dramatic notes late in the third act, and often seems confused about where it’s going. But its dark sense of humour seems far more befitting of earlier Hitchcock films à la The Trouble with Harry, and feels like a minor but ironic coda to a storied career. The comic caper may feel loose at first, but it does tighten up quite a bit toward the end, and the ending is a release of tension as effective as many of his previous films. The 1970s period detail adds an interesting patina to the film, and the result is an entertaining but definitely second-tier Hitchcock film.

(On Cable TV, August 2020) As I’m digging deeper and deeper in the Hitchcock filmography, I’m starting to reach the bottom tier of his work, and Number Seventeen is clearly one of them. Despite a few intriguing moments, this is a film that doesn’t quite cohere. It looks, at first, like one of the single-setting style exercises that Hitchcock would keep exploring later in his career: the action is mostly centred around a staircase in a large house. But this isn’t true for the entire film, as things eventually move toward a speeding train. Throughout, we’re left mystified by poorly motivated characters, a tone that half-heartedly reaches for comedy at times but not at others. Number Seventeen lacks the spark that distinguished Hitchcock thrillers, even early ones, from most other contemporary thrillers. Oh well – they can’t all be first-rate, and it’s not as if he hasn’t done much better after that…

(On TV, May 2020) Alfred Hitchcock’s idea of a comedy isn’t the same as everyone else’s, and so The Trouble with Harry is all about what happens when a small New England community finds a dead body in the woods and tries to figure out what to do with it. In this film, a romantic subplot is given equal importance than an opening sequence in which nobody reacts in any conventional way at the presence of a corpse that several people they know may have murdered. It does have a bit of a pacing issue in its second half, partially redeemed by the pleasant climax of a group of people coming together to solve a problem. As darkly whimsical as Hitchcock could best be, The Trouble with Harry is as much a departure from his usual thrillers as it is a reaffirmation of his core strengths.

(YouTube Streaming, April 2020) It’s amazing that Alfred Hitchcock’s career spanned six decades, from silent cinema in the 1920s to the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Of course, the farther back in time you go, the less distinctive his movies become and by the time we get to the period when cinema transitioned to sound, we’re not necessarily left with “Hitchcock Movies” as much as genre exercise in which he shows his increasing mastery of the craft. So it is that Murder! is a lower-tier Hitchcock, but still a serviceable film by the standards of the time. It does play with some favourite Hitchcock themes, including an innocent man investigating a crime, a look in specialized spheres (here, the circus and the theatre, as the protagonist is an actor) and a few playful winks to the audience, such as a final scene revealed to be within a play. It’s a clear step up from Hitchcock’s silent movies of only a few years earlier, although it only hints at what the writer-director would eventually be able to accomplish. Hitchcock fans will get the most out of Murder!, although early-thriller fans will probably enjoy it as well.

(On DVD, March 2020) Considering that Alfred Hitchcock’s career started so early in the history of film that some cinema basics hadn’t even been figured out, it’s tougher than you’d expect to identify his “first” film. Is it The Pleasure Garden? Is it his first thriller The Lodger? Or maybe it’s Blackmail, not only his first sound film but the first one ever made in Great Britain. As one could expect from a film at the dawn of the sound age, it’s a bit of an odd duck—the film was reportedly retooled midway through to take into account that new crowd-pleasing sound technology, so it’s not a surprise to see a few title cards show up and the pacing drags in an attempt to show what that fancy new talking thing was. Even then, however, Blackmail has its share of clever touches: the central murder is shown tastefully, and the story is not bad considering what Hitchcock (who co-wrote the script) had to work with. A few of what would become Hitchcock’s trademarks also make their way into the film. This being said, let’s be clear: Blackmail is not worth picking up as a light evening’s entertainment: it remains a bit laborious to get through, and should be of more interest to Hitchcock fans and scholars of early sound cinema.

(On Cable TV, March 2020) Director Alfred Hitchcock had a very long career, and it’s movies like The Lodger, his third feature film and arguably his first suspense movie, that drive the point home. Produced at the height of the silent movie era, it’s far closer to the ideal we have of silent movies than Hitchcockian ones, with the title cards, broad overacting, static cameras and tepid simplistic plots we associate with the era. It is, as a result, far more interesting to put in context than as an actual movie by itself—although I’ve seen far worse from the era. For Hitchcock historians, The Lodger does have its fair share of attraction—it clearly heralds the director’s favourite motifs of an innocent man at the wrong time, echoing Suspicion and The Wrong Man later on. (Although the perspective is far closer to the first film in at least entertaining some ambiguity as to the alignment of the protagonist.) Compared to other silent films, there is some panache in the way Hitchcock leads his film even at this early juncture in his career. Considering all this, The Lodger is best suited for Hitchcock or silent-era completionists.

(On TV, October 2019) I’m nearing the end of my essential Hitchcock viewing regimen (I’ve seen all his top tier, almost everything in his middle tier and am now focused on his 1930s production), and with that knowledge of his body of work it’s easy to recognize in 1942’s Saboteur a rough blueprint of plot elements he used during his entire career. Let’s see: a romantically antagonistic couple-on-the-run from The 39 Steps to North by Northwest. Musical Leitmotifs from The Lady Vanishes to The Man Who Knew Too Much. Climactic use of a national landmark, repeated in North by Northwest as well. The usual blend of small humorous touches and taut suspense sequences. The fuzzy nature of the antagonist’s overall allegiances à la not-to-be-confused-with Sabotage. Described as such, Saboteur does run the risk of being perceived as a collage of elements from other Hitchcock movies, but that’s ignoring the fact that it still works remarkably well: It may be a middle-tier work for him, but it’s still as enjoyable as it was in 1942—perhaps more so given the period feel and wartime paranoia so clearly described here. (Substitute “terrorist” for “saboteur” and you’d have a solid basis for a contemporary update.)  Hitchcock even at his most mediocre is still well worth watching, and Saboteur is a further proof of that.

(On Cable TV, September 2019) You can make a good case that Sabotage was the film in which Hitchcock’s talent as a filmmaker came into focus. While he had, at the time, more than a decade’s experience in directing, this is the film that encapsulates a lot of what his later movies would be about. Yes, The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much both precede it, but Sabotage has one of the first of Hitchcock’s classic illustrations of how to create suspense, with a boy unwittingly carrying a bomb onto a bus and the audience knowing that it’s about to explode. The overall story is a sordid tale of a deep-cover foreign agent creating deadly chaos in London, reinforced by the drama of his English wife suddenly discovering who he truly is. Several touches show Hitchcock perfecting the various aspects of his direction that would soon see him recruited by Hollywood—the oddball details, the touches of dark humour, the domestic concerns crashing into criminal ones. Hitchcock may not have been all that good at titles (Sabotage was accompanied by Saboteur a few years later), but he already knew how to put together a well-crafted movie back then. While it’s going to be of most interest to Hitchcock completists, Sabotage holds up better than many of its contemporaries.