HITCHCOCK, A STUDY IN DIRECTION

An Introduction

Alfred Hitchcock, the subject of this year's Winter Film School, is one of the few film directors whose names are mentioned in newspaper advertising for their films. Most fans are aware also of his habit of appearing briefly in every film which he directs, and "spotting Hitch" is a well-known pastime among devotees.

Hitchcock was born in London in 1899. At an early age he acquired an urge to travel, and trains, buses, ships, and planes figure largely in his films. He studied art and engineering, which he claims are the two subjects that best fitted him for the job of directing. His entry into films was almost accidental. His natural talent for drweing was being applied in the advertising department of a cable manufacturing company, when in 1920 he became a title artist in the London studios of Famous-Players-Lasky. Later he joined Gainsborough Pictures as art directer, script writer, assistant director, and production manager. He had no thought of becoming a director until he was offered the chance to direct a film that was to be made in Munich. He took a film company over most of Europe until, during the ninth shooting, his employers cabled: "Come home; use sets."

His first screen credit was as art director of Woman to Woman (1923), directed by Graham Cutts, and he was given his first feature to direct in 1925. He directed several silent films that showed promise, and then he achieved recognition for his direction of the first British talking film, Blackmail (1929), which made American studios conscious of a threat from British sound films. During the thirties he continued to produce films of distinction.  In particular, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) won critical aclaim and is still shown by film societies and in cinemas which specialize in superior films. Other films of this period, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), consolidated his reputation as a master of suspense, and established the British cinema internationally.

In 1938 he went to Hollywood to size up the place and' to sign a contract with Selznick-International. He returned to direct his first American film, Rebecca (1940) which was not his usual style of material but which received the Academy Award for the best picture of the year. Since then he has worked exclusively for American studios.

Long recognized as the most consistently successful director of thrillers, Hitchcock uses every possible device to build suspense, but has never resorted to horror tactics. The "McGuffin" is his pet name for the thing that is being chased - the formula for the airplane engine in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the code in The Lady Vanishes, the jewels in To Catch a Thief. More especially during his American period, he has experimented with the "gimmick". - the confines of Lifeboat, the ten-minute takes in Rope, the peeping camera in Rear Window.

Hitchcock has been described as "an affable man-mountain with bright black eyes", and it is said that "what he can do to a double-thick steak is no Hollywood secret". "On the set it's different", wrote Walter Wanger. "He arrives in the morning, is punctual on the stage, makes a careful check of his script scenes before he starts and, while he drinks a cup of black coffee, directs the set-up for the first scene of the day in the minutest detail. His script is an historical document." In addition.to. having art directors prepare many sketches showing lights, shades, and suggested composition, Hitchcock will make as many as 300 quick pencil sketches of his own to show crew just hoe he wants scenes to look. He has said: "Movies are delightfully simple. What you do is take a given piece of'time, add colour and pattern and you have a movie."

SPECIAL SUNDAY SCREENING: A HITCHCOCK SESSION.

A special screening of two Hitchcock films  has been arranged at the Roxy Theatre on Sunday May 31, at 7pm.  This will be open to all members of the Wellington Film Society and their friends. Members who have enrolled for the Winter Film School will be admitted to this screening without additional charge. For other members and friends the charge will be 2/6. Tickets may be obtained at the Roxy or at the D.I.C. Theatre Booking Office from May 25.  Seats will be allotted on a first-come-first-serve basis on the night of the screening. The films are:

The Lady Vanishes

Great Britain 1938. Certificate (G).

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, adapted from The Wheel Spins by, Ethel Lina White.

Leading players: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty, Googie Withers, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne.
One of the bestof Hitchcock's British films, this is the story of the mysterious disappearance of an elderly woman from an express train travelling through the Balkans and involves political espionage on the eve of World War II. The film wears so well that it was revived commercially four years ago.

The Trouble With Harry

USA 1955.  Certificate (Y)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by John Michael Hayes from the novel by Jack Trevor Story. Technicolor and Vistavision.

Leading players: Edmund Gwenn, Shirley MacLaine, John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock.
This is a change from Hitchcock's usual style. Harry is a corpse, and the trouble with him is the number of times he is buried and exhumed on the same day. It take a good script and a sure hand to direct a comedy about a corpse, and Hitchcock makes it beguiling entertainment. There are fewer of the touches that have made the director famous, and on the whole it is probably the least pretentiuns film he has ever made.

Two other Hitchcock films will be available for the Winter Film School. Spellbound (Y) is being screened commercially at the State Theatre during the week of the School. This is a revival of his pseudopsychological study in anmesia, featuring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. The School will screen Rear Window (A), featuring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, the story of an invalid who occupies his time spying on and photographing the happenings, including murder, in adjacent flats.

- from Sequence May 1959

WELLINGTON FILM SOCIETY: HITCHCOCK

Reviews

"Alfred Hitchcock, a study in direction" was the subject chosen for the sixth Winter Film School conducted by the Wellington Film Society in association with the Regional Council of Adult Education over the Queen's Birthday Weekend 1959. Sessions were held at the Adult Education Centre. The two tutors were Miss Catherine de la Roche, whose addresses are summarised here, and Mr Philip McHale, a director in the National Film Unit.

Four films were available for those attendiing the school, and could hardly have been better chosen to illustrate the diversity of Hitchcock's art. The Lady Vanishes (1938), from his British period, involved political espionage on the eve of World War II in the story of the mysterious disappearance of an elderly woman from an express train travelling through Europe. Spellbound (1945) was an excursion into psychoanalysis. Rear Window (1954) told of an invalid confined to a wheelchair who suspected that murder had been committed in a nearby flat. Finally, The Trouble With Harry (1955) was a comedy about a corpse, and a change from the suspense melodramas with which Hitchcock's name is mostly associated.

Discussion was lively at all sessions. Mr McHale dealt with the technicalities of film-making, while Miss de la Roche considered the broader aspects of film content and film art. At the conclusion of the school on the third day, speakers agreed that the sessions had been among the most stimulating and successful of any school so far held.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

By Catherine de la Roche

Critical Survey

Reticent about personal matters, Alfred Hitchcock occasionally makes revealing comments on his work. He has acknowledged the influence of D W Griffith and John Buchan. And indeed his resourceful use of the film medium sometimes resembles Griffith's, while his treatment of mysteries often recalls Buchan's, in that improbable plots have meticulously, authentic settings and the action is motivated by situation or incident rather than by characterisation. "For me suspense melodrama is part-fantasy," he once told me. He says, too, that he is not particularly interested in crime or criminals, but in the processes of detection and in forms of dramatic presentation. He has not filmed any great literary classics, although a number of his pictures have been founded on stories by distinguished authors, like Galsworthy, Maugham, Conrad, Steinbeck, Patrick Hamilton, and a few (Saboteur, Notorious) on his own scripts. He collaborates closely on every screenplay which serves as a framework for the film he visualises. Hitchcock is in every sense author of his picture, which bears the imprint of his personal style.

A distinguishing feature of his style is that the dramatic conflict between say, pursuer and pursued, is enhanced by combinations of other conflicting elements. (1) Combination of fantasy and reality: realism of background, police procedure, etc., and far-fetched plots (The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train), apparent realism and total surmise (Rear Window). (2) Combination of humour and the macabre ("I like the macabre in a ray of sunlight." A.H.) In The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock has said, humour and suspense achieved "the right discordant combination." This discord is the whole point of The Trouble With Harry. (3) Combination of corn and classicism ("If you have to produce corn, do it well...Indoctrinate your film with an understanding of human desires." A.H.). He respects his backers and his public, whom he endeavours to please while maintaining his own standards of quality and, possibly, conforming to a favoured order of ideas. (4) Conflict in pictorial composition. The late Andre Bazin noted "an instability, a conflict between the elements in a composition - figures, decor, lighting - something incomplete...creating expectancy." (To Catch a Thief.)

Hitchcock's inventive use of the film medium for suspense melodrama has specific origins. "A detective's genius," he once said, "lies in his sensibility to anomalies...'This mark shouldn't be here,' says the cinematographic eye of Sherlock Holmes. 'These words are lies,' says the cinematographic ear of Father Brown...Great detectives have cinematographic perception." Thus Hitchcock developed the use of the camera's sensitivity, its powers of selection, emphasis, magnification, for the type of fiction they serve particularly well and for which he has a special flair. (Examples: magnification of mouth and ear when a dying man whispers to the doctor in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much; close-ups of the glass of milk and use of the "subjective" camera in Suspicion). For the most part he uses effects that are sober in themselves, underplaying climaxes and creating a dread of the unexpected subtly, by suggestion (The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Secret Agent, I Confess, Vertigo).

Always an enthusiast of the idea of "pure cinema," he is very aware of the "corrupting ease of dialogue, which limits cinematographic expression" and particularly liked the subject of Rear Window because half the action is silent. His films abound in original pictorial devices (Michael Wilding holding his coat behind a window pane for Ingrid Bergman to see her reflection). Hitchcock continues to be experimental in every film, constantly varying his techniques (long takes in Rope, long shots in Rear Window, quick cutting - 780 shots - in Vertigo.

In judging the comparative merits of Hitchcock's films, the degree of suspense achieved is the usual criterion, and therefore The Lodger, Blackmail, the original Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and The Trouble With Harry are most often listed among his best. But he takes pride in ringing the changes within the thriller genre. Also, he has learned in Hollywood to take into account the preferences of women, who form the majority of picturegoers, for the milder, non-horrific types of mystery film. Somewhat different standards, therefore, apply to pictures like Stage Fright or To Catch a Thief, deliberately made in lighter vein, and to Under Capricorn, which is not a thriller at all.

Some of Hitchcock's more recent films lend themselves to comparison according to motivation: those, like Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo, in which situation motivates the melodrama and determines the construction, and those, like Under Capricorn, I Confess and The Wrong Man, in which the screenplays are motivated by human passions or a moral. The first three have been described as parables on knowledge. In The Man Who Knew Too Much the dreaded future causes the action and the story's form is determined by the element of time. In Vertigo, also, but here it is an obsession with the past. In Rear Window surmise motivates the plot, and the element of space gives it its form. In all three an idea, not facts, is the reality. What happens might happen to anybody - characterisation is of little account. Like the critics, it is this group Hitchcock prefers. He is on his traditional terrain, and his treatment of the subjects is masterly.

So it is in The Wrong Man, a screenplay founded on fact and pointing a moral. The only one of Hitchcock's pictures which might be described as neo-realist, it is an admirable work of its kind, was never intended to be a conventional thriller and has, I believe, been under-rated. I Confess, on the other hand, is a drama of the human conscience, of passions, and here characterisation, which should have been the motivating element, is no better developed than it is in the Buchan-type plots. Whether or not this applies also to Under Capricorn is a somewhat controversial point.

Reassessment of Hitchoocks Art in Recent Criticism.

Hitchcock was educated at St. Ignatius College, London by Jesuit Fathers. Already in his early films, like The Lodger, critics occasionally identified what they believed to be Roman Catholic motifs or symbolism. For his part, Hitchcock has as consistently denied introducing religious elements into stories which {unlike I Confess, for instance) have no religious characters or episodes, as he has agreed that unconsciously he may well be influenced in his work by his faith.

In recent years his art has been reinterpreted by some of the newer critics, notably those in France, among whom are Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, authors of Hitchcock {Editions Universitaires). In their opinion, an order of ideas determines the form of his films, and their form, not their content, is the key to his art. Whatever its subject, the film conforms to a moral idea, contains the universal themes of man's destiny, the conflict of good and evil, etc.

Among the particular aspects of such themes, for example, is the idea of transfer or exchange, of the identification of the weak with the strong. The moral captivation, for example, of the niece by the evil uncle in Shadow of a Doubt, emphasised by similarities in the composition of several scenes, those involving her appearing as counterparts of those involving him; or in I Confess the taking upon himself by a priest of another person's guilt. In Strangers on a Train {as in Under Capricorn, and in a way, in To Catch a Thief) crimes are exchanged. Here recurrent geometrical forms in composition, straight lines and circles, correspond to or symbolise the ideas of transfer or egoistic solitude. The critics, while admitting that great masters may sometimes use symbols intuitively rather than deliberately, claim that if all the symbolism in Hitchcock's work is fortuitous, then the same applies to the work of authors like Edgar Allan Foe. And it is precisely in the formal expression of what they call the Platonic philosophy of Poe's supernatural stories that they see affinities between him and Hitchcock.

Rear Window, they claim, conforms to a similar order of ideas. Here an invalid, watching through his window the inmates of the flats opposite his own, finds in what he sees only what he himself puts into it. Representing the projection of thoughts of an isolated onlooker, this screenplay deals with two closed worlds, closed not in themselves, but in the form of presentation. Form suggests the ideas of space, of desire, just as in Vertigo it suggests the ideas of time and desire.

Other constant elements of a moral order noticed in Hitchcock's thrillers are: opportunities for confession before death given to all criminals, save those who are demoniac, like the protagonists in Rope, Shadow of a Doubt or Strangers on a Train, and may be regarded as not responsible; ambiguity of characters, which, besides being appropriate in mysteries, may reflect Hitchcock's respect for the freedom of the human will - villains may reform, or possess redeeming features {"I try to achieve the quality of imperfection." A.H.); the drama of the revelation of evil to the innocent {to Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt, to Jane Wyman in Stage Fright).

Under Capricorn, greatly admired in France, contains most of the recurrent motifs in Hitchcock's films: exchange (an innocent man takes the blame of a crime committed by the woman he loves); confession: ambiguity of the characters, whose motives may be variously interpreted; the conflict between good and evil; the triumph of truth over appearances in the denouement of the plot.

The validity of the revaluation of Hitchcock's art is, of course, a matter of opinion. It seems to me that films like Strangers on a Train have not the symbolic significance attributed to them, and that in any case they are hardly edifying, if, that is, one takes thrillers seriously. After all, they make entertainment out of crime, "compensating moral values" notwithstanding. And if Hitchcock's films are distinguished by urbanity and humour, some of them have also a measure of cruelty and cynicism. The characters, except those in The Wrong Man, do not attain the importance of the heroes in the masterpieces of the cinema's humanists, nor would Hitchcock, who clearly dislikes the significance of his thrillers being exaggerated, dream of claiming that they do.

But he is no doubt aware of the implications in his pictures, which to some extent must needs reflect, conform to, or at least be compatible with, an order of ideas akin to his own. This, however, does not make ideology of primary importance in his work. His great contribution to the cinema, surely, is his apparently inexhaustible inventiveness and origlinality in the use of the medium.

- from the Newsletter of the NZ Film Institute, October 1959.

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