Paul
Late Hitchcock -- Pyscho, The Birds -- is a big flop in my book. Now North by Northwest I like a great deal...but we might differ there?
I don’t know why it took me so long, but I finally figured out why I find Alfred Hitchcock’s movies so off-putting: they kinda suck. I recently had to watch The Birds and Psycho for class, and I was possessed (heh) to watch Vertigo as well, since it’s so firmly ensconced in the film canon. I liked it more when it was just a movie I had heard of and not seen.
“Hitchcock” is synonymous with “suspense.” He inverts it in Psycho, where the audience knows whodunnit long before the investigators even know what’s been done. He also subverts suspense with his use of MacGuffins (the money in Psycho) or by denying both the audience and the characters any clear answers (The Birds). In Vertigo, the suspense in the first half of the movie is based on a question that both Scottie and the viewer want answered, but when the answer is revealed, it turns out to be a cheap twist, and the suspense of the second half of the film boils down to “how apeshit is Scottie going to go when he finds out?” (Answer: plenty.)
If Hitchcock’s skill lies in formal innovations in the generation of suspense, his downfall is in his dialogue. Will someone please explain to me this: if Hitchcock is so skilled at the use of exteriorized imagery to reflect the interior state of his characters, why does he spend precious time in both Psycho and Vertigo having doctors drone on and on about their pathologies? It’s telling, not showing, and it’s boring as hell.
Speaking of boring, the acting in these films is uniformly dull, through no fault of the actors themselves. Like Lucas in the later Star Wars movies, Hitchcock uses his actors as props with mouths, draining all the life out of his characters, especially the female ones. I’m not even going to bother going into the way he treats female characters, as it’s well-covered ground, but there’s a reason Mulvey used him as exhibit #1 in her seminal essay on the Gaze.
I think Hitchcock’s real genius is in the crew he surrounded himself with. What I really want to watch is a combination of Saul Bass’s herky-jerky titles, Bernard Hermann’s tense scores, Robert Burks’s rich cinematography, and Edith Head’s suave costumes, without the actual frustration of having to watch a Hitchcock film. Maybe someone can do a Phantom Edit of Vertigo.
Late Hitchcock -- Pyscho, The Birds -- is a big flop in my book. Now North by Northwest I like a great deal...but we might differ there?