Family Plot (1976)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 120 mins.


Many assumed Alfred Hitchcock would end his career with Frenzy, his 1972 thriller about a necktie strangler in the vein of Jack the Ripper. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to it: his career launched widely in 1927 with The Lodger, a film also concerning a mysterious killer threatening London. And Frenzy, although I have my own personal reservations about it, was certainly seen as closer to the patented Hitchcock aesthetic than Torn Curtain and Topaz before it. But reportedly he consistently displeased at retirement questions while on his publicity tour for Frenzy. "What would I do?" he told one journalist. "Sit in the corner and read a book?"

His next film, however, did come from a book. Victor Canning's The Rainbird Pattern followed a faux clairvoyant and her boyfriend as they search for the missing heir to a rich old woman and cross paths with a vicious kidnapper and his wife. Hitchcock and North by Northwest scribe Ernest Lehman adapted the novel into a script they called "Deceit" but which would eventually become Family Plot — a Hitchcockian film title if there ever were one. The con artist clairvoyant and her boyfriend are played by Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern, both adequate. Karen Black and William Devane, however, are sort of deliciously evil; their chemistry onscreen is strengthened by the hesitation in Black's character, Fran, and the growing menace of Devane's character, Arthur.

Like all of the director's films post-Marnie, Family Plot doesn't quite work as a whole. Most surprising is the fact that the direction feels so strangely anonymous, even more than the failure that was Topaz, and for once it can't be chalked up to the director's apathy. There is little by way of technical sophistication in the film, and most of the suspense and excitement occurs during bursts of quick editing. Whereas Hitchcock had always been a master of composition and the power of the image, Family Plot relies more on its, well, plot to grab the audience.

Lehman's script is far from his clever work on North by Northwest. The source text was much more maniacal than Hitchcock desired and he ordered Lehman to tone it down; in the novel, evil triumphs and the seemingly good characters die, and although Hitchcock loved exploring the darker side, it had never won in one of his films. The story's singular strength is the way it initially plays with audience allegiance in its first half; neither couple, the clairvoyant and her boyfriend or the kidnappers, can technically be considered good. There is only less bad (attempting to swindle $10,000 from an old woman by pretending to be a medium) and what turns out to be worse (kidnapping men and collecting jewels as a ransom). That motif isn't unfamiliar Hitchcock territory; doubling and contrasting is best exemplified in Strangers on a Train, and rooting for a less-than-ethical character has never been done better by anyone than Hitchcock with Psycho. But for a film that feels as if it's trying to belong in 1976, its soft duality feels too dated.

Moreover, the dialogue isn't as punchy and the humor certainly lacks energy. One of Family Plot's supposed banner moments for laughter, where a car's accelerator becomes lodged and the breaks are cut, feels like a pathetic rehash of Roger Thornhill's drunken escape from Vandamm's thugs. Toss in Barbara Harris kicking and screaming like a lunatic and the humor becomes more of a turn-off than anything else.

It is correct to say that Family Plot is lighter fare as far as Hitchcock is concerned. This is the sort of loose and carefree variety of comedy not seen since his work in the mid-1950s — i.e., The Trouble with Harry (although Plot lacks the black humor bite) and To Catch a Thief (although Plot lacks the glossy and gorgeous veneer of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on the Riviera). But while it's lighter, it shouldn't be dismissed of its more sinister elements. Hitchcock was nearly 77 years old upon the release of Family Plot, and what once felt like a twisted pleasure in death and murder in his earlier works carries an eerie feeling of mortality in his later works. More a few scenes take place in a cemetery, yet somber they are not. In one scene, a young woman carving a headstone listens to pop rock music so loud she's told to turn it off by the offbeat caretaker.

Hitchcock planned a fifty-fourth film — The Short Night, a spy film based on a true story of a British double agent — and between 1976 and 1979, he and writer David Freeman worked extensively on the script. Once finished, however, Hitchcock knew he could never film it. Family Plot would be the final film in a career that spanned more than half a century and produced many irrefutable masterpieces in the form. In many ways it's a strange film to have at the end of the Hitchcock catalogue, save one important element. In the moment, after it appears that Barbara Harris's character has performed a genuine act of clairvoyance, she looks directly into the camera and winks. It was reportedly not planned, but Hitchcock kept it. In the context of the film, it is ridiculously cornball. But you have to think a part of Hitchcock delighted in the fact that the final moment in what would be his final film was a wink.

After all, hadn't he been essentially been doing that at us for fifty years?

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Frenzy (1972)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 116 mins.


Returns to form are often greeted with commercial and critical exuberance, and even if such assessments are occasionally inflated, as they are with Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, there's no denying the satisfaction gleaned from the experience of a director in familiar territory. This, Hitchcock's penultimate film, is a casserole of the director's favorite themes: a murder-by-numbers plot with a bumbling police detective on the heels of a wrongfully accused man. But as close as Frenzy seems to the heart of what it means to be Hitchcockian, there's also an unshakable feeling that we've been whisked away to a foreign land where subtle craftsmanship yields to the opportunity of gratuity. I'm no prude when it comes to sex and violence, but the lack of inhibition on Hitchcock's behalf makes Frenzy somewhat of only a novelty to me — it is certainly interesting to see what the director does as an artist unshackled from content limitations (and no doubt it put to rest what could have been decades of debate regarding what he could have done without censors), but it is also spotty and a little wearisome.

Which makes it all the more ironic, when you think about it. Hitchcock spent almost his entire Hollywood career fighting the rigorous standards of the Production Code; there were always liars, murderers, criminals, the morally corrupt, and the mentally unstable in his films, but there was also a sophistication and elegance in the way he cut corners to squeak by the censors. (Although the Production Code existed in opposition to every First Amendment principle I hold dear, I'm still of the mind that its inherent difficulties forced creativity out of its artists; the effect, while constitutionally reprehensible, is nonetheless artistically rewarding.) When the Code was scrapped in favor of a letter-rating system in 1968, Hitchcock, in the twilight of his career, was finally able to go places on-screen that he never could have gone before.

For Frenzy, he returned to his native England — his first British film is more than twenty years — to make what would be his only R-rated feature. It is a postwar Jack the Ripper-inspired thriller, adapted from Arthur La Bern's novel Goodbye Picadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, about a murderer who asphyxiates his victims with neckties. Hitchcock discloses the true identities of all involved within the first half-hour of Frenzy, but nevertheless I'll avoid giving too much away about the plot; if you haven't seen it, one of its strengths is that Hitchcock tantalizes the audience with the faintly veiled mystery and then completely abandons any pretense that we're to be the detectives. He wants you to know who the Necktie Killer is, wants to watch the depictions of rape and strangulation (not to mention nudity), wants the audience as always to be one step ahead of the bumbling police force. The suspense isn't quite as tight as it should be, but what is created in the space between the innocent man and the guilty man is a intriguing twist: which one will make the first false move? As such, Frenzy is ultimately about its two male leads — Jon Finch and Barry Foster — who provide two of the most interesting performances in a Hitchcock film since his early work in the 1960s. The film's female characters come off as too slight, however, and the chief inspector (Alec McCowan) doesn't deliver the laughs Hitchcock wants him to.

Aside from the suspense not being quite as taut as it could have been, the freedom to see the crimes somehow diminishes their shock value. Some have argued the simple fact that we are witnessing tremendous violence in a Hitchcock film should make them shocking enough. Perhaps in 1972 upon Frenzy's premiere that was the case, but today the violence doesn't translate as well as the sublimely crafted sequences in Hitchcock's earlier films, where he was forced to make your imagination work.

The film does have a great moment of imagination at work, however, and it's also the most dazzling sequence in the whole film. Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer rightly convinced the director that showing multiple murders would be redundant. The Necktie Killer's first on-screen attack is prolonged, vicious, and meticulously staged (the quick editing resembles, but fall short of, the infamous shower scene in Psycho). The next time the Necktie Killer strikes, however, is one of the most memorable shots in all of Hitchcock's films: the camera smoothly follows him and his victim up the stairs to his apartment where the camera then stops, watches them enter, then slowly reverses its course down the stairs and out of the building where any sounds from the apartment have been drowned out by the diegetic noises on the street. It's all done in a single shot, and it's superb in its technique, all the more so because not a single violent moment is seen yet we clearly know what's going on inside. The effect is far spookier than any filmed murder could be, and if Frenzy had more of these moments — as opposed to the killer's loony scrummaging in the potato truck as he searches for a lost item and the body of his victim serves as comic relief — I think what is a rather adequate film could have been a final brush with greatness.

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Topaz (1969)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 143 mins.


There's a part of me that is sympathetic to the notion that a mediocre film from Alfred Hitchcock is still better than most other films. I'm guilty of extending that analysis to a few films that I recognize as interesting only because I bring to them a love, knowledge, and admiration of Hitchcock. If my views on some of his films are slightly inflated due to my interest in the man and his art, don't take that to believe that I think all of his films are above reproach. He made his share of bad movies, and a painful clunker like Topaz is particularly in need of some yellow police tape and a caution to stay away at nearly all costs.

Reeling from the relative catastrophe that was Torn Curtain, Hitchcock climbed back onto the spy thriller bandwagon with Topaz, released three years later and after much reflection on the director's part. It's disappointing that this film fails in virtually every way Torn Curtain did: bloated and overlong, lacking a central and cohesive theme, victim to its scattershot pacing and suffering from an absence of any thrills. Like the previous film, Topaz contains a few moments worth the Hitchcock name, but most of what we consider to be the director's hallmarks, from the narrative to the stylistic, are curiously absent. By the denouement, there is perhaps only a single shot that might stick with you in the coming days. If you were to dust Topaz for fingerprints, you might not turn up any of Hitchcock's.

It's not surprising how things could never quite come together for Topaz. The first draft of the script was written by Leon Uris, who adapted his own novel into something Hitchcock believed was impossible to film. To salvage Uris' script, the director turned to Samuel Taylor, who had delivered a delicately psychological and rich layered detective story for Vertigo; but even if Taylor's finished script is twice as good as Uris's, then I think that says more about how awful the first draft must have been. This is the director's longest film, and it feels like it. Although the plot could have been developed into something substantial, there are missed opportunities from start to finish, and what is too convoluted at first turns too simplistic in the end. (Far too simplistic, if you ask me, but Hitchcock was put in the corner by the studio after the original ending didn't test well. He shot three possible endings, and what made it onto the film is the least offensive, although that's hardly praise.)

Set against the Cuban Missile Crisis, two spies — one American (John Forsythe) and one French (Frederick Stafford) — are working together to help bring down a global network. There is some general international intrigue, including attention paid to the beautiful Juanita (an under-valued Karin Dor), mistress to the French agent who is also involved with a Castro-lookalike (John Vernon). But the affairs of men and governments is not woven together with any intricacy by Hitchcock, whose Notorious is among the best films to explore the murky line between love and duty. Perhaps you, like me, are occasionally willing to let something of depth and nuance slide in exchange for excitement and action, but Topaz lacks those latter elements as well (largely attributed in some circles to that its fact leading men are bland and its only alluring character, Dor's Juanita, disappears all too swiftly; even Torn Curtain, for all its shallowness, had Paul Newman, for God's sake). More damning than the lack of psychological exploration is the fact that even the Cuban Missile Crisis itself feels flat and astonishingly drab, and when you have a director that can send you to the edge of your seat as two characters search for a wine bottle, flubbing the brink of nuclear annihilation does not bode well for the film at large.

In addition to being Hitchcock's longest film, it was also his most expensive (and his biggest commercial flop). His team had fully dissolved, and Hitchcock knew he had another dud on his hands. The seams show where he tried to fix what he could see was too gone to rescue. With its foray into Cuba as well as on-location shooting in Harlem and Copenhagen, Topaz attempted to correct the bland Eastern European tourism of Torn Curtain by taking its characters to exotic locales; but the promise of exoticism is never paid off.

Then there's a simple matter of mechanics. Typically Hitchcock rewards his audience with something of value in almost every scene, but for Topaz only two moments are noteworthy. The first, a rather superb moment involving the theft of a red briefcase belonging to Cuban militants, I'd nearly forgotten about until I went back through my notes. The second, however, has stayed with me since I first saw the film. In the moment of Juanita's death (see above in the accompanying still), the camera flows into a bird's-eye view angle and captures Dor's purple dress flowing out from underneath her with the liquidity of oozing blood. Such a moment is proof Hitchcock wasn't finished yet, but for one stupendous shot to come in the vast expanse of 142 minutes is be drowned in a sea of problematic filmmaking.

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Torn Curtain (1966)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 128 mins.


The following review discusses significant plot points.

Torn Curtain has its origins in the James Bond series, which Alfred Hitchcock believed had been stealing liberally from his work in North by Northwest. There's a relative amount of truth in that, particularly the first few (and the best) installments. He became infatuated with the idea of making a "real" spy movie, something that erased the glamour and instead showed the darker side of espionage. The story of an American scientist posing as a turncoat (and fooling his own fiancée) to slip into the Soviet Union to collect intelligence seemed like it might just be twisted enough to show a spy get his hands dirty. Hitchcock had reason to believe a film like this would be a breeze — The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps, Notorious, North By Northwest are all espionage jewels. But this project would prove to be a mistake for Hitchcock; his remaining cinematic collaborations fell to pieces, and the resulting film is among his worst.

In fact, everything that's wrong with this milquetoast political thriller has been passed down through film lore: the on-set squabbling between the director and his method-actor leading man, Paul Newman; squabbling between the director and master composer Bernard Herrmann; squabbling between the director and the studio, between the director and ... well, you get it. One after another, the pieces fell apart on Torn Curtain. If the rationale behind the film was purely dubious (why couldn't he have been satisfied with the glossy and decidedly unrealistic spy flick he had perfected in North by Northwest?), then the final product was doomed from its launch.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Torn Curtain is that it features Paul Newman in his '60s heyday, and neither he nor Hitchcock seem capable of raising the viewer's pulse. Much of that can be attributed to the anemic script, adapted first by Irish novelist Brian Moore and polished by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. (It should be noted Hitchcock tried to lure Vladimir Nabokov on board, to no success.) The script simply provides little by way of genuine suspense; the cinematographer, John F. Warren, and the editor, Bud Hoffman, lack the rhythmic rapport of Robert Burks and George Tomasini, so the sequences that should show the dirty side of spy life are too stagy. (The most famous sequence in the film is called "the farmhouse murder" in Hitchcock-devotee circles; the idea, as Hitchcock imagined it, was that the audience should observe how difficult it actually is to kill another person. Enticing, yes, but it falls flat, too.)

In theory, the typically wonderful Newman would be great as the next generation of Hitchcockian leading man, a slot most frequently filled by Cary Grant and James Stewart, but his performance as Michael Armstrong, an American physicist/spy, comes off as too apathetic and bland. But what worked for Hitchcock in the 1940s and 1950s was changing in the younger guard. Newman became frustrated because Hitchcock consistently rebuffed his attempts to understand the character to a greater degree (your motivation, Hitchcock is to have told him, is your salary). Newman's resignation is palpable in the character of Armstrong, and it doesn't help matters much that Julie Andrews is utterly miscast as Sarah, Michael's nitwit assistant/fiancée.

Accounts vary as to how excited Hitchcock was about the two leads. Hitchcock's agent, Lew Wasserman, lobbied for them, but apparently they weren't high on Hitchcock's radar. Still, he was familiar with both and he relished the chance to undercut their images, specifically Andrews's, by placing the two as an unmarried couple in bed together in the sexually charged first scene. It's slightly humorous in that deft Hitchcock way, but there isn't much joyous in Andrews's performance. The role seems to call for a firm but skeptical woman who believes she has lost her husband to the global enemy. (He can't tell her of his spy work, after all.) Deciding she'd rather have him than her home country, she sneaks overseas with him, but the film portrays her from this point on as confused, muddied, blank, and ineffectual. First drafts of the script call for Sarah to be the viewpoint character; between the two in this incarnation, Newman is certainly more engaging, and I wouldn't have wanted to see how Andrews would have fared as the lead. But the film is ultimately weaker on a narrative level for switching its point-of-view because the possibilities of Sarah's psychological dislocation prove more intriguing than Michael's scientist-as-spy persona. And once you set weak performances and a weak script against a set with a color palette dominated by shades of gray, it's not difficult to experience the sluggish.

The general lethargy can also be traced back to the score. Torn Curtain was the first Hitchcock film since 1955's The Trouble with Harry that did not have its music written or overseen by Bernard Herrmann. (He advised the aural elements of The Birds, but there was no formal score.) Hitchcock might have begun the film in denial, but by its end he knew what he had on his hands and wanted Herrmann to save the film outright — "If you cannot do this then I am the loser," the director wired to the composer ahead of Herrmann's work. However, Hitchcock had also come to believe the composer was recycling too much of his work and the director and the studio both wanted Herrmann to produce a pop score to fit with the height of pop rock in the mid-1960s. (Horrifically, Universal even wanted a possible musical number for Andrews.) Herrmann agreed, but turned in a traditional score anyway. Fighting ensued; in Hitchcock's version, he fired Herrmann, and in Herrmann's version, he quit. The absence of such a score — pins-and-needles mixed with heavy and sonorous brass — affects the film in exactly the way Hitchcock imagined it would. What was sluggish and needed emergency resuscitation received no such thing.

Devotees, particularly myself, are always curious as to why Hitchcock's later films are perplexingly bad. After all, he is one of cinema's giants, with so many masterpieces under his belt that he's secured his place in the pantheon of twentieth century art. Keith Waterhouse, who co-scripted the polishing of the film's first draft, has as sound of a theory as I've ever heard on why Hitchcock's later work suffers. It has to do with numerous miscalculations on the director's part: a strong sense of caution and trepidation previously unfelt in the 1950s; an incapability to new crews and actors; a preoccupation with seemingly irrelevant details; and, finally, a move downward toward satisfying the expectations of a younger audience instead of challenging them as he had done for the previous two decades. A Herrmann score (for example) wouldn't have saved Torn Curtain, but it's indicative the situation Hitchcock was in: he wanted something more contemporary, but was unaware how to pull it off. His reign as the Master was coming to an unfortunate close, and this sort of spy film, which might have worked in a different incarnation thirty years prior, became one of the most mediocre offering from the director, as tense as a limp balloon.

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Marnie (1964)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 130 mins.


The one thing people seem to agree upon when it comes to Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie is that it's a fascinating movie; everything else is up for grabs. It's perhaps the most critically divisive of his fifty-one feature films, which alone makes it mandatory viewing. It was derided upon its release as hokey, meandering, and simplistic; it's been given second life by Hitchcock aficionados who, in remeasuring the Master's legacy, declare it neo-expressionistic, psychologically complex, and cinematically influential. The two most famous takes on it come from Pauline Kael and Robin Wood. Kael said it was "Hitchcock scraping bottom" and "hardly seems worth the trouble." Wood, wading consciously into hyperbole, said, "If you don't like Marnie, you don't like Hitchcock. If you don't love Marnie, you don't love cinema."

I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't think you can say, as Kael does, that Marnie is Hitchcock at the bottom until you've seen Torn Curtain and Topaz, released within the following five years. Unlike Wood, I think the socially responsible thing for Hitchcock (and film) lovers to do is approach this film with a right blend of reverence and skepticism. But what lover of cinema can't help but be fascinated by a film that's simultaneously lauded for harkening back to Hitchcock's roots as a title designer during the silent era of filmmaking in Germany, and conversely accused of being sloppy, lazy, shallow, and overtly artificial?

Throughout this retrospective on Hitchcock, I've placed emphasis on his collaborative nature, the names and talent that he used from film to film, particularly in his 1950s powerhouse heyday. Marnie is the end of the line for many of those collaborations. It was the last film edited for Hitchcock by George Tomasini, who died shortly after its release; it was the last film shot by cinematographer Robert Burks, who did not work with Hitchcock on Torn Curtain and died in a house fire on 1968;

For a director interested in staircases and all their metaphorical treats, it's fitting that his career should wind down in a way that mimics a stair-step descent. Psycho is his last masterpiece, his grand experiment and the film for which he will forever be remembered. The Birds was his final great thriller, the sort of movie that isn't flawless but is as good as any non-masterpiece that reflects the sort of high-quality production that most of his films possess. Marnie, for all intents and purposes, is the last Hitchcock film Hitchcock made. Everything else afterward — four more films, to be exact — wouldn't have the same twisted soul.

Tippi Hedren — fresh off Hitchcock's previous film, The Birds — is the titular Marnie, a kleptomaniac with a fear of thunderstorms and the color red who bounces from town to town, dyeing her hair and acquiring jobs as secretaries in order to swindle thousands from different companies. Her thieving streak runs afoul when she encounters Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), a widower who ranks in a printing company. Rutland is intrigued by Marnie's mania (actually, intrigued might be too soft a word; it's outright fetishistic) and blackmails her into marriage. Love, then you might say, is not the modus operandi. Mark approaches Marnie from his classically trained zoological past and his own psychological position, intent on curing her, even to the point of forcing her to attempt to overcome issues by raping her on their honeymoon.

Evan Hunter, the author of the first draft of the screenplay, was possibly fired because he was too disturbed by the rape scene, which was the essential element Hitchcock latched onto in Winston Graham's 1961 novel of the same name; when he wouldn't write it to Hitchcock's specifications, he was apparently let go. Hitchcock's wife, Alma, suggested the director bring a woman onto finish the screenplay, and thus Jay Presson Allen joined up. Hitchcock relished her straightforwardness, and she became one of his many co-worker crushes. Allen herself is the proponent of one of the theories as to why the film doesn't succeed like the director's others: "He loved what I wrote, he shot what I wrote, and he shouldn't have."

In other words, the light Hitchcockian touch was replaced with a Hitchcockian sledgehammer. As Marnie stands, things are Hitchcock-turned-to-eleven: characters reeling from tumultuous sexual psychology and begging to be analyzed to their Freudian extremes; dueling forces of dominance and submission; the obsession with blondes and the latent misogyny; the suspense, the melodrama, and the bizarre expressionism; and its utterly unclassifiable existence. The result, however, is somewhat unexpected. Because the director's themes and motifs are cranked up to their loudest setting, they tend to drown out the simple underlying mechanics of the movie. And for being so provocative, it's also a bit stuffy. There are a few great scenes, proving Hitchcock hadn't lost all his magic. A perfectly constructed shoeless theft by Marnie, for example, is about as suspenseful as anything else in Hitchcock's canon. But the good is slightly off-balanced by the strange, including pretty much everything about the ending.

Hitchcock was a man who had to settle perpetually in his career — he never snagged Gary Cooper for Foreign Correspondent, he never convinced the studio to give him William Holden for Strangers on a Train — but still, he often made the best of what he had. One of the curious aspects of his later films, however, is the profound and tangible sense of settling. The job of an actor is often to stand in for something larger, but many of his later films have actors who feel like they're also standing in for other actors, a sense that can mar a film from the start. Bond-era Connery and post-Birds Hedren do adequate jobs in performing roles Hitchcock clearly envisioned for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. But this time, Kelly wasn't merely a pipe-dream for Hitchcock. She had been wanting to get back into a film, and her husband, Prince Rainier, signed off on the project. Without politics and contracts, she might have actually ended up in the film, but the citizens of Monaco (angry at the film's sex-charged themes) and MGM (who demanded Kelly return to fulfill her commitments to them if she was going to work for other studios) essentially nixed the deal. My bias is, like Hitchcock, to Kelly; I've never found Hedren to be an engaging screen presence, and with Marnie she's not even particularly convincing. It's unfair to the film to wonder what Kelly would have brought to it, but there is this undeniable feeling in me that the right level of subtlety on Kelly's part could have positively counterbalanced the heft of the expressionism.

Still, I hold firm to my original statement. Two factors make Marnie mandatory viewing, regardless of how you feel about it in the end: the divisiveness among critics and scholars, and the fact that it's Hitchcock's final film before he moved into the final stage of his career. It's flawed, but it's not void of entertainment. There are some wonderful set pieces, though not enough to save the entire film. It might not be the masterwork some claim it is, but it's also too often unfairly dismissed simply for not being as good as his forays into psychological realms.

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The Birds (1963)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 119 mins.


Alfred Hitchcock utilized many motifs and recurring devices through his long career: the wrongfully accused man, the ubiquitous presence of trains, tall and foreboding staircases, the audience-as-voyeur, etc. It is odd that perhaps the most common device associated with him as far as public consciousness is concerned — the bird — occurs only in two films. Avian imagery is layered throughout Psycho (the taxidermic hobby of Norman Bates in the motel parlor; the way he pecks at his food and becomes ensnared in the fate of a woman with the last name Crane), but such imagery serves primarily as a sly metaphor as opposed to something that drives the film.

However, The Birds, his eagerly anticipated 1963 follow-up to Psycho, speaks for itself right in the title. Whatever your opinion on the film, it's impossible to deny that a flock of many birds turns the brain toward the Hitchcockian side of life, and in some cases, Hitchcockian nightmares. From a respective standpoint, such a connection is an anomaly in the director's canon.

I don't think Hitchcock made another masterpiece after Psycho, but The Birds comes closer than any of his later films. It is the last great film made by a great director — not flawless, but certainly a strong and exemplarily crafted horror film. Where does it fall short? I'm not aware of many who still step up in defense of its rather milquetoast stars: Tippi Hedren as socialite Melanie Daniels, and Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner, a hulking beau suitor for her with an icy mother (Jessica Tandy, in a good performance). In public Hitchcock spoke tongue-in-cheek about performers and on the set he could be equally cruel; but in private it's clear he knew how important they were. His technical masterpieces — and, to be fair, on a technical level The Birds is among his most ambitious films – all succeed in part because they're driven by rapturous performances. Think James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window; Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo; Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest; Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho; and the list goes on. Hedren and Taylor bring little to The Birds aside from being rough visual equivalents of Hitchcock's two beau ideals, Kelly and Grant, who were in fact the starting point for both the Melanie and Mitch characters. (Alas, Hitchcock lamented, Kelly was busy "being a princess" and "why should I give Cary fifty percent of the movie?")

Famously, or perhaps infamously, Hedren was to be Hitchcock's "next big thing," the reincarnation of Kelly's screen presence after his pursuit of Vera Miles ultimately failed. He had spotted Hedren in a commercial (sans dialogue, mind you) and recruited her as a potential star for The Birds, although did not make it clear until much later. He schooled her in Hitchcock 101: at the director's home, she watched Rebecca, Notorious, and To Catch a Thief, then acted out scenes from those movies with Hitchcock directing her. He made consultations on wardrobe and jewelry and, as his way was wont to be, attempted to build her up. He was so involved in her cultivation that she declared years later that "Melanie Daniels was his character," not her own. It was a miscalculation on Hitchcock's part, and The Birds shows that. Although Hedren may have fit his visualization of a latter-day Kelly, on screen she lacks the depth Kelly brought to her three roles in the director's films. Hitchcock may not have been classically trained in the art of acting, but he had the tremendous luck of having talented people star and co-star in his films and carry them through.

But the lead performances aside, there's still a great deal working well in The Birds. Although the script might not be the director's tightest, it takes risks and pulls off many of them. Scheduling conflicts prevented Hitchcock from recruiting Ray Bradbury as screenwriter (would have been great, right?), and so crime writer Evan Hunter came on board to adapt the 1952 novella of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, the third time Hitchcock would bring her material to the screen. It was tumultuous writing process, and Hunter was eventually made sour by the changes Hitchcock did after the screenwriter's time on the film officially ended, but some of the decisions are for the best, most notably the reason behind the birds' attacking. Simply put, there isn't any. In the immortal words of Norman Bates, we all go a little mad sometimes, and the birds begin attacking people, then keep attacking people, and not once in the whole movie are given any hint as to why. Hitchcock and his writers searched for one, but eventually went with the pessimistic and haunting reason of absolutely nothing. The final scenes were even pared back from a larger, more expansive view of the whole community devastated by birds, to (and I think it was for the best) simply watching the car full of our characters slowly roll away. Considering that final shot and the absence of any "The End" title card, the surreal and disturbing effect is heightened to the extreme.

It's the best decision in the film, followed by the pacing — which, although it drives some mad, I think is richly rewarding. Almost half of the length passes before a bird attacks, no doubt a storytelling technique that greatly influenced Steven Spielberg. Such a move is a gamble, no doubt, but it pays off in the film's final hour of pure tension, which follows the bird attacks getting tighter and tighter until the triumphant sequence where, crouched in the corner of a small room, birds relentlessly attack Melanie. (For the record: that took one whole week to film, using both real and animatronic birds, and reportedly sent Hedren toward a nervous breakdown.)

Many of Hitchcock long-time collaborators returned for The Birds after a brief departure during Psycho, including cinematographer Robert Burks and production director Robert Boyle. George Tomasini was again editor, and composer Bernard Herrmann was on hand, although The Birds features no score and instead utilizes real and ambient bird sounds that he supervised to create atmosphere. (Say what you will about the film's ultimate effect, but Hitchcock the Experimentalist was in full swing with an unknown lead actress, no music, a huge budget, and thousands of birds. Appropriately, the film was given a special premiere screening at the Museum of Modern Art.)

Tomasini was a sublime career editor, whose best work was with Hitchcock. From the back-and-forth voyeurism of Rear Window to the crop-duster attack of North by Northwest and the shower scene of Psycho, he brought structural success to so many pivotal moments in Hitchcock films. His work on The Birds is equally dynamic, a striking balance of slow suspense (think Melanie outside the school, the birds slowly accumulating on the monkey bars behind her) to a literally explosive elements (the explosion that occurs in the gas station during a bird attack). For Burks and Boyle, the photography and art direction on The Birds is still quite impressive today — maybe among the most technically complex and startling of Hitchcock's canon. Hitchcock brought on Ub Iwerks, the former animator and Walt Disney collaborator, to serve as a "special photography adviser" to the film and to oversee the optical printing technique he had invented. The four brought more 300 matte trick-shots to the screen, blending thousands of real and fake birds, and pushing the boundaries of conventional special effects. The crème de la crème of these sequences is the final ominous shot, a car slowly driving away with birds covering the landscape. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan notes Hitchcock called it "the most difficult single shot I've ever done"—thirty-two different camera exposures layered atop each other to create a single image.

Hunter, the film's screenwriter, recalled Hitchcock boasting that "he was entering the Golden Age of his creativity. He told me The Birds would be his crowning achievement." I don't think either critical or popular consensus reaches that conclusion, and ultimately I don't think Hitchcock did. But the association of the director to birds remains as conclusive proof that The Birds is, in a general sense, among Hitchcock's most recognizable films in the social consciousness. One could make the case that the three most "pop culture" films occurred in successive order: North by Northwest, Psycho, and then this film. In their own unique ways, each speaks to the magic of making movies and watching them. And while The Birds falls short of masterwork status, it's an important film in the Hitchcock chronology — and a damn good horror flick at that.

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Psycho (1960)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 109 mins.


Note: You may think it ridiculous to submit a warning that this review discusses significant plot details and should only be read by those acquainted with the film, but if teaching at the college level has taught me anything, it's that each year at least two-thirds of my intro-level creative process class are neither familiar with Psycho nor its most famous sequence. In any event, if you're new to the film, you've been warned.

Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker in 2008, noted that we're inclined to think genius "is inextricably tied up with precocity," essentially something that thrives on the energy we have in our younger days. Among his many examples are Orson Welles, who made Citizen Kane at 25; Herman Melville, who began writing a novel per year in his twenties and finished Moby-Dick by 32; Pablo Picasso, discovered at 20; and Mozart, who wrote Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at 21. He might have included Bob Dylan, who had gone from Freewheelin' to Blonde on Blonde before he was 25, or Paul McCartney, who was not yet 28 by the time the Beatles had broken up.

But then – and Gladwell mentions him specifically by name – there was Alfred Hitchcock. The director went to work behind the camera at the age of 26; his first film, The Pleasure Garden, was made after years as an apprentice designing title cards. He broke onto the scene with The Lodger when he was 28, and before he turned forty he made The Man Who Knew Too Much (35 years old), The 39 Steps (36 years old), and The Lady Vanishes (39 years old). Yet the director's unmatched masterpieces were all made after he turned fifty.

His most famous film, and in many ways his most experimental, is Psycho, the film Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan dubbed as possibly "the most overly familiar motion picture in history." It is only when one sits down and tries to imagine something new to say about the film that one's brain begins to shake. What is left to say that hasn't been written countless books and essays, hasn't been taught in any random liberal arts college course, and hasn't been dissected now on the Internet? Not much new it seems, but plenty worth repeating because it focuses in on the particular genius of Hitchcock and how, at 61, he managed to turn his greatest experiment into a canonical piece of cinema.

Released in 1960, Psycho was a turning point even for the man who always seemed to procure a previously unknown corner. There's a necessary point to be made about this film coming so late in the director's career: in the 1940s he often experimented for the sake of effect (Lifeboat, Rope, etc.), but in the 1950s and 1960s he experimented as a way to drive a stake into the establishment for the sake of profundity. Psycho deviates from the director's films of the previous decade in three important ways: it was cheap and fast, made with only half of his standard crew; it was scandalously sexual and was among the loudest announcements that the 1950s were definitively over; and the director had a greater monetary stake in its success than he had ever had before.

Hitchcock pitched the film to Paramount and his staff as "a simple, low-budget American shocker, in the style of his TV show, which would provide a breather from more lavish, grandiose productions" (McGilligan). But few were as excited as he, and as ironic as it may seem, he ended up forging ahead on production with a crew largely different from the reliable personnel he repeatedly used on his films. His steadfast cinematographer, Robert Burks, who had worked on almost every Hitchcock film in the 1950s, had been assigned to a different project; the same went for famed production designer Robert Boyle. (They were replaced by a cameraman and production director who had both worked extensively with the director on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.) His only real long-time collaborator carryovers were editor George Tomasini and composer Bernard Herrmann.

To save money, Hitchcock deferred his salary (more on that in a moment), shot in black-and-white (as much for budgetary reasons as to disguise the color of blood), and kept the project as low-key as possible. He anonymously bought Robert Bloch's 1959 novel through an agent for a one-time fee of $9,000, and the whole production cost Paramount around $800,000 (about $5.5 million, in 2007 dollars), roughly one-fifth the cost of his previous film, North by Northwest. Cheap then, comparatively, and quick, too; but cost and speed in the context of Hitchcock don't equate to inattentive. Although he intended Psycho to look like a B-movie, the distance between a poverty-row production like Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour and this film is still quite cavernous. In other words, Hitchcock was willing to sacrifice a lot but he wasn't willing to sacrifice the essential elements — the star, the vision, the tightness of the screenplay, the intentional foray into controversy, the meticulous planning — that makes a Hitchcock film what it is.

Psycho proves itself a continual reward because of those essential elements on the part of the director, the right knowledge of where to cut and what to keep. Few directors could work artifice into theme like Hitchcock, but with Psycho he proved he hadn't lost the talent honed on the cheap in England of producing brilliance on a budget. Hitchcock's cinematic language in Psycho is clear and careful. A friend of mine once suggested Citizen Kane is the easiest film to teach because Orson Welles lays out his cinematic language in the most obvious and instructional of ways. I countered with Psycho, which I teach to my creative process class. Because it has a forest's worth of paper devoted to it, few films document the movie-making process and the collaborative nature of the industry better.

Consider the point, still early in the film, when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) stops at the Bates Motel in the middle of a rainstorm, where she meets the caretaker, Norman (Anthony Perkins). The levels to which Hitchcock is able to manipulate your impressions of the scene, from the obvious to the subconscious, are still staggering to this day. Those new to the film waver between comfort and fear; we're trained to feel leery of such isolated locales, but also to be cautious of driving in intense weather. Marion makes the best decision she can at that moment, and we go along with it. A lesser director might let the tension deflate, but Hitchcock builds it steadily. Is she safe? We seem to think so; Hitchcock even slips into the frame a textual cue through a folded newspaper in Marion's purse, the banner headline stating voters have okayed a particular measure, but due to the shape of the folds, only the word "OKAY" can be read.

Our radar is made murky by Perkins' performance as Norman, impeccable to the degree he captures how simultaneously reassuring and creepy awkward niceties can be. There is an ebb and flow of tension and curiosity, Marion obliviousness to her boundaries and Norman fervently aware of his. The pace kept through the editing is remarkable in that it lowers the viewer into comfort through repetition and formality, but willingly jerks us back to the potential danger of the situation by shifting angles or rearranging the staging.

What helps drive this tension is Hitchcock's most subversive element. To the unacquainted, Marion is the film's primary character; so why is Norman such a powerful presence? Why does all of the storytelling elements seem to suggest the two are equal at this point, particularly when one character materializes seemingly out of nothing? The film's center of gravity shifts beneath the scenes of Norman and Marion, culminating in the apex of Marion's story and what emerges as the foothills of Norman's: the infamous shower scene.

It is one of cinema's lasting treasures, for all the obvious reasons. Storyboarded by Saul Bass, filmed over the course of one week, and put together as a montage from 78 flash pieces of film, the shower scene of Psycho justly earns its the cinematic canon for what it is (a horrifying murder, the likes of which still haunt showerers to this day) and what it is not (lacking in general fanfare, discreet and even-handed with only the slightest moment of penetration between knife and flesh). It stands on its own, of course, but it is richer in its form and meaning inside the context of the film — the glimmer of hope we have for Marion, recanting on her crime; the virtual silence of a person's unknown last moments followed by the staccato of Herrmann's icy strings; eventually Norman's frantic clean-up and the equally powerful scene of the sinking car in the nearby pond. It is an expertly built sequence (is there another of equal cultural recognition and cinematic skill?), yet it possesses all the more merit for serving not only as pure cinema but a gearshift inside Psycho, the moment the story officially transcends Marion and is placed between Norman's shoulders. (We indeed follow him all the way through to the end, when the film makes the slightest misstep by giving a fumbling and verbose diagnosis of Norman from a prison psychologist; although to be fair, it was a decision Hitchcock deliberately made to bring the film to a close as soon as possible and avoid any kind of decompression on the audience's part.)

Not surprisingly, the Production Code board struggled with Psycho. They railed against the opening scenes, where Leigh is shown in her white lingerie after her unmarried afternoon tryst Sam Loomis (John Gavin), and of course they shrieked at the shower sequence — and, no doubt to Hitchcock's delight, it was because of the scene's potential display of nudity rather than the brutal murder. Stephen Rebello, author of the definitive Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, reports that three members of the board believed they saw nudity and two did not. They demanded Hitchcock remove the nudity and screen the film for them again. But when it came back, the breakdown reversed itself: now the three who had previously seen nudity were satisfied, but the other two were livid. McGilligan reports:

[Hitchcock's] final maneuver was volunteering to reshoot the opening if he could leave the shower sequence alone—adding the stipulation that the censors had to show up on the set for the reshoot because he was confused as to how to satisfy their objections. The story—perhaps apocryphal—is that the reshoot was scheduled, but the censors never materialized, so nothing was changed. "And," script supervisor Marshal Schlom said, "they finally agreed they didn't see the nudity in the shower sequence which, of course, was there all the time."

The Production Code office signed off on Psycho, and numerous decency boards cautioned heavily against it. But Psycho was one of the gambits in the late 1950s and early 1960s that helped severely weaken the previous strength of the Code. It was a phenomenon upon release, and with so many people flocking to see it, the culture tide began to splash against the censors.

No film up to that time created as many return visits than Psycho, which proved glorious for Hitchcock. In order to persuade Paramount to fund the film, he deferred his standard salary and directed it free, on the condition that he be considered 60 percent owner of it until Paramount hit its intended box office goal and then all further revenue and ownership would be his. He heavily marketed the film himself, appearing in its trailers and dropping clues to its mysteries and insisting no one would be admitted once the film had begun. It was the second-largest grossing film of 1960 and earned Hitchcock his fifth and final Best Director nomination from the Academy Awards.

McGilligan notes that Hitchcock always insisted he never foresaw Psycho as a blockbuster, and that any money he earned from it was a "secondary consideration" to making the film itself. With many others, you'd have to wonder if that's true, but I think in Hitchcock's case it genuinely was. The film's screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, always believed Hitchcock was drawn to Psycho because of his and his wife's illnesses in the late 1950s, making "the picture at the very time he was grappling with his own mortality." That may be why Psycho was and remains Hitchcock's last masterpiece. The director had spent an entire career offing people in a variety of ways and for a multitude of reasons, but certainly no other Hitchcock film showed the randomness of death in such a shocking and emotionally powerful way. This is a capstone to an unparalleled career.

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962)

Viewers who turned their television dials to CBS on the evening of October 2, 1955, were greeted with Charles Gounod's "Funeral March for a Marionette" played against a simple caricature of a rotund man in profile. After a beat or two, a silhouette appeared, a man also in profile, walking toward the drawing until becoming aligned with it. The silhouette lingered, Gounod's music twiddling away with the silhouette, forever linking the two. Then:

Good evening, I am Alfred Hitchcock. Tonight I'm presenting the first in a series of stories of suspense and mystery called, oddly enough, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I shall not act in these stories, but will only make appearances, something in the nature of an accessory before and after the fact, to give the title to those of you who can't read and to tidy up afterwards for those who don't understand the endings.

And so began the director's foray into television, a medium which, in his words, "brought back murder into the home – where it belongs."

The 1950s are generally remembered as docile years — picket fences and two-and-a-half kids and gin-and-tonics served under the sunny and grandfatherly smile of Dwight Eisenhower. When we think of 1950s television we tend to think of wholesomeness, sitcom fare like Leave It To Beaver. But lingering right underneath that serene illusion of the decade are darker elements, witch-hunts and duck-and-cover exercises done in the fear of nuclear annihilation. The darkness of the decade, or at least its moral ambivalence, is embodied wonderfully by Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the most sinister shows to run on network television. And that's all the more surprising when you consider that it debuted a full two years before Leave It To Beaver.

Lew Wasserman, a personal friend of Hitchcock as well as his agent, is credited with the idea of putting Hitchcock on television. And why not? It would be a clear opportunity for Hitchcock to cash in on the name he had spent years connecting with mystery and suspense. The director tried to launch a national radio series during the 1940s but never had much luck, and television was the new mass-media machine of the 1950s. Hitchcock was well known and generally liked (artistic respect, we now know, would have to wait a few years, and it would require this television show to reach the masses completely). Shrinking his popular aesthetic in scope and length to easily digestible episodes on home televisions seemed to have success written all over it. His contract was financially pleasing, and the rights to the episodes would revert to him after they ran.

Hitchcock's bank account benefited wildly from his television show, and he became more popular than ever, reaching a wider audience than merely his films, and for once, he was part of the show, not just a mind behind a lens. But what is not given much credit is how seriously Hitchcock took the television project. He was a savvy marketer — often heading up the publicity projects for his own films — and could have simply lent his name and image to the series, turned over the reins to any random person, and let the money come in. But no doubt part of the show's tremendous success comes from the fact that Hitchcock also lent his mind.

The first four seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents total 268 episodes, each thirty minutes. The final three seasons, totaling 93 episodes, were expanded to sixty-minutes and the program was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It would be disingenuous of me to say I've seen all of the episodes; but I have seen many, enough to discuss the show at large, including the eighteen total directed by Hitchcock. This essay, an installment in my retrospective on the director, will primarily be about those episodes and the show's historical effect and reach.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is another argument in the ongoing case that Hitchcock — the man and the mind — was like a lightning bolt, the likes of which we may never see again. Biographer Patrick McGilligan says the television series was "an enterprise that might have consumed a full year's attention for a man less well organized, less brimming with ideas and energy." The 1950s were Hitchcock's prime film-making years, and he had a similar drive in launching the show. Less than six months after the idea for the show was hatched, it premiered. Varying accounts exist of how intensely Hitchcock was involved in the show; obviously we know he wasn't ghost-directing in his free time, or participating in extensive re-writes or re-edits as he did with his films, but the extent to which he participated in the show's development was often undersold, primarily by Hitchcock himself, who preferred to defer credit to his long-time assistant Joan Harrison. (This was characteristic of the man whose films hardly bore his name as a contributing writer.)

Harrison produced more than 250 episodes of Presents, and without question was the chief ringleader behind the scenes. But with Hitchcock's name attached, he also put in grueling hours to make sure it reached success, particularly during the first two seasons. McGilligan notes that the director was involved in story and personnel choices and served as a liaison between the show and the network. As the series continued past the first two seasons, he delegated more authority and responsibility, but through to the end he was still working weekends to approve stories and writers and screening final episodes for any post-production suggestions. "A television show, like a souffle, reflects the taste of the person who selects and mixes the ingredients," Hitchcock once said. "It matters a great deal, for example, whether onions or garlic are used and when arsenic is added."

The television show gave Hitchcock, who had a penchant for short fiction, an outlet for hundreds of story ideas that couldn't be adapted into films. He preferred the simple, single-engine driven plot that keeps a short story pushing forward, and relished the twists that often came at the end. If stretched too far and unsupported with more details, Hitchcock believed short fiction could become tedious for a two-hour film; not so with thirty minutes. Since the launch of his directing career, he had been collecting favorite tales and stories. Much of what appears on Alfred Hitchcock Presents came from published works — the likes of H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Rebecca West, Julian Symons, V.S. Pritchett, Eric Ambler, John Moritmor, Roald Dahl, Stanley Ellin, Belloc Lowndes, Ray Bradbury, and Cornell Woolrich. Even with films, the director preferred the published world to the original world; adapting a published work required less story development, thus allowing the director to focus more exclusively on the cinematic rendering of the material. The show also gave opportunities to emerging and established directors, like Robert Stevenson, Ida Lupino, Robert Altman, George Stevens Jr., William Friedkin, and Robert Stevens.

At the end of the show's first season, the New York Herald Tribute wrote that "the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock Presents is Alfred Hitchcock presenting," a sentiment which I think holds up nicely even today. It's a remarkable feat that, as he was in the midst of directing his masterpieces, Hitchcock appears in every single episode of the series as its host. We hear stories of the director as a jokester and huckster on the sets of his films, and his films are often morbidly funny, but if you want to see Hitchcock pushing the boundaries of humor, you needn't look any further than any random episode of Presents. His droll wit, often self-inflicted and regularly cruel toward his network and his advertisers ("Crime does not pay, not even on television — you must have a sponsor," is one of his best lines), is utilized to great success. An actor he is not, but a performer — ah, yes, he is a performer. The man who fed him his words was James Allardice, a former journalist, television writer and playwright, who ghost-wrote most of Hitchcock's lines during the openings and conclusions of the show. It was a fruitful and productive relationship; Hitchcock loved a particular anecdote about a high school play Allardice wrote, in which an electric chair set under a sign that read: "You can be sure if it's a Westinghouse." (Not too difficult to understand why they got along so swimmingly.)

What of the show itself? It is great fun, with episodes often coming across like pressurized Hitchcock films. The hand of the director can be sensed behind nearly every aspect of the series, and the themes and motifs that recur throughout the show are Hitchcockian to the nth degree: murder, suspicion, betrayal, guilt, voyeurism, doppelgangers, crime. The plots are curved and twisted; although Presents predates The Twilight Zone by four years, the two are often connected simply by the skewed angle on humanity and the frequent moralistic twist endings. Presents is hardly political and rarely as fantastical, but no doubt it was a great inspiration for Rod Serling, whose show would also run on CBS. Hitchcock himself introduced to the show's attitude in the first episode as "striv[ing] to teach a lesson or point a little moral, advice like mother used to give – you know, walk softly but carry a big stick, strike first and ask questions later, that sort of thing."

The pilot episode, called "Revenge," has the Hitchcock sensibility in the plot and construction. A woman (Vera Miles, who's ravishing in an over-large white button-up draped across her swimsuit-clad boy) has suffered a mental breakdown and her protective husband moves her to a trailer park adjacent to the California coast. When she claims to have been attacked in their home, he seeks revenge, attacking the man she identifies as her assailant. All is well until she ... identifies another man as her assailant. The episode is a stylish debut, with close-ups and selected lighting, the camera positioned at oblique angles, and a great murder scene partially obscured and partially reflected in a mirror.

The rest of the first season's episodes (of which Hitchcock directed four) play out the same way. One Hitchcock-directed episode, "Back for Christmas," has a murderous husband undone by his wife's kindness. Joseph Cotton appears in the episode "Breakdown," a heavily stylistic episode where a man experiences a car crash and is completely paralyzed except for his single little finger. The story relies on many point-of-view shots — a rarity in television — and a haunting internal monologue to achieve an eerie feeling of inescapability and doom. But the crème de la crème of Hitchcock's work in the first season has to be "The Case of Mr. Pelham," which actually is the sort of thing Serling could have worked into The Twilight Zone. Starring Tom Ewell, the "case" is actually of doppelgangers. Pelham is an aloof and distant man of wealth who grows anxious and paranoid as he begins to suspect someone is impersonating him, not merely at certain moments of importance but in the mundane moments in life.

Throughout the series, Hitchcock ran afoul with the ambiguity of the episode endings — namely whether characters who committed crimes were receiving proper punishment for their deeds. Untethered with the Production Code, Hitchcock was still stuck with nervous advertisers that didn't want to run commercials along successful murders. Where an early episode like "Revenge," the series pilot, would directly imply punishment for the characters in the stageplay, later episodes had to state explicitly what was coming. In "One More Mile To Go," a country man who murders his wife is antagonized by a police officer on a motorcycle who is determined to have the man fix a broken taillight. Normally it'd be as easy as popping open the trunk — except, of course, the dead wife's body is in the trunk. "One More Mile To Go," a Hitchcock-directed gem from the second season, pushes boundaries; after the man murders his wife, he cleans off the weapon and burns a blood-stained handkerchief and decides how he's going to load the body into the car, all while the orchestra swells and sighs with music of unbridled romance. In the end, as the officer escorts the man to the police station where the resident mechanic "will have that trunk open in no time," Hitchcock zooms the camera in on the broken taillight, oval-shaped and flashing on and off to look like a blinking eye. And there the episode ends: a vague impression that the man is caught, but he's alone on a country road and already murdered once, so who knows?

In many instances, the story within the episode would literally take away all possibility of punishment and let the perpetrators get away with the crimes. Hitchcock, as you might expect, would need to toss something onto the ending, but would deflate the safety of punishment with bad jokes. In "The Perfect Crime," from the show's third season (tied with the first season as the best), Charles Courtney (played by Vincent Price) gets away with murdering a lawyer named John Gregory (James Gregory) and using the remains to make a vase out of "special clay." Except, as Hitchcock explains in self-consciously pathetic narration:

I regret to inform you that Courtney did not retain his last trophy very long. He was caught. A charwoman knocked over the precious vase breaking it into pieces, a few of them identifiable as, uh, bits of Mr. Gregory. You see, the gold fillings in his teeth had resisted the heat of the kiln. But all the good doctors and all the good police couldn't put Mr. Gregory together again.

He might as well be rolling his eyes, and by the time we arrive at the lame pun, Hitchcock understands no one except the advertisers really care. The same sense of safety in the ending is elusive in what might be the show's most famous episode, "Lamb to the Slaughter," directed by Hitchcock and adapted from a Roald Dahl short story where a pregnant woman (Barbara Bel Geddes), upon hearing the news that her husband is leaving her, kills him with a frozen leg of lamb. If it's not the best example of the show, it's certainly among the most perverse. The woman deceives the police from start to finish, and even though the lead detective essentially solves the mystery, he can't pinpoint the murder weapon. "For all we know it could be right under our noses," he says as he and his crew sit down to dinner — a perfectly cooked leg of lamb, as a matter of fact. The ending here, with the woman cackling at her masterwork, is blunted by criticism with another Hitchcock tacked-on anecdote: "she would have gone scot-free if she hadn't tried to do in her second-husband in the exact same way." It's a wonder anyone who had trouble with the on-screen murder ever found that excuse satisfying.

These are only a few of the hundreds of episodes in a series that is quite worth your time, and, as the cliche goes, still better than most of the stuff on television right now. As I said above, the first and third seasons are probably the show's strongest — the strongest episodes directed by Hitchcock and the strongest episodes not directed Hitchcock, which still carry the hallmarks of the director. The series is a curious and rewarding departure from his longer, more nuanced cinematic artwork, but because he never let the show venture too far away from his watchful eyes and ever-spinning mind, you know it has the quality the Hitchcock name is known for.

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North by Northwest (1959)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 131 mins.


Alfred Hitchcock had been covering his tracks with Macguffins for years, but he told François Truffaut he thought the Macguffin of North by Northwest was his best: "And by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd." Later he would admit he didn't even know who is in the crop-duster that attacks the film's hero, and furthermore he didn't care. "So long as the audience goes through that emotion." In that way, the superficiality of North by Northwest becomes one of its greatest attributes; without the psychological baggage, it's among the purest of external Hitchcockian experiences. The director could speak at great length about the intricacies and flaws of the human mind, but he was a film craftsman first, always concerned with how the audience would respond to thrills, suspense, and romance. North by Northwest is whimsical, enrapturing, and adroit in its consummate technique, and it is a film that has often been reduced to a single frame of Cary Grant being chased by an airplane. It's so much more, but it's also nothing more, which strangely turns out to be more than enough.

For seven years Hitchcock had carried with him an idea he called "The Man in Lincoln's Nose." At first, it was just an image: someone dangling from the nostril of the sixteenth president's chiseled face on Mount Rushmore. Then the idea grew larger: a story about a CIA decoy mixed up with international intrigue and a prominent assassination, leading to a climax set atop the South Dakota landmark. It was an original idea – something Hitchcock did not dabble in often – and as such, it was in need of substantial development, which sidelined it for years while other projects, adapted from previous sources, passed through the director's mind. But he talked about it regularly with friends and associates, including Rear Window writer John Michael Hayes, and never lost interest in producing the espionage thriller.

Who knows how much longer the film might have simply been an idle thought for Hitchcock had screenwriter Ernest Lehman not taken interest. Lehman and Hitchcock were teamed up for an MGM film, and were getting along splendidly but were burning through a number of non-starters. That is, until Hitchcock mentioned "The Man in Lincoln's Nose." The idea excited Lehman, who, like Hayes before him, was part of a new generation of movie industry workers that were entirely familiar with the director's aesthetic and recurrent thematic motifs. The screenwriter famously said he wrote the film to be "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures"; while that's certainly up for spirited debate, it's clear that he and the director made what is today certainly among the Hitchcock's most famous films.

North by Northwest is the lighter side of Hitchcock's genius – and genius it must be, for few directors would have been able to pull off this extraordinarily illogical film as unquestioning entertainment. It is often dismissed as a featherweight because it falls between two heftier films (Vertigo and Psycho), and as far as psychological resonance is concerned: sure, the film could be blown over by a light gale. Yet there's something magical here, rooted in the mind of a director that knew how to entertain and manipulate an audience. By all accounts it probably shouldn't work: a rakish Manhattan advertising executive named Roger Thornhill (Grant) is mistaken for a secret agent, and nothing he can do will convince a murderous ring of spies that are stalking him that he is not the man they think he is. The police are equally immovable and don't believe there are spies at all, so Thornhill is stuck in a no-man's-land and must prove he is neither the secret agent the spies think he is nor the murderer the police think he is. Along the way there's an assassination at the United Nations, a daring stowaway on a train with a beautiful woman named Eve Kendall (Eve Marie Saint), a pissed off crop-duster pilot, a couple espionage twists, and a breathless climax atop Rushmore.

But that's not what North by Northwest is about. It's about point-A to point-Z, and rearranging the alphabet in between. The paradox in describing a Hitchcock movie is that the synopsis is never what the movie is about. Some are easier to describe than others – Rear Window is voyeurism; Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train are the science of doppelgängers; Vertigo is obsession; The 39 Steps is the thrill of the wrong man. North by Northwest is in the "thrill of the wrong man" tradition, but it is more abstract than any previous attempt at the theme. Part of its supreme joy is that it only makes sense up to the point of being a thriller; everything else is essentially illogical or unimportant, existing only to make it as much of a white-knuckle chase as possible. Even the title doesn't make any sense. (It was originally, and awkwardly, called "In a Northwesterly Direction." Hitchcock changed it, and included a quick shot of Thornhill at a Northwest Airlines counter. But those close to Hitchcock say he had known his Shakespeare front and back since boyhood, and he might have pulled the title out of Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.")

James Stewart had his eye on the role of Thornhill, but tangled post-production on Vertigo and a cancer diagnosis for Hitchcock's wife Alma delayed the start of North by Northwest and the role went to Grant, his last with Hitchcock. He had previously sworn never to work with the director again, but the money – nearly half-a-million, plus a share of the profits – lured him in. It was the prissiest he had ever been on the set of Hitchcock film, but the director knew better and shrugged it off. Almost as soon as Grant signed on, he wanted out: he complained about the script, which he repeatedly said he couldn't understand and doubted anyone else would either; he argued Hitchcock's humor wasn't funny; he kept an air-conditioned limousine on hand during the hot days of filming the crop-duster sequence; his contract charged $5,000 a day for each day the film went over schedule. But hindsight is a lovely thing. James Naremore has written Grant's performance is one of the most restrained and detail-oriented of the star's career. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan writes that after North by Northwest opened, Grant spotted Hitchcock having lunch then walked over "knelt down on the floor, and salaamed the director exaggeratedly." McGilligan writes:

Why? Take a look at Operation Petticoat, a perfectly entertaining film made in the same year as North by Northwest, but one in which Grant is reduced to mannerisms. Not only were Grant's Hitchcock films among his very best, no director gave him better roles, and extracted livelier performances.

If Grant was overly anxious on the set, it doesn't show in his loose and funny performance. The great thing about Grant is that even when his characters are out of their elements, as Thornhill certainly is in the espionage plot, he is still as graceful and cool as ever. He works well with Eve Marie Saint because the script keeps her character and motives intentionally hidden while Grant is so prominently on display. (The chemistry isn't quite as strong when we begin to know more about her.) Likewise with James Mason, as the leader of the spy-ring, and Martin Landau as Mason's henchman. Aside from harboring homicidal thoughts, everyone is on his best behavior, and watching Mason and Grant attempt to outclass each other proves one of the film's most wicked thrills.

Lehman's script is dazzling and funny, and surprisingly suggestive for the 1950s. The overtly sexual relationship between Thornhill and Eve is unmistakable, and Hitchcock tossed in a throwaway line suggesting marriage at the end to please the censors. Of course, they would miss the film's final shot: a sleek train sliding into a darkened tunnel, which Hitchcock scholar Bill Krohn calls "the most explicit depiction of the bottom-line facts of the sexual act ever pulled off under the Production Code."

North by Northwest is perhaps the director's most recognizable example of incorporating well-known public places into his thrillers, a motif that began with Blackmail (the British Museum) and continued through The Man Who Knew Too Much (the Royal Albert Hall), Saboteur (the Statue of Liberty), and Vertigo (the Golden Gate Bridge). The United Nations and Mount Rushmore are both featured prominently in the film, and both severely limited Hitchcock's on-location shooting, giving the director the only choice of trick angles and recreations to reach the effect he wanted. Production director Robert Boyle steals the technical show in North by Northwest with his elaborate set work, ranging from Rushmore to the cornfield. I'd remiss not to mention the utterly brilliant title sequence designed by Saul Bass, which is widely considered to be the first cinematic example of moving typography. (It's also a contender for my favorite first few moments of any film.) The crosshatch lines on the opening green screen reveal themselves to be a perfect overlay of the lines on the side of a skyscraper, reflecting the city below. Cinematographer Robert Burks continues the beautiful geometric patterns of crossing lines throughout the movie, and Bernard Herrmann's score is one of his best with a Hitchcock film, a balance of thunderous percussion and brass and delicate woodwinds that imitate a marching forward sensation that reflects the constant state of pursuit in the film.

Part of me would like simply to end here and pretend the infamous crop-duster doesn't exist. McGilligan, in his biography of Hitchcock, calls it a "textbook montage that will be studied and enjoyed as long as cinema exists," and quite frankly, you can't top that description. If ever a list were to be constructed of single shots that sum up the entire experience of cinema, certainly Grant and the airplane must be among the top few. It is remarkable in its execution (a series of splicing and matting), absent of music and almost all dialogue, consisting only of natural noise. For a scene that takes place in the middle of nowhere and in a wide open field, it is surprisingly suspenseful. Chapters of books have been devoted to deconstructing the sequence in all its technical glory, and there's no need in repeating them here. The image I've used above is from moments before the "famous shot," and I decided to use it because I appreciate it more for what it stands for. You don't need me to tell you it's Cary Grant. You don't need me to tell you it's North by Northwest. It's one of those things you know, one of those things you'll always know, something you'll fall back on time and time again and enjoy endlessly, something that's been imitated for years but never done as well in the fifty years since its premiere and no matter how much time passes, it'll be a mainstay. That's the genius of Hitchcock.

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Vertigo (1958)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 128 mins.


"We could all tell that this was a very important project for Hitch, and that he was feeling this story very deeply, very personally." - Vertigo screenwriter Sam Taylor.

The Alfred Hitchcock film I have screened more often than any other is Vertigo, his 1958 masterpiece that may be the purest cinematic expression of obsession ever made. It is the film often considered to be not only his greatest, but one of the greatest in all of cinema. Although my personal preferences lie with a thriller released four years prior, I won't argue with either of these accolades. Great films, like all great art, are treasures that affect someone differently with each viewing, films that require and reward your frequent participation but are never a burden to experience; they are great and live on because they have reached some truth-filled corner of our psyche, and never grow old. Vertigo lends itself to multiple viewings, each occasion more rewarding than the previous. From the worn VHS copy loaned to me by my high school art teacher, to the film poster that adorned the walls of my dormitory rooms and apartments through college – that tableau of construction-cone orange, the silhouetted cutouts falling into a white spiral vortex – through film classes and repeated viewings on television, it's been a storm cloud surrounding my brain, always thought-provoking, always complicated, always beautiful in its accomplishment. From periphery to upfront analysis, I'll consider myself lucky if I have Vertigo swirling around in my mind for the rest of my life.

Of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Roger Ebert wrote: "I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo. " Although the comparison was not done for the purposes of discussing Vertigo, perhaps it should have been. Cinema's most obsessive director regarded the film as one of his most personal, yet what we know about him allows us to know that even without this confession. He was a man of phobias, made impotent by his fears and forces he could not control. What he could control were his movies, all meticulously constructed in his head before cameras even rolled. Hitchcock was most controlling with his actresses, his "blondes" as they became known: Joan Fontaine, whom he tore apart emotionally just so she would give the wrought performance he desired; Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly, objects of impossible love; Vera Miles and Tippi Hendrin, whose careers he longed to sculpt.

In Vertigo, the Hitchcock proxy is a retired detective crippled by acrophobia named Scottie, played by James Stewart, recruited by college friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to track the friend's wife, now feared to be suffering from mental illness. Everything after this point is a feat of supreme narrative dexterity: that the woman (Kim Novak) is not who she says she is, that the plot is an elaborate ruse where Scottie functions solely as a cog and a witness, that love and obsession become stronger than anyone can anticipate, that the hired stand-in impersonating Madeleine could be seen later by Scottie and become subservient in love to his molding of her back into Madeleine. If Rear Window is the director's clearest exploration of voyeurism and the cinema, and The Wrong Man his clearest exploration of the nihilism and the unjustly accused, then Vertigo is the director's closest interpretation of what it means to be, of all things, a director – to arrange the pieces in a complex and satisfying way, to make individuals into who you desire them to be at a seemingly unlimited cost, to project your desires and fears onto a blank canvas.

The atmosphere was different in the making of Vertigo, and it's important to consider how this film many say is Hitchcock's best took a course of development unlike any other Hitchcock picture. Between his first Hollywood release in 1940 and his last release before Vertigo in 1956, Hitchcock produced 21 feature films, at a rate of roughly one film every nine months (like children, one might say). He was a director of great efficiency, which rarely translated to a decrease in quality – not all of his films from that period are great, of course, but the great ones were produced with the same rigorousness that many of the lesser ones were. The time devoted to Vertigo, however, would be different. There is no way to know from sure if the extra time spent on Vertigo equates to a superior motion picture, but we do know it allowed numerous revisions of the script and copious notes from the director to himself that included specific camera movements and plans for what emotions the music should evoke. The extra time came from necessary recuperation after Hitchcock suffered a hernia, and by the time Vertigo began production at the end of September in 1957, more than one year had passed from its intended start date. (Once in better health and awaiting the beginning of filming, the director worked on episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.)

Delays in pre-production came from the process of screenwriting. Early drafts of the Vertigo script are reportedly quite messy – a far cry from the remarkably complex story that unwinds for the audience. (I have lost track of how many times I have seen Vertigo, but still I don't think I understand everything that is going on. Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent, sure, but not everything, and that's exactly the way I like it.) Maxwell Anderson, the playwright who helped pen Hitchcock's most underrated film, The Wrong Man, wrote the first treatment of Vertigo, and that treatment, according to scholar Dan Auiler, was reportedly awful. Long-time Hitchcock friend Angus MacPhail helped after Anderson, but quit the project citing an inability to be particularly imaginative. (MacPhail's is one major contribution, according to scholar Bill Krohn, may be in developing the film's introductory rooftop chase). The two men who ultimately shared screenwriting credit are Alec Coppel and Sam Taylor. Coppel came recommended from his regular work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the version of the script he inherited shows Hitchcock had his most meticulous in terms of planning: "four typed notes about key matters such as the opening rooftop chase, and dictated a list of twenty-three sequences he already had in his head" (per Krohn). Coppel left amicably and Taylor, a playwright, came in to add depth and dimension.

Vertigo became a passionate love of the Cahiers crowd in the 1960s, and the reason not only has to do with the brilliant auteurism of Hitchcock but the direct invocation of French cinema. Biographer Patrick McGilligan notes The Wrong Man exists almost as a cinematic conversation between Hitchcock and the Italian neo-realists, and Vertigo – based on the French novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac and set in Paris and Marseilles during World War II – has a similar conversation with the slower, methodical, character-driven work from France. (As he, Coppel, and Taylor worked on the script, Hitchcock reportedly screened Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques numerous times.) The film's reputation has grown steadily since its 1958 premiere, and today it is the film that duels with Citizen Kane for the top spot in the revered Sight & Sound poll, only five votes short in the most recent survey. Hitchcock, whose feelings on a film were always remarkable transparent even at the time, was quite serious about Vertigo, tinkering with it long into post-production to achieve the perfect effect.

Stewart starred in four Hitchcock productions, matched only by Cary Grant. While Hitchcock always seemed to want to be Grant – debonair, traditionally handsome, prissiness tolerated by nearly all – it was Stewart who was the more analogous counterpart for the director. Vertigo was his last film with Hitchcock, and it is one of his most disturbing performances. Little known is the fact that Stewart worked as a creative partner with Hitchcock. He wanted the role of Scottie in Vertigo, and the richness of his performance is due in large part to conversations he had with Taylor. Stewart's work with Hitchcock and western director Anthony Mann in the 1950s allowed him to dig deeper into the darkness of the human soul, and the actor told Taylor he was willing to go deep to create the hurt and tortured aspects of Scottie. The effect was cyclical: Stewart gave Taylor permission to let the writing become more complex, which only strengthened Stewart's performance. Scottie is dark, psychological, complex, and has such regard for the illusion of Madeleine that he has little regard for Judy's emotions. Like Jeff in Rear Window, he is the protagonist but a difficult man to root for because his goodness is undercut by his more abnormal tendencies. Still, we sympathize with him during the entire movie, even as his darker side emerges; Stewart plays it subtle, close to the chest, and steel-jawed throughout much of the film, and when he becomes prone to episodes of viciousness, we have become so attached to the character we still sympathize with him; he is not angry to mean, but angry to release the pain stored in his emotional valves.

Of course we sympathize with Novak's Judy in this ordeal, too, maybe as much as the audience has ever sympathized with a female lead since Rebecca; while Vertigo straddles the line of patriarchy and misogyny, it is never callous. It is clear Judy does her actions willfully and her love seems real; as much as Scottie seeks to mute the natural for the artifice, her emotions are never muted. The source of her pain is the zigzag course of manipulation: first by Gavin, then of Scottie, then again by Scottie. Most production accounts of the shooting of Vertigo make clear that Novak and Hitchcock never got along. She disagreed with many of his decisions (most notably, she didn't want to wear grey), and she sought counsel and advice from Stewart regularly because she didn't receive the feedback she wanted from Hitchcock. Years later, she said wasn't sure he really liked her. Those on the set with Hitchcock in other productions knew how much he could dote on the men and women he loved, and accounts indicate that attitude was not present for Novak. But her performance in Vertigo is one of the chilliest from a Hitchcock woman: she is a world-class example of restraint, broken and tormented just below the surface. Perhaps not surprisingly, Hitchcock worked her to this successful degree, and in a great coincidence of life-reflecting-art, for the role of Madeleine, Novak was dressed against her will and forced to carry herself in a certain way. If there ever proof needed that Hitchcock thrived on a sordid vicariousness of what the men in his films did, and what the camera was able to capture, it was on the set of Vertigo, where his own treatment of Novak eerily mirrors Scottie's treatment of Madeleine.

The director's team of regulars each played important roles in making Vertigo the masterful film that is, and the man who deserves a large portion of the credit is Robert Burks, Hitchcock's most trusted cinematographer. It is one thing to visualize certain shots, as Hitchcock often did, sometimes sketching them and story-boarding them so tightly the final result hardly deviates from the design; it is a whole other to execute them as flawlessly as Burks does. The cinematographer only won a single Oscar for his body of work – To Catch a Thief, a dazzlingly shot but relatively unremarkable Hitchcock film – but his talents are better displayed in the noirish black-and-white of Strangers on a Train, the claustrophobic complexities of Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, and the highly geometric work on North by Northwest. Of all Hitchcock's color films, however, Vertigo has the best look – luscious reds and greens painted throughout as important emotional symbols, and the hazy shots of an ethereal San Francisco capture the ghostliness and intrigue of the film's mysteries. Thanks to a 1996 restoration project, today we have much of the intended color still popping and humming with electricity. But still, beyond the gorgeous color, there is the issue of the astounding technical wizardry. There is the memorable kiss sequence, where the camera spins around Stewart and Day as they embrace and the dizzying effect creates both bewilderment and ecstasy. And of course, there is the camera shot named for the film: the Vertigo effect, or dolly zoom, developed by Paramount cameraman Irmin Roberts and which beautifully distorts the perspective in the film by zooming and dollying in opposite directions. It is a pièce de résistance in the canon of Hitchcock visuals, and he later discussed it by saying, "I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk, and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me."

It is fitting that the film called Hitchcock's best also features some of the best work by his traditional crew. Edith Head worked on costumes, George Tomasini was editor, and Herbert Coleman, a second-unit director and associate producer on many Hitchcock films, was an instrumental part of many post-production discussions. Vertigo was also the first three collaborations Hitchcock with title designer Saul Bass. The opening title sequence, where images of a woman's face overlap with Lissajous spirals, is Hitchcock in one of his most surreal moments. (The orange poster I mentioned earlier was also designed by Bass.) Of all the collaborative successes on Vertigo, however, perhaps none is more important than Hitchcock's work with Bernard Herrmann, who scored the film. Herrmann's Vertigo score is perhaps the best of any of Hitchcock's films, and certainly among the greatest film scores completed. It is instantly chilling with its spiraling notes and mournful repetition, like an addict's return to bad habits. I haven't ever heard the score defined better than by Martin Scorsese, who said in 2004: "Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession." It was a stroke of genius on Hitchcock's part to allow Vertigo to slide along for long stretches without any dialogue at all, only Herrmann's score floating above the actors and locations like a light and spooky fog. The violin strings of Psycho could be Herrmann's most culturally familiar composition, but the entire score of Vertigo, from start to finish, is his magnum opus.

And so Vertigo is commonly referred to as Hitchcock's magnum opus. In a lot of ways, it's difficult to refute that title – there was a strange and heavenly intersection of material, time, desire, and teamwork that went into producing this film. My favorite Hitchcock film, Rear Window, has always been to me a testament in the goal of all moviemaking, but even I must admit the aura on Vertigo is more magnetic than on Rear Window. You cannot learn everything about Hitchcock simply by watching this film (you need to consider him across all his many splendid films), but Vertigo has the feeling of closeness between a great artist and his great art, that kind of feeling that connects Vincent van Gogh with The Starry Night, Miles Davis with Kind of Blue, Frank Lloyd Wright with Fallingwater, F. Scott Fitzgerald with The Great Gatsby, and so on. When we watch Vertigo, we are watching Hitchcock, and what's inside is at once breathtaking and terrifying.

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