Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

Shadow of a Doubt is top three for me, but I thought it was still very underseen.

Actually, come to think of it, I thought there was general consensus among critics/non-critics on The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes.

according to that diagram vertigo and strangers on a train are the ones critics/"fans" like but that the general public cannot countenance

this is my favorite statistic in there: 20% of hitchcock dvd sales are north by northwest.

can't decide whether i care least for the opinions of critics, film fans or the general public

http://www.barbican.org.uk/film/event-detail.asp?ID=15029

Hitchcock’s East End is a season of screenings and unique events that celebrates Alfred Hitchcock’s connection to Waltham Forest. For our opening event we celebrate Hitchcock’s masterpiece – Vertigo.

IDGI

Strangers on a Train simply isn't shown by AMC as much as the others.

Vertigo still fails miserably within the "general public" sector.

this is my favorite statistic in there: 20% of hitchcock dvd sales are north by northwest.

I could puke right here.

of course, it's too weird

there are trees in Vertigo, Nood

Vertigo still fails miserably within the "general public" sector.

You, sir, are no movie critic-slash-film fan.

step away from the sacred cow, mister

are the London scenes in the 50s Man Who Knew Too Much from Waltham Forest? they're some of my favourite "creepy emptiness of sleepy outer city" shots ever

I took a couple of film classes in college, one of which was a sort of combined history-of-cinema/film language course taught by a guy named Bill Allman, a drama/theatre professor. He chose two Hitchcocks to show in class: Strangers On A Train and Shadow Of A Doubt.

step away from the sacred cow, mister

mmm skirt steak from sacred cow

waltham forest is not a forest

I do find the film fan/general public thing amusing. Do they differentiate by number of films seen in a year, or by someone's evaluation of the quality of films? Is one Weerasethakul worth more or less than two P.T. Andersons and an Adam Sandler?

Pretty sure "film fan" = IMDB user

I'll raise you one Joe give you three Mizoguchis.

Pretty sure "film fan" = IMDB user

Yeah. The footnotes say that "film fans" = IMDb voters and "general public" = DVD sales.

you guys have to remember Alfred thinks Tootsie is a great film

you're pretty much alone with that scorn, bud

http://www.moviemartyr.com/1959/somelikeithot.htm

David Thomson has a Hitchcock piece up today:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114225/hitchcock-review-david-thomson

"Where is America? I don’t think we see it until Psycho, which uses actual geography, abandoned back roads, a shabby motel, and out-of-the-way towns where gruesomeness takes twenty years to surface."

That matches my own experience, with the exception of Shadow of a Doubt. That feels pretty American, or at least the small-town version of America you got from movies in the '40s.

no America in Vertigo's SF and Cali locations?

"The villain in Vertigo is very English, and he makes San Francisco seem like Fortnum & Mason."

Not being British, I don't know what that means...My sense is that Thomson means feel more than locales.

I should make clear the piece is a tribute to Hitchcock, not an attack--that's just one small point along the way.

yeah i wasn't being defensive just questioning his argument. i went back over that - there might be some point about SF, altho i feel that it's as much a character as the actors in some respects, but beyond that the out of town locations feel essentially Californian to me (who's never been there) and not landmarks for the sake of it - it has the same vibe to me as the use of London in Sabotage or The Man Who Knew Too Much

i can see a point about Psycho being the only film thoroughly rooted in an American sensibility tho - that might be a different argument, because i think Americana pops up throughout his US work

Saboteur, NxNW have road movie elements
The Wrong Man feels threatened by a particularly American version of democratic process
what you said about Shadow of a Doubt feels true of The Trouble with Harry to me too

Everything about TTWH is so awkward, though, that its vision of small town America can't help but feel equally off.

North by Northwest too, yes--that slipped my mind. Not necessarily even Mount Rushmore, but all crazy road-movie stuff that leads them there.

it's a nice little piece, it's interesting to think of Psycho as Hitch's uniquely American movie. i think Thomson might be making a classic British assumption that class doesn't exist in the US to over-argue his case tho.

yes, Rushmore in NxNW = the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, landmark excuse for a set piece. but there's American picaresque in the lead up to both those climaxes

yer going to Hitch for smalltown verisimiltude, huh?

it's needed and works in SoaD, probably due in part to Thornton Wilder.

I'm a dissenter. SOAD has always been falsely, insistently acted, particularly by Teresa Wright; she telegraphs every move. It's been a few years though.

The general thrust I get from Thomson's piece is the Antonioni-in-America thing: that Hitchcock's Britishness was always there--in Vertigo's detective, in The Birds' old woman--and that he was always a bit of a tourist. Even with some obvious exceptions, I think it's a reasonable point. (Says this Canadian...)

Which is one of the many things that amazes me about Sweet Smell of Success: how was this the first American film of a Scottish director in his 50s? Except, except--reading a little bit of Mackendrick's bio right now, I find out for the first time he was actually born in Boston. Not sure at what age he left--maybe that mitigates my amazement somewhat.

Howe's photography and Lancaster and Curtis' unabashed Americanness helped too.

And Odets, obviously and above all else. He had lots of help--true collaboration. It was still surprising to learn, when I first saw the film, that it wasn't an American director.

A group of exceptional film-makers died at about the same moment: Howard Hawks, Chaplin, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, King Vidor. With regret, I have to concede that those careers are now known in the halls of cinephilia but hardly anywhere else.

including chaplin -- one of the most famous ppl of the 20th century -- with these guys is kinda crazy imo.

Yet if you say “Hitch” out loud on any bus, people start looking for a bomb, or a fat man with a poker face who is studiously ignoring the search.

i wonder if anyone has ever tried this experiment?

When Mackendrick was six, his father died of influenza as a result of an pandemic that swept the world just after World War I. His mother, in desperate need of work, decided to be a dress designer. In order to pursue that decision, it was necessary for Martha MacKendrick to hand her only son over to his grandfather, who took young MacKendrick back to Scotland when he was seven years old. Mackendrick never saw or heard from his mother again.

psycho's 'real' america was produced on US television means - so i wldn't be surprised if you found similar location-work and imagery in some of the Hitchcock-directed tv shows that preceded psycho

Thanks for the Mackendrick information--longer in the States than I would have guessed.

I tried the Hitch experiment this morning. No bomb-searching, but I did end up arguing about the existence of god with the person beside me.

xp

i wondered about the TV shows but didn't know how hands-on Hitch was with them tbh

Nick Pinkerton gives Frenzy a close, admiring look, and gives a short comparison to Shadow of a Doubt (I'd forgotten that one shares a writer with Meet Me in St Louis):

http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/bombast-109-2

Newly translated -- Rivette on Under Capricorn:

Not the least of the script’s merits is its resolving of this complex network of emotions and plans into a story with a clear, linear continuity. Hitchcock’s direction—which is also very discreet—intentionally remains on the side of its subject, refusing to underline the important points and, instead, simply presenting them to us. The camera surrenders to the characters as they move around but usually refuses to penetrate and intervene in their interior lives. If the surface details of the story—including the macabre evidence—are underlined in one heavy, abrupt stroke, it is because Hitchcock does indeed love disposing of the whole spectacular side of a plot through excess and, by taking on the outrageousness of such details himself, frees the spectator from being preoccupied with them.

http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2013/08/hitchcocks-under-capricorn-by-jacques.html

HItchcock's Holocaust documentary restored:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/alfred-hitchcocks-unseen-holocaust-documentary-to-be-screened-9044945.html

I Confess anyone? Screened last night, surprisingly low-key and offbeat. Hitchcock really wanted to reuse Monty Clift after this one*, but alas it was not to be.

*Both Clift and Anne Baxter were sorta imposed on him by the studio; Hitch wanted Grant, Stewart or Olivier for the male lead, and got as far as flying Anita Bjork over to the states to for the female lead before the studio discovered she'd had a child out of wedlock.

Eyes of HItchcock

http://vimeo.com/107270525