Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

*warning: this may not be true

I do remember seeing a hitchcockian tv movie many years ago w/Ritter and Henry Winkler, one of them was stalking the other and it was really excellent.

Don't even joke about it! *trembles in fear*

Also, when they revived the show in the 80s on NBC, it was surprisingly high-quality; a shame it didn't quite catch on. How 'bout the episode with Martin Sheen dismembering Parker Stevenson to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" (a la Apocalpyse Now)? It doesn't get any more classic than that...

Yeah, Hitchcock made the very same movie, pretty much, over and over again: the wrong guy being pursued, the crime being solved, etc. (North by Northwest is Saboteur with a bigger budget) - but he did it so extraordinarily well that even today any hint of suspense in any sort of film can influence it to be mislabeled "Hitcockian." And Ford was mr. patriotism-western - exactly what sort of variety did he pursue? Even Wilder had a similar satirical element in all his films..that's why they were "auteurs" folks! (And of course he picked blondes well - it was that notorious fetish of his...Tippi was a 4th-rate Grace, but even in such a flawed film like Marnie was he able to evoke something-bordering-on-performance)

Ironically, none of those Cahiers people strike me as sticking to one or two central themes long enough in their own checkered careers - any dissention here?

The Rear Window remake that I know of has a post-accident Christopher Reeve in the James Stewart role, which does add a whole other level of creepyass voyeurism...

a more interesting question then: we all know truffaut would have become hitchcock's sex slave if he was asked, but what do you think hitch thought of tru's early 60s works...which he supposedly must have seen before they did that book together? or do you think hitch never saw them, or cared to ?

Perhaps. But I almost always find her more interesting to watch, think about and discuss than Grace.

Thomson's book Overexposures has a great Hitchcock essay. Haven't read the new Dictionary, but I have a complaint about edition one: How can someone who loves/hates Hitchcock and egregiously slams both Travolta and De Palma get away without seeing and addressing Blow Out?

I agree. It's not remembered so much probably because it didn't have any big name actors. It was also rated R in the US, atypical of a Hitchcock film. I love the scene right at the very end, where the protagonist is flogging a dead body, covered by a sheet, thinking it's the murderer...and then the detective walks in and sees him doing that. And you think, "MAN, does this guy get *any* breaks?".

Mr. and Mrs. Smith sucks too.

Man Who Knew Too Much remake isn't very good, Doris Day. Not too hot on Marnie, although it's interesting.

Frenzy and Family Plot are both underrated, though.

Best: Rebecca, Vertigo, Shadow of a Doubt, The 39 Steps, Psycho. Vertigo and Shadow of a Doubt the deepest of all his work?

Also very good: The Birds, Rear Window, The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train.

Critical opinion on him, though, very divided. Better than Ford? I think so, but such totally different views of life. Hitchcock's work, overall, is very shallow, though, and so repressed...

-- naked as sin

That's an interesting opinion. Why do you think so?

Yeah, you might. Joseph Cotten is great, I think, in the movie; and Teresa Wright is worth watching just for her very determined walk. It's a very creepy movie. "Uncle Charlie" 's speech about what really lives in the hearts of men and women (at the dinner table) is a classic. It's also one of the great shot-on-location Hitch movies, shot in Santa Rosa, Calif. So give it another shot maybe.

A tremendous, world-historical understatement.

http://www.reelclassics.com/Actresses/Teresa/images5/teresa_faceshot_crop.jpg

Shadow of a Doubt was his personal favorite of his films, by the way. I think it's extraordinary.

"Shadow" was Hitch's favorite, and it's usually rated one of his best films, along with "Vertigo" and "Rear Window."

Compared to the very greatest filmmakers--Ophuls, Ray, Renoir, to name three who I don't think would provoke much dissension, although I would add Lang and Coppola and several others to the list--I think Hitchcock comes up a little short. Too much control, not enough "sense of superfluous life" (in the words of critic Robin Wood). But he's great. I'm sure other posters will take issue with the above...yeah!

Shirley Maclaine is georgeous in it though.

I think Rope, as often as it is dismissed as a one-off experiment, is underrated, especially the way Hitchcock makes the homosexual lovers angle subtly apparent. Farley Granger was the bitch, no?

Shadow of a Doubt was my early favorite, but I still personally like Rebecca best, even though (has this been said yet?), it could be argued that it was more of a David O Selznick "production" picture than a Hitchcockian one. He himself suggests as much in the Truffaut book. I thought Paradine Case, as much as I stayed awake for, was definitely a dud (and no one in the lead could save such a script) but I quite like Stage Fright, another one everyone typically moans about. Dietrich = delightful divadom

Suspicion was precisely a dud because of its studio-sanctioned ending. Interesting but useless trivia: Hitch put a small lightbulb in that glass of milk to make it glow up like that.

I think Vertigo is his unassailable masterpiece (Psycho is easier to critique), but imo Strangers on a Train is the most underrated Hitch, as far as I remember. Even though it falls under "light Hitchcock," as opposed to "dark," not a single minute lacks entertainment value. But I have to see it again.

Family Plot underrated? Please. Why is it rated at all? Let's see, is there even the remotest possibility that a film with both Bruce Dern and Karen Black in it could be watchable?

No Hitchcock film sits "squarely" in a light category, and Strangers on a Train has complex subtexts, as vitually all of his work. But on the whole, compared to his other man-on-the-run films, it's more along the side of North by Northwest and Saboteur in the lighter, wittier half of his catalog rather than the darker films with the similar narrative theme, such as Frenxy or The Wrong Man.

I think Rope was deliberately stagy (as was the lesser Lifeboat, another formal experiment) to a point, but I agree that Hitchcock does not quite "solve" the problem of shooting in unedited long takes. Actually he applies some similar techniques much more effectively in Under Capricorn--a film he could only have made after trying trying them out in Rope. UC is shot entirely in long takes (none 8+ minutes, but quite a few 3+) but without foregrounding that decision as noisily as Rope.

Rope is indeed a deliberate formal experiment; it's meant to be stagy. That doesn't make it good, and it doesn't make the experiment successful. Unless the point was to make a stagy-looking film. That he had an explicit, conscious idea (granted, already more than most directors), and executed it as precisely to plan as the production process allows--there are no auteurs--doesn't keep the background from looking like a grammer school diarama. The performances by the killers are unmotivated, and the diaglogue, although witty, is stilted. That's not a receipt for a great film, regardless of how few cuts there were, how elaborate the lighting changes are, and how complicated the camera choreography is.

Hollywood has never felt particularly in debt to the theatre--unlike early Continental cinema--and that's generally been a strength. The media are in most respects unrelated. Even European film got over this perceived link pretty quickly.

One of the (utterly true) cliches in the film world is the importance of casting (,casting, casting). Cary Grant is just brilliant. So is Jimmy Stewart. Farley Granger isn't. I'm just not convinced that H. coaxed these performances out; he was lucky when they were good, but indifferent when they weren't.

Thanks for excerpting, Halfway. That was the bit I was thinking of; I just didn’t remember it properly, in that I thought he made a point of discussing how the film’s noted “flaws” actually worked in its favor (he may make a similar point elsewhere in the essay).

Sorry for the confusion - that quote wasn't from the Wood essay, it was from a blog discussing the scene that he mentions, which I found interesting in its own right. I think your summary is close to what he actually says.

I wonder if it is too late to say a thing or two more about Shadow of a Doubt.

There's a shadow of a doubt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pdscKJp_58

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFNnvQLvs7I

Speaking of rear projections...

Cool.

👍

since Twitterers are so easily riled up, let's just say that Ravel, one of the great composers of the 20th century, also composed one of the absolutely awful, glaringly unmusical, excruciatingly unbearable compositions in musical history--"Bolero."

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 6, 2023

DNFTT

if I was only famous as an 80's soft-porn movie I wouldn't be chatting shit about Maurice!

that didn't make any sense, but neither do opinions - I'm done with 'em!

Everyone has them, just like everyone has, um...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXtBsikiY50

"Bolero" is both awesome and also one of Ravel's lesser compositions

Fair enough.

There is no thread dedicated to Ravel so I'm posting here

I got to see the Dover String Quartet perform the Ravel String Quartet in F Major as part of the Yale Summer Music Program at the Shed in Norfolk CT last July. I had never heard it before. It was an amazing performance

I think it anticipated and influenced a lot of the movie soundtracks that followed, including those of Bernard Hermann

There is this, but the results are infuriating: for the piano #3: Debussy vs. Ravel vs. Satie

I don't know why Blake Edwards decided that "Bolero" was a good soundtrack for sex. I guess he like the resonance with the name of his star.

*liked

“Bolero” is sex tho

I suppose, in the sense that it rhythmically builds to a climax, but it takes a long time to get there.

https://e.snmc.io/i/600/w/794e08b67ab88a629684111230f1fe2e/4402113/orchestre-national-de-lopera-de-monte-carlo-alceo-galliera-werner-haas-complete-music-for-piano-solo-complete-piano-concertos-Cover-Art.jpg

this is a fantastic disc

Paul Crossley's two discs on CRD are also highly recommended.

I suppose, in the sense that it rhythmically builds to a climax, but it takes a long time to get there.

you might wanna reword that last bit

Huge fan of Pascal Roge’s solo piano collection tbh

xp Or I might not LOL