Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

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.

Well part of Hollywood being "Hollywood" is the directors of the 00s and 10s and 20s trying to cast off their inevitable borrowings from the theater--the low theater and, sometimes, that high theater too. The anxiety of influence, etc. See a book called Eloquent Gestures to see how this played out on the level of acting styles.

Candidia, I agree that Rope is not a complete success. What I was saying that he perhaps foregrounded the technical feat of unedited takes at the expensive of the fluidity in performance style that he had achieved in earlier films. I still think it's an awesome achievement in itself, but UC is a more successful integration of dramaturgy/mise en scene.

*use other features please.

Okay, what I perhaps SHOULD have said that was for all it's supposed glamour, chemistry (both literal and metaphorical), and plotting, I found it rather ponderous and incredibly talky.

What do you think?

Has anyone seen Blake Edwards' take on Hitchcock: "Experiment In Terror"? I would think that David Lynch and Mark Frost watched this together in 1989.

(I wasn't calling you out for repeating yourself btw)

-rated: Psycho, North By Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much (original), Frenzy

-rated: Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much (remake), Vertigo, Rear Window

... don't you agree?

“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