Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

Mutuals with NRQ on twitter it's not like he just disappeared.

That, um, doesn’t sound like NRQ’s govname

He has posted under different names.

Oh, wait, I was reading wrong, d’oh! Of course that’s him.

It's really good!

― xyzzzz__, Friday, November 19, 2021 5:22 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Second on this endorsement (the Criterion disc is excellent). But approach The Phantom Fiend (1932) with extreme caution (even if you are a completist crank like myself). The 1944 version had already been on my informal list to watch.

TY - I only have The Lodger in this box set, but the quality has been dece on the ones I've watched, and there are good intros from Charles Barr:

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Hitchcock:_The_British_Years_-_Network_(UK,_2008)_-_Press_Releases

NRQ has written good stuff about early English film studies/culture for Sight and Sound and elsewhere for quite a few years now. Just today, this fun little piece popped up in a newsfeed:

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/greatest-films-all-time/1941-quiz-film-classics

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FEwcNJfVcAQipJz?format=jpg&name=large

a signed certificate of rewatchability

Interesting! A re-release of Rear Window on the back of Psycho; I had to check, and apparently RW was withdrawn from circulation between 1968 and 1983, so this must be early 1960s?

In other news, the Lodger disc in that box set I linked to above looks great - nicely tinted and generally well preserved - but it's presented mute ie without a soundtrack of any kind. It makes it feel more like a Stan Brakhage joint than a Hitchcock one - so I think I'm going to check if the Criterion version has music. Even a basic piano accompaniment would be fine.

I watched it at the BFI with live piano.

The DVD I have has a truly atrocious soundtrack. Vocals, even wordless, are a bold move on a silent film score and this one sure doesn't pull it off.

That does sound bad. And not necessary.

I'm guessing that no record of the Lodger's original score/accompaniment has survived, as it doesn't seem to feature on any disc release. The Criterion Blu-Ray has "a new score by composer Neil Brand, performed by the Orchestra of Saint Paul s-Downhill". I've seen Brand live accompanying various silent films as a pianist and he's excellent - and he may well have been the pianist you saw at the BFI, xyzzzz.

Honestly can't remember. But yes I do love the (I'm assuming) live improv-y accompaniment to silents.

New restoration of Shadow of a Doubt is grebt!

classic

With support from the Robert Jolin Osborne Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.

Patrick McGilligan makes it pretty clear that Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder both really enjoyed the collaboration. Wilder didn’t even seem to mind that Hitch brought in another writer after he left to join Army Intelligence to punch up the script and make it a bit more modern. Patrick Collinge who played the mother/sister (DO U SEE?) also rewrote a lot of her own lines and helped touch up the garage scene between young Charlie and the detective.

those ridiculous "backgrounds" in scenes involving cars highlight the artificiality of Hitchcock in general & this frankly silly concoction in particular. he certainly is an overrated director--really a cynical puppet-master manipulating gullible audiences. https://t.co/EDY3dko30S

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 5, 2023

Hahahahaha!

I'll put aside her overall evaluation of Hitchcock, but those horrible matte shots make me wince too.

man those gullible audiences, overrating Hitchcock because they foolishly believe those backgrounds are part of the shot!

O yes, clutch the pearls and whip the fooles! I'll put aside her overall evaluation(s) of many things, in predictably snotty-shallow tweets esp.

while most boomers, and even much of gen x, struggles to adapt to a fully online life, this octogenarian member of the silent generation is a true poster, an effortless annoyance on par with any 22 year old whose brain has been destroyed by the computer since kindergarten https://t.co/gmXVp6vxPR

— Jess Harvell (@cheaptrickrules) January 5, 2023

Those matte shots are...what all Hollywood directors did back then?

Was gonna say

there's a lot to go after hitchcock for personally but she seems to be going after the entire medium?

the ridiculous shapes ink makes on paper really highlights the artificiality of her work to me

Joyce dislikes Hitchcock's films. Wherever she looks she finds evidence confirming her opinion.

There's some kind of thing about Elia Kazan famously putting a shade in the back of the car during that one oft-quoted scene of On the Waterfront, but other than that, I don't know too many exceptions.

Past a certain point, when they started location shooting (late '40s?), I don't think everyone continued to use them. I'm glad there aren't any in, say, On the Waterfront. I just think they look bad, regardless of the director. I don't think they look less bad because it's Hitchcock, and I don't think they look less bad because it's Joyce Carol Oates doing the complaining.

Next thing please let her tell us how much she hates the glass shots in Black Narcissus.

Hadn't seen the previous post when I mentioned On the Waterfront...I don't remember any, maybe there is one or two. Substitute Sweet Smell of Success if you want.

Her Twitter account is a pretty amazing feat of anti-marketing; I know she's written like 400 books, but I don't know anybody who's read any of them, and nothing she says makes me want to crack one myself.

the answer to the thread is obviously dud along with kubrick and all the other great men of cinema whose abuse of women is glorified by film nerds. i'm sure the films are great in some sense, i'm also told birth of a nation and triumph of the will are great films

That's an excellent comparison--fantastic.

xxxpost I don't think matte shots look bad enough to give a shit about, no matter who used 'em when. Who cares about policing the background, esp. when you got Kelly & Grant up front?

Martin Skidmore was a huge fan of hers and the few things I read were good but yeah, she is what the Germans call a "Vielschreiber," in her case "Vielschreiberin."
(xp to up)

If only Euler were still around to duke it out with left.

I'm really caught in the middle here. I'm supposed to love the matte shots in Hitchcock because anything Joyce Carol Oates tweets should be discounted, but at the same time I'm supposed to consider Hitchcock worthless because he abused (literally or symbolically, I'm not sure) women. Very, very confusing.

xxxxp Moot, because Kubrick and Hitchcock films are good in ways the tours de force/tech coups Birth and Triumph aren't. Kazan films also in the former group.

Ignore all that if you can, just like Hitch himself ignored the factcheckers, the bean counters, the trainspotting continuity crew or whatever he called them, can't recall.
(xp)

Just kidding, not confused at all: love Rear Window, hate those matte shots.

No doubt JCO has a particular bone to pick with Hitchcock since she is an aficionado as well as a writer of crime fiction and knows How It Should Be Done, preferring local color and gritty detail to stars dangling in front of monuments in rear projection shots.

you've all already piled on so i'll just sit and wait for eyeballs to unroll

Hitchcock's process shots are exemplary and deliberate ffs

the factcheckers, the bean counters, the trainspotting continuity crew or whatever he called them, can't recall.

xp yeah no prob, overall results usually good at v. least.

looking forward to Joyce noticing all those Italian movies were dubbed next

I don't doubt that they're deliberate--things that make me wince in some of Tarantino's later films were deliberate too--but you'll have to explain to me what's exemplary about them. They make me notice the artificiality of something he's trying to draw me into (and usually succeeding in doing so).

i dislike JCO and love hitchcock but will admit that i have always enjoyed clowning on the terrible process shots in his films, both of which he lazily relied on for years after they were no longer standard or necessary and which often looked conspicuously bad even by the standards of the time imho. i have never been swayed by arguments that he did it on purpose as some brechtian distancing technique or comment on the artificiality of cinema or w/e. i believe that he didnt waste a lot of effort on it because it looked "good enough" and, as others have said, who gives a fuck? which is correct, you shouldnt give a fuck. but thats not to say that, especially by the time you get to shit like topaz, family plot, torn curtain et al, there are not some true howlers on display

"both of which"

NV otm obv

Two of us have made an effort to explain why we don't like them; maybe somebody who thinks their exemplariness is obvious could explain why that's so.