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| The two Charlies, Shadow of a Doubt |
In the early 40s Selznick allowed Hitchcock to make
two films at Universal, Saboteur (1942)
and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The latter
film is his first real masterpiece, a fortuitous collaboration with playwright
Thornton Wilder whose vivid recreation of small-town Americana
(uncharacteristically for its period shot on location) provides a perverse
backdrop for one of Hitchcock’s morally densest works. In it, an “average”
Santa Rosa family plays host to one of its own members, a beloved brother and
uncle who unbeknown to them is a cold, cynical misogynist and psychopath, on
the lam from the law and known to the police as the “Merry Widow” murderer
because of his predilection for charming wealthy middle-aged widows before
killing them off. Joseph Cotten, effectively and perversely cast against type
as Uncle Charlie is neatly and cruelly juxtaposed with his adoring niece and
namesake, young Charlie (the excellent Teresa Wright). She innocently reads his
visit as a “miracle” bestowed on the family to lift their spirits out of their
provincial, humdrum, ordinary lives.
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| Joseph Cotten as Uncle Charlie, Shadow of a Doubt |
Hitchcock’s superb film traces her gradual
realization that this handsome, sophisticated visitor is not what he seems, and
that her romantic, adolescent illusions are about to be shattered by his vision
of the world as a “foul sty”, as well as by two attempts on her life. Hitchcock unravels this moral morass through sequences
of seamless formal beauty; the famous opening with its parallel introductions
to the two Charlies in comparable and contrasting sets of images; the noir
atmospherics that invade and threaten the family’s sunlit domestic scenes; the
recurring images of smoke surrounding Uncle Charlie which evoke a Lucifer-like
presence; young Charlie’s two flights into the night, employing characteristic
subjective camera movement, one culminating in her shattering confirmation of
her uncle’s identity in the library, the other in the climactic confrontation
with uncle Charlie in the Til Two bar.
Hitchcock’s dark undercutting of young Charlie’s
innocent dream of small-town life is aided in no small measure by sequences of
unsettling black humour (young Charlie’s father Henry Travers and his neighbour
Hume Cronyn fancy themselves as amateur sleuths and constantly exchange graphic
details of gruesome murders); by Thornton Wilder’s and Joan Harrison’s
incisive, ironic and literate screenplay that constantly portrays each member
of this “average” middle-American family (including precocious children) as
living in isolated cocoons with little communication among themselves; by a
pulsating Dimitri Tiomkin score that pinpoints young Charlie’s steadily
mounting fears about her uncle Charlie; by Joseph Valentine’s location
cinematography that lends sardonic verisimilitude to the atmosphere of cosy
middle American life under scrutiny and threat here; and especially by an
ensemble of superlatively honed performances (Patricia Collinge, Teresa Wright
and Joseph Cotten all suggesting, without ever becoming explicit, incestuous
undercurrents at the heart of this very American family). Even under the
watchful eye of the Hays Code, Hitchcock in his sly subversiveness was always
daring the moral guardians to catch him out.
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| Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Notorious |
Notorious (1946) is Hitchcock’s other 40s masterpiece, a
noirish, brooding romantic thriller mostly set in Rio de Janeiro at the end of
World War Two. Ingrid Bergman joined the ranks of Hitchcock’s good/bad women. Later
incarnations would include Eva Marie Saint, ready to risk life and reputation
through a sense of duty to her country, in North
by Northwest (1959) and Kim Novak in Vertigo
(1958). Claude Rains predictably lends strong humanity to his Sebastian, a
tailor-made role as one of Hitchcock’s most charming and vulnerable
villains. He plays the Nazi friend of Bergman’s father whom she is sent to
ensnare in marriage. In doing so, she becomes herself entrapped in a complex,
emotional web where she is forced to compromise her feelings and her sexuality
under the nose of failed lover and fellow undercover agent Cary Grant. Grant’s
performance is uncharacteristically and effectively glacial and stiff-as
Hitchcock intended him to be. He joins here the ranks of Hitchcock’s growing
list of thwarted romantic obsessives.
Hitchcock’s voyeuristic style is at its most
compelling here, with Grant the watcher reduced to helpless impotence (at
several levels) while Bergman is being slowly poisoned in a mansion that
threatens to become her tomb. Bergman, encouraged by Hitchcock, projects a
wanton erotic abandon in her early, inebriated scenes with such skill that the
romantic obsessions of both Grant and Rains become resonant and realistic.
There is some sublime subjective tracking down a staircase as Grant rescues
Bergman from under the noses of her incarcerators. This is great film making!
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| Stage Fright |
After a string of interesting experimental works – Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948), Under
Capricorn (1949) in the middle to the late 40s, Hitchcock began the 50s
with an enjoyable enough throwback to the lighter English thrillers, Stage Fright (1950). I underrated it
initially largely because of its relatively weak male leads (Michael Wilding
and Richard Todd) but it contains some of Hitchcock’s most diabolical - and
characteristically English - humour, a theatrical ambience and a total
lack of pretension all of which improve it over multiple viewings. Sequences
like the theatrical garden-party set-piece and the resolute English-ness of the
character people in the cast-Alastair Sim, Sybil Thorndyke, Joyce Grenfell and
Miles Malleson all contribute to the atmosphere of Hitchcock enjoying himself
in a lighter vein. The plot, involving a flashback containing false
information, allows Hitchcock to play deviously with audience sympathies.
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| Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train |
Hitchcock went into really high gear again in his
next effort Strangers on a Train
(1951), based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, which presents a display of
Hitchcock stylistics at their showiest. Here, he is unrepentantly upfront in
his manipulation of audience complicity in a crime, an exchange of murders
whereby motives will be hard to find. In making the psychopath (Robert Walker)
who proposes this exchange so compelling and the tennis pro (Farley Granger)
who innocently plays into his hands so weak, Hitchcock invites his audience
into becoming accessories after the increasingly nightmarish facts. In the
process, Hitchcock indulges in some of his most bravura mise-en-scene: the
entire fairground sequence exerts a malicious fascination on the viewer. Its
tone is set when Walker pointlessly bursts a child’s balloon with his
cigarette, and culminates in the now famous scene of Walker strangling
Granger’s wife (Laura Elliott) magnified flamboyantly in the big close-up shot
of her fallen glasses.
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| Strangers on a Train |
There are many other well-documented set-pieces in
what is virtually a catalogue of Hitchcock strutting his stuff: Bruno (Walker)
demonstrating the art of strangling on a Washington society matron; the tennis
court sequence that isolates a motionless Bruno among a host of turning heads;
the sequence where Guy (Granger) attempts to retrieve the incriminating
cigarette lighter from a drain which wrings out every last ounce of audience
suspense. (Peter Bogdanovich in his first film Targets (USA, 1969) pays a nice homage to this); and the carousel
sequence leading to Bruno’s death. Robert Walker in his penultimate film is one
of Hitchcock’s most memorable theatrical creations, a richly multilayered and
complex characterization which incorporates like Rope and Rebecca (1940) another
clearly gay subtext, a running fascination for this voyeuristic artist; it
provided the ill-fated actor with a fitting final bow but Farley Granger is
equally well cast in the less showy role of Guy (all sweat and anxiety).
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| Montgomery Clift, I Confess |
I Confess (1953), which followed Strangers on a Train, is one of two
sombre and overtly religious (Catholic) works which surprised a lot of
Hitchcock’s devotees. The other work in this vein is The Wrong Man (1955) and I have a
fond regard for both films. Montgomery Clift may not on the face of it seem
like an ideal protagonist for Hitchcock but it’s an effectively interiorised
performance nevertheless; the mismatching styles exert their own fascination
anyway. For the most part, the priest’s (Montgomery Clift’s) moral and
spiritual dilemma is captured in restless movement-Clift spends a lot of time
in the film walking through the austere Quebec streets; one street sequence
where Hitchcock evokes the stations of the cross and allows Clift to break down
in an overtly Christ-like gesture is so audacious it makes me gasp.
The centrality of voyeurism (in the Catholic ritual
of the confessional itself and all that that implies) to the film’s plot is
totally Hitchcockian and it is worked out stylistically through some overt
subjective camerawork-Karl Malden observing Clift in a street crowd, for
example is a stunning visual effect. Dimitri Tiomkin’s typically relentless
score is another of the film’s big pluses. The only real weakness of I Confess
is Anne Baxter’s heavily theatrical performance-effective enough in the
flashbacks in her romantic scenes with Clift, but out of kilter with the
introspective tone of the whole.
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