Family Plot (1976)

Family Plot, released in 1976, was Alfred Hitchcock’s final movie. This is definitely Hitchcock Lite, but that does not mean it’s a lesser Hitchcock movie. Some of Hitch’s cleverest and most delightful movies can be thought of as Hitchcock Lite, obvious examples being Young and Innocent and The Trouble with Harry. And of course To Catch a Thief. When I say these movies are Hitchcock Lite I mean that they were intended as lighthearted feelgood entertainment. I like feelgood entertainment if it’s done well, and Hitch did it extremely well.

There are Hitchcock fans who wish that his final movie had been something more in the style of his previous movie Frenzy. But it was not to be, and I think Family Plot was Hitchcock going out on a fairly high note.

Family Plot is essentially a comedic caper movie but the movie it most resembles in tone is The Trouble with Harry. That movie had been a flop because it was at least a decade ahead of its time. It was pure comedy, but it was black comedy. Neither audiences nor critics were ready to embrace such a concept in 1955. By 1976 however audiences were accustomed to black comedy and Family Plot was quite well received by both audiences and critics. By that time they had caught up with Hitchcock.

There are two entirely separate plot strands involving two contrasting criminal couples. We can see early on how the two plot strands are going to intersect and knowing this adds to the fun.

Blanche Tyler (Barbara Harris) is a phoney psychic. Her boyfriend, cab driver, George Lumley (Bruce Dern) helps her out by digging up background details on her clients to help her to convince them that her psychic powers are real. Now they’re hoping for a big score. Mrs Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) is an old lady with a guilty conscience. Thank to her her nephew missed out on his inheritance. And the Rainbird Estate is worth many millions of dollars. If Blanche and George can produce that long-lost nephew Mrs Rainbird will give them a large cheque.

Fran (Karen Black) and Arthur (William Devane) operate on a whole different level. Thy have just pulled off a kidnapping and collected a million dollar ransom.

Blanche and George are not really particularly dishonest or immoral. They really do intend to find Mrs Rainbird’s nephew and it never crosses their minds to try to substitute a phoney nephew. They don’t do that because it would be out of character for them. It would be immoral and cruel. They are just not cruel people and in their own way they have a sense of fair play. They intend to produce the genuine article. They are very much small time. Their score, if it comes off, will amount to a $10,000 cheque from Mrs Rainbird. And they will make an old lady very happy. It’s also significant that they are amateurs and they’re working class.

Fran and Arthur are big time and they’re ice-cold professional criminals. They’re smooth and sophisticated middle crass crooks. They don’t have the ethical qualms that Blanche and George have. I don’t think Hitch had any intention of making a political statement about class - it just adds extra flavour to make the two couples so very different in every way.

What links these two couples was something that happened a long time ago. We, the audience, know all about it. The fact that the protagonists don’t know this crucial fact leads them to make absurd and mistaken decisions. They have no way of knowing that their decisions are absurd and mistaken. That not only adds to the fun, it creates the suspense.

William Devane as Arthur is great fun. He’s not so much a psycho as an old-fashioned scoundrel. A Victorian melodrama villain for the audience to boo and hiss. Karen Black looks like a classic Dangerous Dame.

Bruce Dern had been around for a long time mostly doing B-movies or playing heavies and misfits. This gives him a rare opportunity to strut his stuff as a comic actor and he makes the most of it. He gets so much mileage out of that pipe. George is no genius but he really is a nice guy.

But the movie belongs to Barbara Harris. She does the phoney medium bit to perfection She’s funny and adorable.

We can’t help really liking George and Blanche. They’re only mildly dishonest but really they’re pretty nice and they love each other.

Technically Hitch is in complete command. The film is full of neat little Hitchcock moments. And the highway scene with the car is the sort of thing he’s done before but he manages to make it feel totally fresh, and it delightfully combines whimsy and terror (which is of course very Hitchcockian).

It’s a movie with real charm and wit and a lightness of touch and I manages to be very 1970s as well. This is not a movie made by a tired old man who had lost his touch. It’s a movie made by a man who still had enormous enthusiasm and style.

Family Plot is based on Victor Canning’s novel, The Rainbird Pattern. Canning was one of my favourite thriller writers and a lot of his novels were filmed. He’s not as well known today as he should be. I’ve reviewed his novels The Golden Salamander, Panther’s Moon and Castle Minerva all of which I recommend.

Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay, having previously written North by Northwest for Hitchcock.

Family Plot is just splendid entertainment. Highly recommended.

It looks great on Blu-Ray.

Topaz (1969)

Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz came out in 1969 and it’s a movie that was doomed from the start for various reasons that we’ll get to later.

It’s a spy thriller based on a novel by Leon Uris. He’s now entirely forgotten but was once hugely popular. His books were immensely long and there are good reasons that he’s forgotten.

It is 1962. The Americans have a top KBG defector and he’s told them how to get the information they need about what’s happening in Cuba. The problem is that the necessary contact cannot be made by an American. This contact will only deal with the French.

So CIA bigwig Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe) persuades his friend Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford) to make the contact. Devereaux is a French spy, but he can only act unofficially since the French have no desire to get mixed up in America’s problems.

Devereaux has to travel to Cuba, with unexpected personal consequences. He is having an illicit affair with the influential but fiercely anti-Castro Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor). She’s also involved with the Cuban chief of security, Rico Parra (John Vernon).

That KGB defector mentioned Topaz but refused to give any information. No-one knows who or what Topaz is, but it’s something very important. And Topaz will also have personal consequences for Andre Devereaux.

There are therefore two espionage plots running in parallel.

So what went wrong? Firstly, there’s no star power here. No star power at all. John Forsythe is the only cast member who had any profile at all in the U.S. and he’s OK but it’s a minor supporting role. Frederick Stafford is dull. He has no charisma. In fact he has negative charisma. John Vernon is great fun but he was not an A-list star. Karin Dor was a huge star in Germany and a fine actress but was pretty much unknown to American audiences. Dany Robin (as Andre Devereaux’s wife Nicole) was a minor star in France.

With zero star power there was no way of effectively marketing this movie. There is a fascinating rumour that Hitchcock wanted Sean Connery and Catherine Deneuve.

The second problem is that it feels so old-fashioned. Hitchcock revolutionised the spy genre with North by Northwest in 1959 but three years later the first Bond movie, Dr No, came out and immediately made Hitchcock’s style of spy movie seem ridiculously old-fashioned. Dr No felt faster, more energetic, cooler and sexier. And Dr No helped to usher in the whole Swinging London thing.

Hitchcock’s 1960s spy movies, Torn Curtain and Topaz, feel very 1950s.

In Topaz the problem is made worse by the fact that it was made in 1969 but set in 1962 which made it seem even more outdated.

The third problem is that at 2 hours and 23 minutes it’s very very long.

A lot of the problems probably go back to the source material. Leon Uris saw everything in simplistic good vs evil terms. As a result the Cubans are portrayed as cartoonish villains, there’s no questioning of the morality of the manner in which the Americans deliberately lie to their French allies and there’s no questioning of the morality of the appalling manner in which the Americans deliberately lie to their French allies and there’s no questioning of the morality of Nordstrom’s manipulation of a man who is supposed to be a friend. I get the impression that Hitchcock was trying here to make a serious hard-hitting spy movie but I think the script needed more work.

On the other hand it’s a superbly crafted movie. There are so many very Hitchcockian very stylish visual set-pieces. They’re not violent action set-pieces and they are perhaps the sorts of subtle visual flourishes that a mainstream audience will miss. The initial escape is very nicely done. And there’s that one superb moment which I won’t spoil for you, involving the use Hitchcock makes of a blue dress.

On more than one occasion Hitchcock shoots dialogue scenes in which we cannot hear a single word. It’s a clever touch and it works. We can imagine what is being said.

And then there are the endings. Three of them were shot. There’s a ridiculous cartoonish ending, the “duel” ending. That was the original ending but preview audiences hated it. Hitchcock shot a different much bolder ending (the “airport” ending) which he preferred to the original. Eventually a third very conventional ending was chosen. The Blu-Ray gives us the airport ending which makes sense since it’s the one Hitch liked. The others are included as extras. Depending on which ending is used Topaz becomes three different movies, with the airport ending version being by far the best.

Topaz is superbly crafted. Hitchcock had lost none of his visual touch. It’s not a bad movie at all but it’s too slow and it needed more energy and it desperately needed some star power. Certainly not top-tier Hitchcock but worth a look.

Stage Fright (1950) - Hitchcock Friday #13

Alfred Hitchcock retuned to Britain in 1950 to make Stage Fright. From the mid-1940s he had started to become quite experimental in his approach, both technically and in narrative terms, and most of his 1940s experiments were critical and commercial disappointments. Stage Fright was another experiment and it had a decidedly mixed reception.

The willingness to experiment was part of Hitchcock’s genius and he would certainly have been aware that it was extremely risky. A director who has several flops in quick succession can find himself reduced to making cheap B-movies for Poverty Row studios. But if you don’t take risks you don’t learn anything and while Hitchcock made mistakes he never made the same mistake twice. And without his willingness to take risks we would never have had towering masterpieces like Rear Window, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds.

In Stage Fright he utilises a certain plot device that makes this his most controversial and divisive film. I can’t describe the plot device because it would constitute a huge spoiler and if you haven’t seen this movie before it’s best to approach it without knowing about it. Knowing about it can prejudice the viewer against the film. And there are those who consider the device to be a masterstroke rather than a flaw.

Hitchcock himself considered it to have been a very serious mistake. What he was trying to do was perfectly valid, but after the movie was completed Hitch realised that the device did not work as he had intended it to work.

The movie begins with a young man, Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd), on the run from the police. He is suspected of murder. The murder victim was the husband of major show business star Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich). Jonathan and Charlotte are lovers. There’s blood-stained dress that Jonathan will need to destroy.

Jonathan is involved with another young lady, aspiring actress Eve Gill (Jane Wyman). Even is hopelessly in love with Jonathan. She will do anything to help him prove his innocence. She considers Charlotte to be a very bad woman.

Jonathan is a man caught between two women, a sexy femme fatale and a good girl. Eve is a woman caught between two men. She’s in love with Jonathan but now she’s met Detective-Inspector Smith (Michael Wilding) and he’s such a nice kind man and so charming and rather good-looking and she thinks he’s a bit of a dreamboat.

Eve however still has to help Jonathan prove his innocence and she persuades her father Commodore Gill (Alastair Sim) to help. The Commodore thinks it’s all foolishness but it could be fun and he’ll do anything for his daughter.

A lot depends on that blood-stained dress. Maybe it could be used to break down Charlotte’s resistance and persuade her to confess.

This is a movie that feels very very English. It’s very similar in feel to Hitch’s great 1930s British movies. There’s also plenty of very English humour.

It benefits from a great cast. Michael Wilding is very solid and Richard Todd manages to be rather jumpy, as you would expect from a man with the police after him. Sybil Thorndyke is fun as Eve’s dotty mother. I have never liked Jane Wyman but I must admit that she’s excellent here. She somehow manages to be both mousy and feisty.

But the standout performers are of course Alastair Sim and Marlene Dietrich. Sim is in fine form playing the eccentric irascible loveable rogue Commodore Gill.

Dietrich gives one of her best performances. She’s delightfully seductive and wicked and scheming and manipulative but oddly enough she’s rather kind to Eve when Eve goes undercover as her dresser. Charlotte is incredibly self-centred but not gratuitously cruel. Marlene singing I’m the Laziest Girl in Town is definitely a highlight.

The final scenes are very well shot and very Hitchcockian, and very tense with the highlighting of the eyes.

How well the plot works depends entirely on how you feel about that notorious plot device, and whether or not you think it makes the ending difficult to accept. Either way Stage Fright is rather enjoyable and it’s recommended.

The Trouble with Harry (1955) - Hitchcock Friday #13

The Trouble with Harry, released in 1955, was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and scripted by John Michael Hayes.

It can be seen as one of Hitchcock’s experiments. This is not an experiment in technique nor an experiment with narrative. This is an experiment in tone. This is full-blown black comedy, but of a kind that was totally new in mainstream American cinema.

The comedy-mystery (as distinct from out-and-out spoofs of the mystery genre) was an established genre but in such movies the murder is always seen as a terrible crime the perpetrator of which had to be brought to justice. There could be amusing hijinks along the way but murder itself could not be treated as a joke. But in The Trouble with Harry the murder actually is treated as an hilarious joke. Poor Harry is dead but nobody cares except for the fact that the existence of his corpse is rather inconvenient.

As in Shadow of a Doubt Hitchcock makes great use of small-town America as a setting but his purposes here are very different.

This is a gorgeous movie. This is a picture postcard world. A world so beautiful and idyllic that a corpse seems rather out of place.

You might think I’m weird but this movie seems to me to have a similar feel to the opening sequences of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is small town America at its most perfect, but it’s a bit too perfect. It’s so perfect it’s slightly disturbing. And while the people in this tiny burg are all very very nice people they regard poor Harry’s murder with total indifference. That’s the weird element that makes this movie so startling. And that makes it such an outrageous black comedy. The audience is not expected to feel the slightest concern about the fact that a man has been killed.

Which of course explains why this movie was initially a box-office flop (although it was re-released and eventually ended up in the black). Mainstream American audiences had never been exposed to such an oddly off-kilter movie. And they had never seen small town America subjected to such gleeful (albeit good-natured) mockery. It also explains why the movie was a hit in France. French audiences would not have been shocked in the least.

The other thing counting against this movie was its complete lack of star power. John Forsythe is well cast and he’s very good but he was never a big star and his name on the marquee was not going to sell tickets. Shirley MacLaine would become a star but at this stage she was a complete unknown and this was her first movie. Edmund Gwenn was the kind of character actor people would recognise without remembering his name. Big name stars might have made the movie easier to promote but as a star vehicle it would have been a different movie. It’s an ensemble piece and as such it works.

John Forsythe really is good. Shirley MacLaine was a nobody. She was just an understudy in a play when she was spotted. But she had the kooky quality Hitchcock wanted and he recognised her star quality immediately. She’s delightful here.

The plot is simple. A dead body turns up. His wallet identifies him as Harry. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), out hunting rabbits, assumes he shot poor Harry accidentally. And maybe he did. As the movie progresses other possibilities emerge. The one thing that is clear is that nobody cares that Harry is dead but his corpse is very inconvenient. The mystery doesn’t really matter. There’s no suspense. This is a comedy. A zany twisted deliciously black comedy. Black comedy was something Hitchcock did very very well. It was the kind of humour he loved.

The location shooting in Vermont is gorgeous, except that a lot of the time it’s not Vermont, it’s a Hollywood sound stage. The trees had already dropped their leaves, but Hitch wanted those lovely autumn leaves. So the crew collected the leaves, they were taken back to Hollywood and pinned onto fake trees on a sound stage. And it works. This is the magic of movies!

The Trouble with Harry is quirky and offbeat but delightful and charming. And it really is funny. It wasn’t what audiences and critics were expecting from Hitchcock but it’s great fun. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks exquisite and there’s a reasonably informative featurette.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

If ever a movie was a surefire commercial hit it was Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, released by Paramount in 1955.

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were huge stars at the time. Hitchcock had worked with both of them before. He knew they would have the right onscreen chemistry and that Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in love would be box-office gold. He knew the story had all the right ingredients for a lighthearted suspense movie/romance. He knew that that was the sort of thing he could do, and do very well. It could not fail. And it was indeed a major hit.

John Robie (Cary Grant) lives in the south of France. He is a retired cat burglar. Now someone has been pulling off robberies using Robie’s standard modus operandi. The police will obviously believe he is guilty. They do believe he is guilty. Even his friends assume he is guilty.

It’s obvious to Robie that his only chance of proving his innocence is to catch the real cat burglar himself.

He gets hold of a list of women who own very expensive jewels. They’re the mystery cat burglar’s obvious next targets. Robie (who is pretending to be an American lumberman from Oregon) intends to set a trap for the burglar.

One of the women on the list is Jessie Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis). She has a daughter, Francie (Grace Kelly). Francis has had the finest education money can buy. She is poised and sophisticated. She’s also a bit of a spoilt brat. She seems to have set her sights on Robie. She doesn’t believe he has ever been anywhere near Oregon. She believes he’s the cat burglar. This excites her (she’s that kind of girl).

They spend the night together. This scene is a great example of Hitchcock making it blindingly obvious that two characters have had sex whilst somehow never quite technically stepping outside the bounds of the Production Code.

While Robie hopes to trap the burglar he has a whole bunch of people out to trap him. There are the police. There are his olds friends from the Resistance. They were all criminals as well. They fear that Robie will cause them problems with the flics. And of course the real cat burglar is out to trap John Robie as well.

The identity of the actual burglar is very obvious but I won’t say any more for fear of revealing spoilers.

To be honest To Catch a Thief, apart from the obviousness of the criminal’s identity, is not a great suspense thriller. It’s more like his wonderful early film Young and Innocent - the real focus is on the romance. It’s a terrific romance movie, and manages to be rather sexy for 1955. There’s plenty of romantic and sexual tension. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly get to trade some very witty very risqué dialogue.

Grace Kelly is superbly dressed and is breathtakingly beautiful and glamorous.

This movie looks gorgeous. The colours are not just stunning, they’re used imaginatively to give a weird other-worldly feel to the strange rooftop world of the professional cat burglar. The sets and costumes are magnificent.

Hitchcock was determined to have as little as possible to do with the deplorable fad for location shooting. Despite the exotic setting the film has that classic shot-on-a-sound-stage look. There are lots of process shots. These are not flaws. Hitchcock did not make movies set in the real world. He made movies set in Hitchcock World, a much more attractive and interesting world. This movie is not supposed to look realistic.

There was one tricky element in the plot. The Production Code was still in force. The movie had to have an unequivocal crime does not pay message. On the other hand to make John Robie an entirely innocent man would be boring and would be a misuse of Cary Grant’s talents. It would be much more fun to make Robie a retired, rather than a reformed, criminal. It would also be much more fun to make him totally unapologetic about his criminal past. Cary Grant had a particular knack for playing likeable rogues and he was at his best playing a character who was a genuine rogue.

The solution was to emphasise over and over again that Robie had fought with the French Resistance during the war. He was a hero who had risked his life for freedom and democracy. As long as it was also made clear that Robie had given up his criminal career Cary Grant could get away with playing him as a man who had enjoyed every moment of his life as a cat burglar. He could also get away with playing Robie as anything but a Robin Hood figure. John Robie did not steal from the rich to give to the poor. He stole from the rich to give to John Robie.

This solution allowed Grant to have some real fun with this role. It also allowed him to be a handsome sexy bad boy.

This is Hitchcock Lite but it's a visually stunning romance movie with Grace Kelly absolutely at the top of her game. Highly recommended.

This movie looks terrific on Blu-Ray - this is one of those rare cases where it really is upgrading to Blu-Ray.

Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie

The subject matter of Tony Lee Moral’s Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie is self-explanatory. It was published in 2002 and a revised edition followed in 2013.

I’m quite a fan of Hitchcock’s much maligned and much misunderstood Marnie. It’s a movie that has its problems but it has major strengths as well, it’s extraordinarily bold thematically structurally and stylistically and it’s ambitious. It sees Hitchcock once again attempting a different approach, just as he had done with Psycho and The Birds. It was savaged by critics who displayed unbelievable obtuseness in failing to comprehend that if Hitchcock made a movie in a particular way that was because he thought that that was the way that movie needed to be made. He always did things for a reason.

I’m always happy to see this movie get some attention, especially sympathetic attention. And Moral is certainly keen to see Marnie get a positive re-evaluation and recognition as one of Hitchcock’s major films.

There’s a lot to like about this book. The author offers us an exhaustively detailed account of the genesis of the movie, the various attempts to come up with the right screenplay, Hitchcock’s attempts to persuade Grace Kelly to take the lead role and the process of actually making the film. Moral seems somewhat suspicious of auteurist theory and (rightly) emphasises the contributions of Hitchcock’s extremely talented collaborators. We really feel that we are watching the making of the movie unfold.

The level of detail is impressive and absolutely fascinating.

He also addresses the absurdity of the attacks on the movie by film critics at that time. The movie was attacked for not looking realistic. You have to wonder if those critics had ever watched a Hitchcock movie, or rather you have to ask if they had ever understood a Hitchcock movie. Hitchcock was never slavishly devoted to realism, and Moral (correctly) points out that Hitchcock’s movies are uncompromisingly subjective. We see the point of view of a particular character whose view of reality is subtly, or sometimes seriously, distorted. The use of rear projection and the controversial use of an obvious painted backdrop in a crucial scene enhance the movie’s feel of subtle unreality. Marnie’s view of the world is distorted by her fears. Moral disposes of these silly attacks by critics in fine style.

He’s also determined to defends Hitchcock from some of the ridiculous and hysterical attacks on his character by people Donald Spoto.

Moral is incredibly good on the subject of the marketing and critical and commercial reception of Marnie.

When he tries his hand at interpretation of the movie he’s on much less solid ground, often resorting to meaningless film school waffle, ideological buzz-words and psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo even sillier than that found in the movie itself. Moral would have been well advised to stick to giving us information about the production while letting us make up out own minds what the movie means.

There’s a silly chapter on the various pretentious arty types who have exploited the movie’s notoriety for their own ends.

The information on the dramatic changes the script went through at the hands of three separate writers is intriguing, and he deals well with the slightly controversial question of Hitchcock’s decision to fire Evan Hunter. The extra chapters added for the revised version give us more information than we could possibly require about the author of the original novel, Winston Graham, and the writer of the final screenplay, Jay Presson Allen. He also tells us at immense length abut Hitchcock’s abortive attempt to film J.M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose. This is reasonably interesting but it’s veering wildly off-topic.

This is not a particularly well written or well structured book. It really needed some attention from a good editor.

It’s the copious amounts of information on the journey from Hitchcock’s original idea of filming Winston Graham’s novel to the time the cameras started rolling, and on the movie’s fate after its release, that makes this book an essential read for Hitchcock fans. For those reasons, despite some flaws, it’s highly recommended.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Hitchcock Friday #12

Shadow of a Doubt, released in 1943, is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most admired movies. For some bizarre reason it sometimes gets labelled as a film noir despite not having a single one of the defining characteristics of film noir.

The Newtons are a thoroughly conventional American family living in a small town in California. The eldest daughter Charlie (Teresa Wright) is very excited by the news that her favourite uncle, her mother’s younger brother, is coming for an extended visit. Charlie Newton was named after her Uncle Charlie, Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten).

Young Charlie slowly comes to suspect that her beloved uncle, whom she hero-worships, may be a criminal on the run. She slowly pieces together bits of evidence.

We know that Charlie is certainly on the run from something. That’s obvious right from the start. Of course a man might be on the run from many things - gambling debts, gangsters, an unhappy relationship, an irate husband, a minor scandal. All we know is that two guys have been following him.

We also know that Uncle Charlie is rather secretive. He hates having his photograph taken. He hates being questioned about his past.

Those two guys who were following Uncle Charlie turn up in town. They seem very interested in the Newton household. A bit too interested.

Young Charlie is disturbed by the arrival of detectives. She cannot believe Uncle Charlie could have done anything seriously wrong. But suspicion has taken root.

This movie makes an intriguing companion piece to Suspicion, made two years earlier. Both deal with a woman tortured by suspicions about a man for whom she cares. In both cases all the woman has are suspicions. She has no hard evidence.

Hitchcock was a great believer in the essential ingredient of suspense - the audience should know more than the protagonist knows. The suspense comes from the fact that our knowledge makes us fear for the protagonist’s safety. In Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt he varied that formula. In both these movies the audience also has nothing but suspicions. We don’t know if the man in question is guilty or not. These are movies that combine mystery with suspense.

Both movies have an atmosphere of paranoia but that is not enough to qualify a movie as film noir. Shadow of a Doubt does not employ voiceover narration or flashbacks. The protagonist is not a true noir protagonist. Shadow of a Doubt is beautifully shot (by Joseph Valentine) but it does not have the classic noir visual style. Both these movies are psychological thrillers as well as suspense thrillers but their noir credentials are very very dubious indeed. If Shadow of a Doubt is film noir then every psychological thriller ever made is film noir.

Hitchcock was notorious for preferring to avoid location shooting but unusually Shadow of a Doubt was shot mostly on location. This was his first movie to have a really strong American flavour. Small town America does not serve as a picturesque background here. It is part of the very fabric of the story. It was as if Hitch wanted to shot on location to immerse himself fully in Americana and it worked.

Joseph Cotten gives one of his best performances. Uncle Charlie may or may not be a murderer but he definitely has a jaundiced view of life and yet he has charm and vitality. He’s complex and contradictory. Cotten manages to make him very likeable and very worrying at the same time. Teresa Wright is OK. The support cast is fine. Young Charlie’s father and his pal Herb (Hume Cromyn) provide comic relief with their shared interest in murder mysteries.

As it stands Shadow of a Doubt is a more successful movie than Suspicion although had Hitchcock been allowed to go wth his original ending for Suspicion then it would have been the better movie. Shadow of a Doubt still stands as one of Hitchcock’s two 1940s masterpieces (along with Rebecca). Very highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks great and includes an excellent documentary dating from 2000.

Strangers on a Train (1951), Hitchcock Friday #11

Strangers on a Train is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most popular and admired movies. And it lives up to its reputation.

By 1950 Hitchcock’s career was looking just a bit shaky. The move to Hollywood in the 40s had produced mixed fortunes - some major hits and some flops, some critically acclaimed movies and others that left critics a little unconvinced. After having a major success with Spellbound he made The Paradine Case, the one Hitchcock movie almost everybody hates. He followed it up with a couple of out-and-out failures, Rope and Under Capricorn. In 1950 he returned to Britain and made Stage Fright, a movie that arouses strong negative emotions among many fans because it includes a blatant cheat (although it's actually quite fun).

By 1951 he really needed a major popular and critical success. He responded by returning to Hollywood and putting his penchant for experimentation on hold and making a classic Hitchcock-style suspense thriller. Strangers on a Train put him back on top in a big way.

Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) has a problem. He wants to marry Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of Senator Morton (Leo G. Carroll) but his wife Miriam refuses to give him a divorce.

Guy meets Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) on a train. Bruno seems harmless, if a bit over-friendly and a bit odd. Bruno tells Guy about his plan for the perfect murder. It involves exchanging murders. Bruno will murder Guy’s wife. It will be safe because Bruno has no possible motive for the murder. Guy will then murder Bruno’s father. Guy will be safe because he has no motive for that murder. Guy assumes that Bruno is joking and thinks no more about it.

But Bruno was serious. And he does murder Guy’s wife. Which is awkward for Guy - Bruno has no motive for murdering Guy’s wife but Guy has a very strong motive, and he has no alibi.

Things get worse when Bruno insists that Guy murder his father. If Guy refuses then Bruno will make sure Guy gets convicted as an accessory in his wife’s murder.

It’s the sort of nasty twisted plot that makes for a great Hitchcock movie. Raymond Chandler received a screen writing credit although there is some doubt as to how much he contributed to the final draft. The script was based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name.

Farley Granger is very good as Guy. Ruth Roman is adequate if rather bland but it’s Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia who gets the plum female rôle as Anne’s kooky likeable murder-obsessed kid sister Barbara. A Hitchcock movie should ideally include some characteristic Hitchcock black humour. In this case that is mostly provided by Patricia Hitchcock and she’s an absolute hoot.

The most interesting character is of course Bruno. He’s disturbing right from the start. He’s obviously unstable and obsessive. He’s also perhaps sexually ambiguous. This is merely suggested in a subtle way and that works in the film’s favour. Too much emphasis on that element would have been a distraction since the real key to Bruno’s character is that he is so self-centred that he’s become delusional. He sees himself as the centre of the universe. He has never grown up. Robert Walker’s performance is wonderfully unsettling.

I like rewatching movies because once I’ve seen the movie and I know what’s going to happen I can concentrate not on the story, but on how the story is being told. That way you pick up little details you’ll probably miss the first time. In this case there’s the scene where Bruno and Guy first meet on the train. The venetian blinds on the window cast barred horizontal shadows on Bruno, but not on Guy sitting next to him. We’re immediately given a subtle hint (which we’re probably only going to notice subconsciously) that maybe Bruno is a tiny bit sinister.

There are countless marvellous Hitchcock touches - the stuff with eyeglasses, the visually distorted murder scene, the carnival scenes and the wild carousel scene at the end. This is Hitchcock at the top of his game as far as visual mastery is concerned. Compared to Lifeboat and Rope this is a more conventional suspense thriller, but executed with breathtaking skill.

Of course there is one extra disturbing element which elevates this film to true greatness - the ambiguity of Guy as a character. He plays the innocent throughout the movie but subconsciously at least he really did want his wife dead, he really did benefit enormously from her death and he wastes no time on regrets about her death. So one level Bruno was quite right in thinking that Guy wanted his wife murdered. Guy just didn’t want to take the risk or shoulder the guilt. Perhaps Bruno really did understand Guy. By killing Miriam Bruno lets Guy off the hook. The fact that Guy could be seen as being partially complicit in Bruno’s plan adds a nice touch of cynical nastiness to the movie.

In fact there’s even more moral ambiguity in this movie. Senator Morton, Anne, Barbara, Guy - not one of these people expresses even the slightest regret about Miriam’s murder. In fact they’re obviously delighted by it. Their only concern is that Guy might have to take the rap, and there might be a scandal. And Anne certainly suspects that Guy did kill Miriam. The fact that Hitchcock has manoeuvred us into seeing Guy as the innocent victim even though he really did want his wife dead make us complicit in Guy’s morally dubious outlook. 

One of Hitchcock’s best movies. Very highly recommended.

Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock Friday #10

Rebecca was a major hit in 1940 and is the only Hitchcock movie to win a Best Picture Oscar.

There has long been some controversy among Hitchcock fans about this movie. Mostly the controversy centres around the question of whether it is really a Hitchcock movie or a David O. Selznick movie. There’s also the question of whether it’s a suspense movie or a gothic romance.

In the late 30s Hitchcock was riding high. He was the hottest director in Britain and his international reputation was growing steadily. It was obvious that Hollywood would try to lure him away. Selznick made him the proverbial offer one can’t refuse. But he really should have refused it. Going to Hollywood at the beginning of the 40s was in retrospect a mistake and signing with Selznick was a huge mistake.

Selznick of course interfered constantly with the production. He had his own ideas of what kind of movie he wanted and those ideas did not coincide with Hitchcock’s.

The superb opening sequence (one of the best in all of cinema) sets the tone right away. This is the world of gothic romance. The extraordinary house, Manderley, looks like it should be on the cover of a romance novel. When we’re introduced to Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) he is clearly established as the hero of a romantic melodrama. And it’s obvious that Joan Fontaine is going to be playing a romantic melodrama heroine.

When she first sees Maxim standing on a clifftop the unnamed heroine (Fontaine) is convince he’s about to jump. He scoffs at the idea but it’s entirely possible that he did intend to jump.

The heroine is acting as paid companion to a perfectly appalling rich middle-aged woman. Maxim runs into her again and is charmed by her. She cannot understand what the handsome rich Maxim de Winter would be interested in such a silly little fool (which is how she regards herself) although as the story unfolds it becomes obvious that she is exactly the sort of girl he would fall for. He knows right from the start that she is the woman he wants, and needs.

Maxim marries her and takes her to live at Manderley. It’s all rather intimidating. She’s not used to managing a household with a couple of dozen servants. Maxim assures her that the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson), will take care of everything. That’s where life really becomes a nightmare for the heroine. She’s afraid of almost everything and she’s particularly afraid of Mrs Danvers. With good reason. Mrs Danvers makes her disapproval very obvious. The heroine finds herself constantly being compared to Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca. She is constantly told that Rebecca was gorgeous, sophisticated, witty, exquisitely dressed. The heroine is painfully are that she falls short in every one of those areas. She is convinced that Maxim only married her out of pity and that he is still in love with Rebecca. Mrs Danvers has kept Rebecca’s room exactly as it was on the night she died, as a kind of shrine. Mrs Danvers worships Rebecca’s memory and it’s obvious that she intends to make the heroine’s life at Manderley a living hell.

Rebecca was drowned in a boating accident a year earlier. The heroine is continually reminded of how devastated Maxim was and how he has never recovered from Rebecca’s death.

I’ve always considered Laurence Olivier, as a film actor, to be an entertaining ham. It has to be admitted however that in this movie he keeps his hammy tendencies rigidly under control and he is certainly perfectly cast as the brooding tortured Maxim de Winter. His performance works very well.

Not everybody likes Joan Fontaine. Selznick apparently wanted Nova Pilbeam as the female lead. Based on her performance in Hitchcock’s wonderful Young and Innocent (1937) she might have been a god choice. Hitchcock thought she was very good but too young. Joan Fontaine got the part and for me her performance works. Yes, she’s timid and mousy but she’s playing a character who is timid and mousy. And she has enough vulnerability and charm to make it perfectly plausible that Maxim would fall for her. I think Fontaine is superb in this movie.

George Sanders is fun in a small part as Rebecca's degenerate cousin. Judith Anderson is positively terrifying.

There is a theory that Hitchcock wanted to make a suspense movie and Selznick wanted to make a women’s picture. There’s obviously a lot of truth to that but it’s worth pointing out that Hitchcock didn’t need Selznick to introduce him to the idea of making movies aimed at female viewers. And this was Hitchcock’s second Daphne du Maurier adaptation (the first being Jamaica Inn) and du Maurier was a writer of gothic romance melodramas. There is however little doubt that Rebecca is more of a woman’s romance movie and less of a suspense movie than Hitchcock had intended. Selznick usually got what he wanted.

A more important question is whether people who dismiss Rebecca as a lesser Hitchcock film do so precisely because it is a “women’s picture” and a melodrama.

This movie has Selznick’s fingerprints all over it. Apart from the great opening sequences there are none of the spectacular visual set-pieces you expect from Hitchcock. It is of course superbly shot with plenty of nice little visual touches but overall it does not feel like a Hitchcock movie. This is all pure romantic melodrama. There is some mystery late in the movie, and a small amount of suspense, but Rebecca is essentially a melodrama. It is very much in the mould of the 1940s Hollywood women’s picture.

Whether that is a problem for you depends on how you feel about melodrama. If you’re expecting a Hitchcock thriller you’ll be very disappointed. If, like me, you actually enjoy melodrama then Rebecca is one of the great movie melodramas. Very highly recommended for gothic romance and melodrama fans.

Spellbound (1945), Hitchcock Friday #9

Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound presents some challenges to a modern viewer. It’s about psychoanalysis. Audiences in 1945 would have taken psychoanalysis quite seriously and considered it to be science. Nobody today takes Freudian psychoanalysis seriously. This means that a modern viewer is likely to find much of the plot to be absurd and silly. The movie is going to have a camp vibe which was obviously not intended.

Fortunately this is a Hitchcock movie and Hitchcock didn’t care too much about the plots of his movies anyway.

Dr Constance Petersen Ingrid Bergman is a psychiatrist at Green Manors Hospital, a mental hospital. The director of the hospital, Dr Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) has been forced to relinquish his post after having a mental breakdown. His replacement, Dr Anthony Edwardes, is about to arrive to take over. Dr Edwardes (Gregory Peck) is much much younger than anyone expected.

He takes an immediate shine to Dr Petersen. Dr Petersen has dedicated herself to her work and has had no time for nonsense like love. She’s likeable enough but she takes her work very very seriously. She’s bookish and intellectual. But young Dr Edwardes sweeps her off her feet. She realises that she is capable of love after all.

There is however something not quite right about Dr Edwardes. He’s jumpy. Silly little things upset him. He cracks up in the operating theatre. Dr Petersen is head-over-heels in love with him but she’s not a complete fool. She realises that whoever this man is he’s not Dr Edwardes (we later find out that his name is John Ballantyne).

He admits that he’s not Dr Edwardes but the trouble is that he does not know who he is. He has amnesia. And he has quite a few other issues as well.

The real Dr Edwardes has vanished. The assumption is that the imposter has murdered him. The police are now hunting him. Dr Petersen has decided that the imposter is sick but harmless. She assumes he’s harmless because she’s in love with him.

Either psychiatric ethics were very loose in the 1940s or Dr Petersen is the most unethical and unprofessional (and recklessly irresponsible) psychiatrist in history. She’s not only prepared to let a man who might be a murderer escape from the police, she escapes with him. And she allows herself to become hopelessly romantically involved with him even though she’s treating him as a patient.

Even allowing for the fact that psychoanalysis is inherently absurd the movie’s treatment of the subject is ludicrous and silly beyond words.

A minor problem is that both Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck are just a little too young for the rôles they play. We’re supposed to believe that Dr Petersen is not just a qualified psychiatrist but an experienced one. Bergman was 30 and just doesn’t quite convince us that she could hold such a responsible position at a major mental hospital at that age. Gregory Peck was even younger and there’s no way on earth he could get away with masquerading as an eminent psychiatrist.

Bergman is also perhaps a little miscast. She is not the slightest bit convincing as a psychiatrist.

That’s perhaps not entirely her fault but due more to the chaotic mess of a script penned by Ben Hecht. Hecht contributed some of the most embarrassing dialogue in movie history. Bergman is a fine actress but nobody could deliver some of these lines without sounding ridiculous. She does her best and it’s to her credit that her performance works at all.

So Spellbound has all the makings of a total trainwreck. In spite of this there’s plenty to enjoy here. Hitchcock gives us his usual moments of visual brilliance. There’s some good suspense. The Salvador Dali-inspired dream sequence was daring and original at the time and it’s still quite impressive even if it’s silly and outlandish.

Hollywood went gaga over psychiatry movies in the 40s. None of those movies can possibly be taken seriously but most are fun to watch. Otto Preminger's Whirlpool is the only one that can be taken semi-seriously and it's a much better movie than Spellbound.

Spellbound was a huge hit in 1945 and a critical success as well. Today it is best approached as a beer-and-popcorn movie. If you have plenty of popcorn and a lot of beer you’ll enjoy yourself.

Notorious (1946), Hitchcock Friday #8

Notorious is one of Hitchcock’s most admired movies. I have of course seen it before, more than once, but not for at least twenty years. It comes in the middle of what I personally consider to be the low point of Hitchcock’s career, his 1940s Hollywood movies.

Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is an American but her father is German and he’s a convicted Nazi spy. The US Government persuades her (by means of emotional blackmail and the implied threat of actual blackmail) to work for them to infiltrate a group of Germans in Brazil. She is recruited by an American spy, Devlin (Cary Grant).

Alicia is a Bad Girl. She is a notorious woman. She drinks and she possibly sleeps with men, which is about as wicked as anyone could imagine in the 1940s. Her job is to get herself into the good graces of a certain Alex Sebastian who is assumed to be the key figure in the evil Nazi plot. Her assignment is to become Alex’s mistress but of course the audience can’t be told anything so shocking. It is however perfectly obvious that that is the plan. That of course is exactly what female spies did - they used sex in order to gain information or to set someone up for blackmail. Female spies were used as honey traps. The US intelligence agency that came up with this particular scheme assumes that Alicia, being an immoral woman, won’t object.

Before she sets out for Brazil romance blossoms between Alicia and Devlin although it’s complicated by the fact that he has no real respect for her because she’s an immoral woman.

She has few problems getting Alex Sebastian interested in her. They knew each other several years later and he’d been in love with her then. In fact he has never really stopped loving her.

What those Nazis in Brazil are up to is of course of no importance whatsoever. There’s some secret plot but it’s just a McGuffin. Hitchcock as usual is interested in the visual possibilities offered by the thin plot, in creating effective suspense and in exploring themes that always interested him - in this case love, suspicion and betrayal. There has never been a director quite so indifferent to plot as Alfred Hitchcock.

The CIA did not exist in 1946 and we’re never told the name of the US intelligence agency for which Devlin works. For convenience I’ll refer to them as the CIA. It’s strange at first that the Nazis are the bad guys, considering that the war was over and the Nazis were totally defeated. But in 1946 the Soviets were still counted among the Good Guys. So even though it makes little sense in 1946 the Nazis still have to play the role of the Bad Guys. The idea is that there’s a circle of Nazis in Brazil and they’re up to something sinister.

In 1936 Hitchcock had made a remarkably cynical spy movie called Secret Agent. Espionage seemed to fascinate him because it is all about deception. Betrayal is the stock-in-trade of the spy. Notorious, like Secret Agent, is brutally honest about espionage. The good guys are no more trustworthy and no more moral than the bad guys. In Notorious there’s no moral difference between the Nazi conspirators and the CIA. Both treat human beings as pawns in a game, to be sacrificed when they’re no longer useful. Espionage is a dirty game no matter which side is playing it. And if you’re obsessively interested in voyeurism, as Hitchcock was, espionage offers plenty of opportunities.

This is the closest Cary Grant ever got to playing an out-and-out swine. What makes Devlin particularly contemptible is that he really has fallen for Alicia, but he’s still prepared to encourage her to take on such a grubby job, a job which will obviously damage her fragile self-resect even further. It might destroy her psychologically and emotionally. But he’s still happy for her to do the job, and he’s still happy to manipulate her into doing so.

Of course if Devlin had a shred of human decency he wouldn’t be a spy. You get to be a spy by proving that you’re perfectly comfortable with the idea of lying to people, manipulating them and using them. We get the impression that Devlin has never had any problems doing such things.

Any discussion of Hitchcock will inevitably have to deal with the appalling censorship problems he ran into especially during the 1940s. It wasn’t just the Production Code Authority. The studios routinely exercised their own unofficial censorship, vetoing anything that they thought might be even mildly controversial. In the case of Notorious much has been made of the famous love scene in which Hitchcock, being forbidden to have his characters doing anything as disgusting as having a lengthy kiss (which might have permanently scarred the minds of innocent American youth), has them engage in a process of serial kissing. But censorship in Hollywood in the 40s went far beyond such overt content. Movie-makers faced incredible restrictions on the subject matter they cold deal with and the ways in which they dealt with a variety of subjects. These were the days when the assumption was that audience members would be shocked and horrified by any suggestion that married couples had sex.

Hitchcock loathed censorship and usually ended up trying to subvert it by dealing with sexual matters by means of subtle hints. In this case the problem was Alicia’s past. She may have been promiscuous and may even have been a courtesan (we do get the vague impression that the Commodore may be a client rather than an old friend). Hints are dropped about Alicia’s sex life but the hints are too vague. Apparently in the original version of the script she was indeed a prostitute. Obviously that had to be changed in the final version. In the version as filmed it appears that she may have had love affairs.

This was Hollywood in the 40s. You come up with a script that works and makes perfect sense. The Production Code Authority forces you to make drastic changes. You come up with a second version which makes less sense and works less well. The studio forces you to make more drastic changes. You end up with a final script that makes no sense, but the moral watchdogs are happy. In the case of Notorious the end result is that the Devlin-Alicia relationship makes no sense. Had she been a prostitute or a kept woman then we could have bought the idea that Devlin might well feel a mixture of attraction and repulsion towards her. In the movie he does feel a mixture of attraction and repulsion towards her, but his attitude is incomprehensible. The man is a spy, not a Sunday School teacher. He has undoubtedly sexually manipulated plenty of women. That’s what spies do. He’s not the type to be shocked and dismayed that his new lady love is not a virgin. But that’s what we’e expected to believe. In fact, as presented in the final film, Alicia may even be a virgin. Instead of being a man suffering from emotional turmoil he just comes across as unbelievable and nasty.

The Production Code Authority also insisted on the removal of an early scene which made it clear that Alicia was a kept woman. The Production Code Authority didn’t quite succeed in wrecking Notorious but they come very close to it. The emotional dynamic between Alicia and Devlin, which is the core of the film, is fatally weakened and seems phoney.

There’s a scene in which (very daringly for a 1946 Hollywood movie), Alicia tells Devlin that she’s now Alex’s mistress. Even though Devlin knows quite well that this was the entire plan all along he reacts like a spoilt child who’s had a candy bar taken away from him. If he’s in love with her it’s understandable that he’d be upset but he behaves as if Alicia is just a whore. He makes sure she knows how much he despises her. Again it makes no sense. The only people in the movie who are actually trying to make a whore of Alicia are the US Government, and Devlin as their agent.

As a result of the moralistic meddling Alex becomes the only sympathetic male character in the movie. Alicia would be better off with Alex, who treats her with respect and gentleness, rather than Devlin for (for no plausible reason) treats her like dirt.

I don’t think Hitchcock had any interest in the political dimensions of the story. Whether Devlin is on the side of the Good Guys and Alex on the side of the Bad Guys doesn’t matter. It’s the suspicions and the betrayals within the romantic triangle that count. The espionage plot is one of the thinnest and weakest in cinema history. Which suited Hitchcock perfectly. Nobody who has ever watched Notorious has cared about the spy plot.

Hitchcock had little or no interest in politics. If he had had any political agenda then you would expect to see it in his spy films, but his spy films are entirely lacking in political content. Hitchcock was fascinated by the world of espionage because it was all about deception and betrayal. And if you throw a woman into such a world, a world in which lies and betrayal are taken for granted, you have a great opportunity to explore themes of love, loyalty, betrayal, suspicion and deceit. But Hitchcock was interested in these themes at a personal rather than a political level. We certainly get the impression that the US Government agency for which Devlin works has chosen Alicia for this job because they consider her to be a bad woman which means they’re not obliged to bother themselves about her feelings or her safety.

Ingrid Bergman is excellent. Cary Grant’s performance is good but fatally weakened by the script changes which make him appear to be merely a bully and a prig rather than a man grappling with emotional turmoil.

Notorious is another typical 1940s Hitchcock movie, a potentially very great movie sabotaged by the censors. It’s still a very very good movie, but again instead of the raw Scotch that it should have been we get the Scotch heavily watered down. It’s still a great movie but, thanks to the Production Code Authority, it’s a flawed one. When you find yourself hoping that the hero will get killed at the end but that the villain will survive you have a serious problem. Notorious approaches greatness but doesn’t quite achieve it. It’s still highly recommended.