An evening evening with Alfred Hitchcock

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The song of the day which while not about Hitchcock or his work, this song always puts me in mind of Hitchcocks special sense of suspense. The End By The Doors youtu.be/aGmAmJFUvzM

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer. Alfred was the youngest child of a middle class English family, his father was a strict disciplinarian and a green grocer and his mother, was strong, outspoken and by all reports was a real firecracker of a woman. Both of these personalities along with Alfreds Catholic roots and his education at very heavy handed disciplinary institutes like St. Ignatius college. One of the most pivotal moments in Alfreds life which also followed him into his films was an often told story of a very young Alfred, after doing something wrong was sent by his father to the local police station where he was locked up for a few hours; leaving him with a life long fear of authority figures, police officers, confinement, and powerlessness.

Alfred's father died when he was 15 and during an unsuccessful career in the royal army Alfred found work on the titles of silent movies. His writing started around this time and one of his first writen pieces "What's who?" was the spiritual precursor to Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?"

After this work Hitchcock found his was to Germany during the height of the expressionist era and got to work as an understudy with several great film makers of the day like Fritz Lang! During this time he learned many very important skills but was most influenced by Mernau's work and Langs Destiny.

This was when Hitchcock started making films himself including our first ....



The Lodger! 1927 youtu.be/ySX99G-l828 or The story of the London fog. About a landlady suspects her new lodger is the madman killing women in London. starring Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, June Tripp, Malcolm Keen, and Ivor Novello. This film is basically based on Jack the Ripper, but done Hitchock style.


One thing you must remember about this time in cinema is that while arthouse film was all the rage in Europe, anything to "artistic" in film in England was grossly unpopular. Hitchcocks films that leaned a little too far into the realm of artistic expression did not do to well at this time and his more commercially aimed work was a smash success. This is a problem that would follow Alfred for the rest of his life. Whenever he tried to work outside of the studio boundaries inevitably the film would flop. NOT THAT IT WAS BAD, just was not palatable to the audience of the time.



As a side note The Lodger was also the first appearance of Alfred as an extra in his own film a scenario that he continued through out his carrier and one that is followed today by Stan Lee.







The women in Hitchcocks movies are always given a certain life and power, a strength which set them apart from the general movie vixens of the time. During his life Alfred was always drawn toward strong women and very unique and confident people. The one woman from Alfreds life that I would have loved to have met was his wife Alma. Hitchcock and Alma married on February 12, 1926; she would become his chief collaborator on all his films. She was said to be extremely bright, blunt and no fuss sort of woman. She spoke her mind and was never shrewish. She was an equal and respected for her knowledge as well as her manner. The Hitchcocks became very busy with filmmaking. They lived in a country house (named Shamley Green) on the weekends and lived in a London flat during the week. In 1928, Alma delivered a baby girl, Patricia – the couple's only child. Hitchcock's next big hit was Blackmail (1929), the first British talkie (film with sound). youtu.be/uwkfM-Gi7KU Alice White, the daughter of a tobacconist, has been dating Frank Webber, a young up and coming detective at Scotland Yard. After successfully ditching Frank one evening on a date, Alice instead meets up with a young male artist who she really wanted to be with that evening. After going up to the artist's studio apartment, he tried to rape her. She ended up stabbing him to death in self defense, after which she tried to wipe out any evidence of being in his apartment, followed by sneaking out of the apartment and wandering the streets in a shocked daze over what she did. Frank ends up being one of the detectives assigned to the case, he who sees evidence only known to him of Alice having been in the artist's apartment, and recognizing the dead man as the person Alice sneaked off with after she ditched him the night before. Frank decides to hide the evidence he knows to implicate Alice from his fellow detectives but confront Alice with it to see what she says. But before she answers, an unsavory type named Tracy implies that he knows what happens and blackmails the pair in return for his silence. Eventually, Frank learns that Tracy is a wanted criminal. So Frank comes up with an idea of pinning the murder on Tracy. The questions become whether such a move will actually work, and if so whether Alice's conscience will allow an innocent man, however unsavory, be charged with a crime he didn't commit.









As a side note, the actress that plays Alice White Anny Ondra was actually a czech actress who's accent was too thick to properly portray the common Alice character, so a voice over actress was used in her stead.

During the 1930's Hitchcock also created in film, a plot device that has no specific meaning or purpose other than to advance the story; any situation that motivates the action of a film either artificially or substantively, called the McGuffin. Originally based on a story where this device was used in a story set on a Scottish train.

Hitchcock then made The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). The film was a British and American success, as were his next five films: The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). The latter won the New York Critics' Award for Best Film of 1938.








Hitchcock caught the attention of David O. Selznick, an American film producer and owner of Selznick Studios in Hollywood. In 1939, Hitchcock, the number one British director at the time, accepted a contract from Selznick and moved his family to Hollywood. Both his wife and his daughter loved America and California's warm weather but He continued to wear his dark English suits no matter how hot the weather. In the studio, he worked diligently on his first American film, Rebecca (1940), a psychological thriller. After the small budgets he had worked with in England, Hitchcock delighted in the large Hollywood resources he could use to build elaborate sets. However even Rebecca did not satisfy Hitch and whether or not this was due to the story not being his or having to the fact that he was being dictated to and stifled creatively by Selznick. The film was nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Fords The grapes of wrath.

Rebecca in 1940 youtu.be/7cf0-GsXDzI A self-conscious bride is tormented by the memory of her husband's dead first wife. Was an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel of the same name. It was produced by Selznick and stars Laurence Olivier as the aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter, Joan Fontaine as his second wife, and Judith Anderson as the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Sir Laurence!


(NOTE from Movie buff extraordinaire Artman2112: "Rebecca actually did win best picture that year, it was Hitch who did not win best director, nor did he ever win an Oscar for best director."



Hitchcock was undoubtedly the master of suspense, but also he was a master at planning out his scenes in every detail. They say that Einsteins brain was curiously configured to see complex mathematical equations in a visual sense instead of purely logical and in text. Hitchcocks brain also must have been similarly gifted as he managed to make the filming of his movies the boring part of his creative process with his keen imagination and thorough understanding of space and setting. Hitchcock took his audiences to the domed roof of the British Museum for a chase scene in Blackmail (1929), to the Statue of Liberty for a free fall in Saboteur (1942), to the streets of Monte Carlo for a wild drive in To Catch a Thief (1955), to the Royal Albert Hall for an assassination misfire in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956),underneath the Golden Gate Bridge for a suicide attempt in Vertigo (1958), and to Mt. Rushmore for a chase scene in North by Northwest (1959).
1942 Saboteur youtu.be/LqUV4CwM12Q







Grant and Grace in To Catch a thief youtu.be/HH8c0szcIdk
The man who knew too much youtu.be/Jy1Bg31B6yI

In fact each film by Hitchcock had the most amazing camera work and when we look back and remember each film we see them more clearly in our own mindseye these fantastic scenes, we feel the oppression, the confinement, the thrill of fear, and the building menace, whether real or imagined that each of the characters face. We remember Hitchcocks work first in the senses instead of in the abstract. Hitch was once known to have said that the future of cinematography would mean that audiences would experience a film instead of just view it.
Hitchcock said audiences found classic blonde females to be innocent looking and an escape for the bored housewife. He didn't think a woman should wash the dishes and go see a movie about a woman washing the dishes. Hitchcock's leading ladies also had a cool, with loads of attitude for added suspense. Hitchcock's leading ladies included Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, and Tippi Hedron. Though I have to say that while they are often attributed to being "Icy" I fear that perhaps was more of an observation based on the contrast they gave to other works at the time. Hitchcocks women where strong female leads, even in fear or duress they where not given to bending or being meek, they were empowered, independent, classy, sometimes scary and sexy women just as intriguing if not more so than the men. The game industry developers of today could learn a lot about how to portray women from Hitch. youtu.be/Zu8JASfWb6A



We all know his classics, Psycho and The Birds, The rear window, spellbound, etc. Want I wanted to talk about the man who is perhaps the greatest influence on film making today is not about just his career and the mark he's made on the collective world creative history, but I also wanted to talk about the man who loved his wife, loved to stay home and have family dinner parties with only his close friends. A home he made with Alma that was joyous as it was a steady sanctuary from the insanity that was the Hollywood which surrounded him. Alfred was a homebody, and I feel it is because of his appreciation for normalcy he could great communicate what was Abnormal, that which causes us irrational gut instinct fear. Hitch got into your brain, had his finger on your pulse and played scales up and down your spine. The following scenes are my top list best scenes from Hitchcocks movies.
The crop duster scene in North by Northwest, the beauty of this scene is the genuine sense of menace that pervades what in lesser hands might have come across as a cartoonish interlude. A guy in a suit steps off a bus in the middle of nowhere. An anonymous pilot in a cropduster tries repeatedly to kill him (strafing him with machine-gun fire, no less). That simple proposition is brought to thrilling life — and an absolutely perfect conclusion in what may be Hitch's most thoroughly entertaining film — by the director's mastery of tension and by the simple pleasure of watching Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) transition so marvelously from detached bemusement to outraged shock to primal, running-for-his-life fear.
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While I can say I love all of Hitches movies equally, Vertigo for me as someone who once had a crippling fear of heights really strikes home. But the real chill factor of vertigo, the thing that is the most viscerally unsettling or as eerily moving than the "green neon" scene that unfolds in a cheap San Francisco hotel. When the obsessed and heartsick Scottie (James Stewart) sees Judy (Kim Novak) emerge, ghostlike, from another room — lit by an awful, green neon light outside the window and dressed and coiffed exactly like another woman, Madeleine, with whom Scottie fell in love — the palpable jolt of passion that passes between the two is unlike anything else that Hitchcock ever filmed. The raw sexual hunger in Scottie's eyes when he sees Judy/Madeleine standing before him, in the flesh, is … well, it's vertiginous. youtu.be/tesqTwX7cpc




There are more spectacular scenes in The Birds — the seagull's-eye view of a town aflame and in chaos, for example — but for sheer Hitchcockian perversion, nothing can top the long, long minute when Tippi Hedren sits outside a schoolhouse, smoking a cigarette, unaware of the dozens, the scores of crows massing on a jungle gym behind her. I really don't like Birds Not the movie just birds in general,, nasty and loud little *cough* well you get my meaning. youtu.be/ydLJtKlVVZw





Uncle Charlies monologue during dinner in Shadow of a doubt. Charlie is a smooth, charming serial killer, "The Merry Widow Murderer," whose adoring niece, Charlotte (Teresa Wright), gradually comes to realize that her namesake is a sociopath. The famous "faded, fat, greedy women" monologue that Cotten icily delivers at dinner one night — finishing with a gaze straight into the camera that's both knowing and vaguely reptilian — is still deeply chilling all these years later, and has informed countless similar fourth-wall-busting scenes in the seven decades since it first stunned moviegoers in 1943. youtu.be/vkEoGmrwNt0


When Raymond Burr looks into James Stewarts camera in Rear Window Here, in a few taut moments, Hitchcock pulls off the neat trick of making the tacit voyeurism at the heart of a great film suddenly, frighteningly explicit. James Stewart's wheelchair-bound character watches helplessly as his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) is attacked by Raymond Burr's Lars Thorwald — and then saved by cops — in Thorwald's apartment, clearly visible across a courtyard. Through his ever-present camera with its telephoto lens, Stewart sees Kelly give him a secret sign that Thorwald is, as they both suspected, likely guilty of killing and dismembering his wife. When Thorwald slowly looks up and gazes directly into Stewart's camera — and into the eyes of the viewer — the sense of the watcher becoming the watched is like a punch in the gut. Still gives me goose bumps, but the Hitchcock was a fan of making you feel helpless along with the main characters. youtu.be/1Ez6dw3ywcc





when a married person is murdered the authorities should look first, and hard, at the spouse. In Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, the fact that the intended victim is played by the gorgeous Grace Kelly, while the hubby who sets up her (attempted) murder is the silky Ray Milland, reminds us that in Hitchcock's universe — as in ours — "nice" people are just as capable of planning and succumbing to appalling crimes as far nastier folks. The critical scene, meanwhile, where Tony's old classmate, Swann (the wonderful, cadaverous character actor, Anthony Dawson) tries to strangle Kelly's Margot to death with a scarf — while Tony listens in on the phone — is especially powerful because we not only know it's coming, but we watch it unfold in Hitchcock's signature, torturous, suspenseful style. As the tousled, nightgown-clad Kelly fights for her life, the musty old conflation of sex and death feels vital and, shockingly, new. youtu.be/LBoL2vMJkCs


Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kissing in a wine cellar. Even if Hitchcock didn't direct this scene (which, incidentally, is almost stolen by the great Claude Rains, playing Bergman's husband), it would still be worth watching for the simple reason that Bergman and Grant are both so absurdly beautiful. But because Hitchcock did direct this little masterpiece of sublimated sexual attraction, what might have been a mere diversion becomes one of the film's pivotal scenes — and its most memorable. In it, Bergman and Grant are trying to find evidence to use against Rains' character, Alexander Sebastian, a prominent Nazi who fled to Brazil after the Second World War. When Sebastian surprises them while they're searching the cellar, Bergman and Grant cover their real purpose by hastily engaging in a pseudo-clandestine kiss in plain sight of her husband. The unspoken but obvious irony, of course, is that Bergman and Grant are passionately attracted to one another — but feel they have to feign passion in front of Sebastian to hide their real motives for being in the cellar in the first place. It's all very twisted, erotic and nerve-wracking. In other words, it's Hitchcock. BTW How the hell do you marry a Nazi and not know they are a friggin Nazi! youtu.be/5jCGfS3GxRM






Lastly we have the shower scene from psycho. I know I know its overplayed, over referenced, but you know it is all of those things for a goddarn reason! I learned how to take a shower with my eyes open because of this scene and watch it as many times as you like. Study it. Analyze it. Dissect it. However many ways one approaches this scene — arguably the single most famous in cinema history — something about it defies explanation. Something about it, more than 50 years after it was shot, invests this awful scenario with a power out of all proportion to its constituent parts. She's naked, she's vulnerable, she's all alone in a strange place, she's surrounded by hard and metalic objects and that music, her scream the shadows...everything really will just scare the shit out of you. There is a reason why when I am feeling particularly dark humored I go around fake stabbing Marion while mimicking Hermans violins and cellos. SCREE SCREE SCREE SCREE youtu.be/0WtDmbr9xyY