I am a dyed in the wool Hitchcock fan. I make no bones, nor offer any apologies about it. I am an average film goer, and I respond to movies that, admittedly, seek a wider audience. I am that audience. But I bristle, a bit, at the suggestion that Alfred Hitchcock was not much more than a Director who made mass movies for a mass audience. He made movies that enjoyed mass appeal, but there was always a touch of the personal in all of his movies. And the proof in that, for me at least, is that it is so hard to pick out a favorite. I have seen them all...numerous times, and I find that my favorite changes with my life stage.
When I was a kid, my favorite was The Birds. I went through a phase when I thought that Psycho was his best, and it still is a really great film. As a younger man, my favorite was Strangers on a Train. How could you not admire the perfect crime? In my late 30's I was torn between North By Northwest and Rear Window. By the time I was 43, North By Northwest had nudged it's way to the head of the pack...I had a thing for Eva Marie Saint's cool good looks and the sexually charged repartee between her and Cary Grant throughout the movie:
Eve Kendall: I tipped the steward five dollars to seat you here if you should come in.
Roger Thornhill: Is that a proposition?
Eve Kendall: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.
Roger Thornhill: You've already eaten!
Eve Kendall: But you haven't.
I was in love with Eve Kendall right then and there. A few years later, Vertigo became my favorite...I had just gone through a very intense affair, and the whole movie seemed to speak to me in ways that it never had before.
Now, after 2 1/2 years of unemployment, I find that Rear Window is, once again, my favorite. With so much time on my hands, I have become the Jimmy Stewart character...and become a neighborhood, if not apartment dwelling, watcher. My spare time is spent, to an alarming and self destructive degree, outside. I smoke, and I cannot do so inside the house. So I smoke outside...and I observe my neighborhood...my neighbors...much as Jimmy Stewart did in that movie. I haven't observed any homicides, thus far. But I have a keen eye, and like Jimmy Stewart's character, I have come to know my neighbors.
Alfred Hitchcock's career spanned 6 decades. That, in itself, is a feat that sets him apart. He directed more than 50 feature films, beginning in the era of silent movies, and ending with the 1976 fil Family Plot. His heyday, without a doubt, was during the decade of the fifties, but he directed several fine films in the 60's as well. Raised in a family of strict Catholics. Hitch's films always lived and breathed in a black and white moral sphere. There was good, and there was bad. And there were consequences. Sometimes he toyed with that moral construct, and made films about good people who were caught up in circumstances that portrayed them as bad, and they had to struggle to prove their innocence throughout the movie. But the movies always hinged upon the concept of guilt.
It's hard to argue that Vertigo is not Hitcock's greatest film. It is a damned good yarn, and it has Jimmy Stewart. And the setting is San Francisco. It's probably the best film ever made in that city, and I include Bullit. I know a few men of a certain age who claim, unequicobably, that Kim Novac was the most...sultry of Hitchcock's leading women. I'm not among that crowd, but she was definitely of the mold. To my mind, Eva Marie Saint takes that honor. Grace Kelly was undeniably beautiful, but she was too beautiful, and too upscale. The true Hitchcock heroine is blonde, a bit of a siren, but also a bit hardbitten, or at least has a past. Grace Kelly was a little to pure for me.
There are many great scenes in Vertigo, but my favorite by far is the scene when he rescues her from after she jumps into the San Francisco Bay, and drives her back to his place. She awakens some time later, in his bed, and he has built a fire in the front room. Upon hearing her awaken, he enters the room and explains to her what she had done. She realizes that she is naked under the covers, and that he must have undressed her before tucking her in. In case the audience doesn't quite grasp it, the camera pans to her dress hanging to dry in the bathroom. She's a little chaste, but not that chaste, upon putting 2 and 2 together. It was a classic Hitchcock moment. Jimmy Stewart seemed more embarassed than she did. That scene alone was woth the price of admission, though, really, the whole film is a delight. The score by Bernard Hermann is my favorite piece of film music, bar none, in Hollywood history.
There's a scene shot at Muir Woods, where Kim Novac is dressed in a white dress with a black scarf. Hitchcock took her shopping in the course of shooting the film, and picked out both the dress and the scarf for her. Those are the touches that make his popular films personal. He knew, exactly, what he was looking for.
Stewart gave his best film performance in this movie, and it would prove to be his last collaboration with Hitchcock. If I've seen it once, I've seen it a dozen times. The scene where Kim Novak, after trying on several dresses in Stewart's feverish obsession to remake her into the image of his lost flame, steps out of the bedroom and her metamorphosis through the magic of cinematography into the character of the first half of the film is forever seared into my memory. You can't help but feel Stewart's desire and angst. It is both beautiful and disturbing at the same time.
Waiting For A Train is an interesting contrast. There weren't any sensual undertones to the story, as with Vertigo. Rather, it was a straight forward suspense film. And a darned good yarn about the perfect crime. Two men meet on a train, one a well known tennis star and the other a cipher. The tennis star is unhappily married, and the cipher (Robert Walker) has an inconvenient father that he would rather be rid of. Walker engages him in conversation, and convincingly suggests to him that both of their problems could be dispensed with without any associated guilt if only they dispose of each others "problem", anonymously....without any motive to attract guilt upon the other. The perfect crime. Robert Walker's character is as glib as he is likeable, even as he proposes murder.
This was Hitchcock's genious...finding the subversive evil in seemingly good people. Putting a bland, the "neighbor next door face" upon something heinous. I credit it to his Catholic upbringing. He recognized that evil isn't a monster...it is us. Most of his films turn upon that simple concept, and most of our response to his films turns upon that recognition, as well. In Waiting For A Train the protagonist comes through with the "bargain" that he assumed he had struck with the stranger, and when the stranger balks at upholding his end of the bargain, the suspense begins. He comes close, but can't go through with it. It is a taught, well plotted movie.
Psycho is later Hitchcock, but probably the movie that most people know. That's both good and bad. Overall, the movie doesn't live up to his canon of films, yet it is undeniably a gripping film. There are unmistable Hitchcockianisms...the character of Anthony Perkins is introduced at first in a way that is both foreboding but solicitous of sympathy. He seems like a nice guy...but ultimately he is not. To say the least. Again...it is the motif that evil takes on very comfortable faces.
The movie gets a bit graphic, though not by modern standards, to be sure. Yet, I must say that my favorite moments of the film are at the very beginning, when Janet Leigh crosses over the line from likeable bank worker to embezzler.
In the opening scenes, we see Janet leigh in a "No Tell Motel", lying on the bed after obviously having had sex with her lover. She is as repentant as she is spent, and tells him she doesn't want to be with him again in such circumstances. She wants a more "respectable" relationship. She is reclined on the motel bed, dressed in white underwear. When next we see her in a similar state of undress, after she has absconded with an envelope full of cash entrusted to her by her banker employer, she is dressed (undressed) in black underwear. That is Hitchcock in his Catholic finest. Black and white. It was a subtle moment in the movie, but it suggested a moral decline...a crossing of the line, that the protagonist would surely pay for by the end of the movie. As a piece of movie making...I think it is a great as it was understated.
These days, however, I find myself drawn to Rear Window.
I'm sure it has to do with my extended period of unemployment, which I can compare to Jimmy Stewart's broken leg. I have time on my hands. And I smoke. I can't smoke in the house, so I am banished to the outside for much of the day. While smoking my cigarettes in the driveway of our home, I find myself cast into the role of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window....the observor.
And observe I do. I observe "The Cat Lady", who is about 48, heavily tatooed but not unattractive. She makes a trek two times each day down the street with a shoulder pack full of food, feeding a coterie of outdoor and semi-feral cats that she feels drawn towards. She seems lonely, but fiercely inependent. I observe the mysterious divorcee across the street, who entertains a new boyfriend these days after leaving, or kicking out, her husband...but who also seems to have her own borderlines. I observe the Lesbian couple to houses down, who I have tried over the years without success to warm up to. I have taken them fresh produce from my garden, and fresh baked goods from my oven...but they maintain a barricade around their home and their lives that no heirloom tomatoes nor any loaf of banana bread can broach. They hate the world, and assume that the world hates them too. I hardly warrant a wave, in spite of my offerings. I don't understand them, and have given up trying to.
I observe my neighbor across the street, who, when he and his wife go to work, their son sells heroin out of their house. I see the cars come and go...surreptitious transactions taken place during 5 minute trips around the neighborhood. I see neighbors who live in the apartments down the street walking their kids to school in the morning, and picking them up in the afternoon. Some of them I know by name, others I do not. I see red headed, or blue headed, or lime green headed students who go to nearby Reed College. Some of them wear fairy dresses, the men often wear kilts. I see Black guys who live in the apartments, and whose clothes look a little sketchy, but whose shoes are white as bleach. I see elderly people who walk hand in hand, and who always wave and say hello.
I observe all of these things, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. I feel like I am looking on to humanity as it is unaware of being observed. There is something sad about it, but at the same time there is something...I don't know...educational? No, that's not the right word. There's just something .... illuminating about the observations one can make about one's neighbors. And absolutely Hitchcockian.
So...what's my favorite Hitchcock film?
North By Northwest.
But ask me tomorrow, and I may have a different answer.