MCTIn ten days it will be the 27th anniversary of Hitchcock’s death. Yes, a lousy excuse to write an article, but it’s good enough to make him the first subject of this new series.
These DVD commentaries will feature movies that deserve to be seen, focusing on a lot of oldies but goodies (and obscuries) of bygone eras. Not all of these films will be in color, but all hearken in spirit to the earliest days of motion picture. Not all of them will be masterpieces either, but all will have earned their keep in film history. Each clip will focus on a film, presenting a little taste, hopefully tantalizing enough to prompt a rental.
This “it’s for your own good” advice isn’t to make you feel guilty or roll your eyes, and the films shouldn’t be banished to the bottoms of your Netflix lists. These movies are not just edifying. They’re sexy, they’re fun and that’s entertainment.
“Notorious,” 1946
Love in the time of the PCA
Ingrid Bergman plays the notoriously promiscuous daughter of a convicted Nazi spy. Bergman’s German Alicia is something of a patriotic expatriate, her heartfelt declaration of love for America prompting undercover agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to enlist her in a dangerous plot. Awaiting the specifics of Alicia’s assignment, the two fall guardedly in love. There’s a wonderful, nearly-three minute take in which they are unable to untangle themselves, Alicia breathless and Devlin reserved, and as they move together across the room they are never separated in frame or bodily contact. Their on-again off-again kisses are a product of the Production Code Administration’s (PCA) regulation that an on-screen kiss could last only a couple of seconds.
According to the PCA, the moral watchdogs of the 1930s through the 60s, Alicia Huberman was a “grossly immoral woman,” and they demanded that her “loose sexual habits” (she sleeps with men! More than one!) be toned down. But even such spoilsporting couldn’t dampen Bergman’s fresh-faced magnetism or her character’s sexy appeal, especially while onscreen with Cary Grant.
It soon becomes clear that libidinous Alicia was chosen not only for her familial ties with the Nazis and her patriotism, but because of her notoriety. She must ingratiate herself into a Nazi’s house, by way of his bed. The PCA had a field day.
Despite rampant restrictions, Hitchcock manages to make a masterful drama. “Notorious” is one of his finest works, showcasing his ability to hold the audience in complete suspense, cutting expertly from one integral, deceptive clue to the next. And the most integral, yet least important clue of all is Hitchcock’s McGuffin.
“The Lady Vanishes,” 1938
Pacing
Older movies often operate in a cadence unfamiliar to modern audiences, which many film buffs call “deliberate” but everyone else calls “boring.”
The first half hour of “The Lady Vanishes” would lean dangerously towards the dreaded “b” word if it were not for the delightfully scripted humor and its charmingly realized British-ness.
While most of this espionage-themed thriller plays out after a young lady’s friend, Mrs. Froy, disappears while both are on a train (few believe that Mrs. Froy ever existed, of course), the first act serves only to introduce characters and their relationships, something unheard of in today’s world of Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, quick cut, seizure-inducing fluff pieces. That’s not to say that “The Lady Vanishes,” Hitchcock’s last English hit before he crossed the Atlantic, is not 80 percent fluff, only that good filmmakers tended to use snappy dialogue and expert pacing rather than explosions to fill dead space.
The hilariously stuffy repartee between the cricket-obsessed passengers Charters and Caldicott proved so popular that the characters started popping up in other movies. Despite the good-natured ribbing of our heroine by her soon-to-be love interest and his ludicrous fight scene with an Italian magician (predecessor to Colin Firth vs. Hugh Grant in “Bridget Jone’s Diary”), the main plot line is incredibly suspenseful and intriguing.
“The Lady Vanishes” is able to live firmly in two disparate genres, which makes it one of Hitch’s early masterpieces, and its decidedly deliberate pacing pays off richly in the end.
“The Man Who Knew Too Much,” 1934
The McGuffin
In “Notorious,” the McGuffin is a wine bottle filled with uranium ore. In “North by Northwest” it is a statuette, and the eponymous lady in “The Lady Vanishes.” In “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” the McGuffin is a little note passed from hand to hand, detailing the place and time of the planned assassination of a government official.
Hitchcock’s international espionage thriller made him a household name and watching it, one is reminded why. Here is Hitchcock at the most basic of his roots, still working in Britain (away from the umbrella of the American PCA) and just starting to create a dazzling, singular style.
A couple and their daughter are entangled in a dangerous plot of international espionage by a little letter. Before husband and wife can deliver the note to the authorities, their daughter is kidnapped. The devilish gangster Abbott (played by Peter Lorre, who, in order to conceal from his director the fact that he had only a tentative grasp on the English language, learned most of his lines phonetically) threatens their child is kaput if they breath a word about the note or the abduction to anyone. The couple take matters into their own hands.
The plot circles around the note that reveals Abbott’s dastardly scheme and, as the film begins, every character is after the little piece of paper. The use of such an object, which simultaneously holds the plot together and doesn’t quite matter at all, is a classic Hitchcockian device.
“[W]e call it the ‘McGuffin,'” he explained. “It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers.”
The McGuffin sets up the plot in the first act and is usually all but forgotten in the third. Explaining the origin of the word, Hitchcock tells a story about two men on a train: “One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a McGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a McGuffin?’ ‘Well’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then there’s no McGuffin!’ So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.” Hitchcock is able to utilize this device so well because of his ability to pace the plot around it.
“Frenzy,” 1972
The end of the PCA
“The Lady Vanishes,” because it was made in Britain before the advent of the PCA, wasn’t subject to PCA regulations the way “Notorious” and many of Hitchcock’s best-known films were. In 1967, once the Production Code had been officially abandoned, Hitchcock broke free from all of the restrictions that so limited him. He returned to London to make a movie that would depict all of the violence he had become such a master of suggesting. While the content may have been radically new, the story itself, concerning a drunken former Royal Air Force officer who is wrongly accused of a series of rapes and stranglings, is classic Hitchcock.
Only one murder is committed on screen, but that scene is so horrific and troubling that it resonates throughout the rest of the movie. Each subsequent killing, always off-screen, is given much greater weight due to the first’s stark quality and Hitchcock’s willingness to use nudity and extreme violence combined with techniques that were more familiar to his audience (the murder is reminiscent, in shot and editing, of the famous “Psycho” shower-scene).
While this color film certainly does not rank among the very best Hitchcock thrillers, it represents the pinnacle of his later career and also serves as evidence of Hitchcock’s chafing artistic license under the far too restrictive Production Code.
A particularly effective sequence depicts the killer wrestling with a dead body in the back of a moving potato truck, attempting to remove a key piece of evidence from her gripped hand. The extremely dark comedy plays so well only because it is so frankly morbid, putting the audience in such a state that nervousness creeps into a sustained chuckle as our murderer is continually whacked in the face by two stiff feet.
The suspense never quite climaxes, but the characters are so ably played by a cast of unknowns and the script (by “Sleuth” author Anthony Shaffer) is so well defined that even its shortcomings are excusable. “Frenzy” falls just short of becoming a masterpiece while scoring highly across the board. It benefits from being more “modern” than many of Hitchcock’s films, with expressive camera work that seems to be more the vision of a brash newcomer than that of a veteran reaching into a well-worn bag of tricks. Hitchcock’s joy for filmmaking comes through grandly, guided by the veteran skill of an old hand finally and obviously freed from the shackles of the restrictive moral regulations of the Production Code.