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HITCHCOCK, SIR ALFRED (1899–1980). British director and producer.
Produced, hosted, and occasionally directed episodes: Alfred
Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962); The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
(1962-1965).
It all began, one must suppose, when his father decided to
punish the young Hitchcock for childish misdeeds by having him thrown in jail,
little knowing that the experience would forever warp his world view. So it was
that, after establishing himself as a talented director who could choose his
own projects, Hitchcock told implausible story after implausible story of
blameless citizens who are unjustly and extravagantly punished for their
nonexistent crimes. His most characteristic scenario is the man mistaken for a
criminal or person of interest who is relentlessly pursued and persecuted for
no reason—best portrayed in the hallucinogenic North by Northwest,
wherein the parties tormenting the hapless Roger Thornhill come to include both
sides of the Cold War, his new girlfriend, a crop-dusting airplane, and finally
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. But
in Hitchcock's world, there are all sorts of traps for the unwary: you strike
up a conversation with a man on a train, and end up embroiled in a bizarre
murder plot (Strangers on a Train); you greet your beloved visiting
uncle but begin to realize that he is actually a serial killer in your midst (Shadow
of a Doubt); you try to rest up after an injury but gradually figure out
that your neighbor is a murderer (Rear Window); and as you flee with
stolen money, your only worry is the police, but it turns out that you really
should have been afraid of that nice young man in charge of your motel (Psycho).
Hitchcock's most extreme paranoid vision occurs in his only overt venture into
the fantastic, The Birds, where poor Melanie Daniels, harmlessly
flirting with a handsome lawyer, discovers that she has aroused the vicious
hostility not only of his family and neighbors, but the entire natural world,
as represented by attacking birds. It is true that, schooled in the film
conventions of his time, Hitchcock generally arranged to provide his put-upon
protagonists with a happy ending, but these denouéments at times seem
contrived, and there is a greater sense of conviction in those Hitchcock films
that end ambiguously, like The Birds, or end tragically, like Vertigo.
Indeed, Vertigo is Hitchcock's masterpiece not
because, as film critics might prefer to believe, it is an allegory about the
dangers of growing too fond of watching the illusions that are films, as
Scottie Ferguson is unable to love the real Judy Barton because he is
obsessively enamored of the part she was playing, but because it uniquely
illustrates the ultimate effect of being irrationally mistreated by a cruel
world: the victim becomes the victimizer, perpetrating his own plots against
undeserving targets. Thus, having been inadvertently manipulated into madness
by an old friend's devious scheme to murder his wife, Ferguson manipulates
Barton into a fatal fall from that tall tower. In a sense, this also was what
Hitchcock was doing on the set, torturing both his fictional creations and the
performers (especially the actresses) portraying them. And that is the real
reason why Hitchcock always made a cameo appearance in all of his later films;
he is letting everyone know that he, too, is involved in the conspiracy against
his unsuspecting protagonist. And, as both those incongruous walk-ons and his
droll comments as host of his television show indicated, he found all that
sinister skullduggery rather amusing.
Of course, tales that validate extreme paranoia do not
necessarily fall into the categories of science fiction or fantasy, and except
for The Birds, Hitchcock's genre filmography must be constructed based
upon flimsy pretexts: the suggestion in Vertigo that the man's
purportedly suicidal wife is perhaps the reincarnation of a similarly suicidal
ancestor; the impossibility of having an enemy spy's mansion located on the
top of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest; the fleeting image of his
mother's skull overlaying the face of Norman Bates in the final scene of Psycho,
implying that he had been possessed by her spirit; and some technological
gobbledygook about advanced weaponry representing the information sought by the
faux defector in Torn Curtain. His television series Alfred Hitchcock
Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour similarly qualify for
inclusion because its episodes, on rare occasions, would include a hint of
fantasy—like one episode he directed, "Banquo's Chair," depicting an effort
to extract a confession from a murderer by means of a man pretending to be a
ghost. In truth, Hitchcock never wanted his films to seem too fantastic, since
that might undermine his desire to convince audiences that his unlikely sagas
of unmotivated persecution might actually occur—which also explains why he
chose to make a very uninteresting film, The Wrong Man, in order to
publicize a true case of a man who was arrested and tried for somebody else's
crime.
Alfred Hitchcock has lived on after his death in the
colorized episode introductions that were re-used for the 1985-1989 revival of
his television series, in official sequels to Psycho and The Birds,
in other unofficial remakes and homages, and in a reverential, shot-by-shot
remake of Psycho—all of which suggests that he has remained an
influential figure. But there are reasons to fear that he may not linger in the
popular imagination as powerfully as Fellini; after all, "Felliniesque" long
ago entered the dictionary, while "Hitchcockesque" never has. But for
Hitchcock, this would only serve as evidence of a vast, convoluted alliance of
inexplicable enemies working together to drive him into obscurity. Let us hope
that, as in most of Hitchcock's films, those conspirators will never fully succeed.
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