Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 featur ...
's films show an interesting tendency towards recurring
themes and
plot device
A plot device or plot mechanism
is any narrative technique, technique in a narrative used to move the Plot (narrative), plot forward. A clichéd plot device may annoy the reader and a contrived or arbitrary device may confuse the reader, causing ...
s throughout his life as a director.
Suspense
Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over the use of surprise in his films. In surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth. Hitchcock often used public places as scenes to heighten terror and suspense. Hitchcock was fond of illustrating this point with a short
aphorism
An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by tra ...
– "There's two people having breakfast and there's a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that's a surprise. But if it doesn't..."
Audience as voyeur
Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty, occasionally making this indictment inescapably clear to viewers one and all, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable" audience. In ''
Rear Window
''Rear Window'' is a 1954 American mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by John Michael Hayes based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder". Originally released by Paramount Pictures, the film st ...
'' (1954), after L. B. Jeffries (played by
James Stewart
James Maitland Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American actor and military pilot. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality h ...
) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the film, Lars Thorwald (played by
Raymond Burr
Raymond William Stacy Burr (May 21, 1917September 12, 1993) was a Canadian actor known for his lengthy Hollywood film career and his title roles in television dramas ''Perry Mason'' and '' Ironside''.
Burr's early acting career included roles ...
) confronts Jeffries by saying, "What do you want of me?" Burr might as well have been addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald turns to face the camera directly for the first time.
Similarly, ''
Psycho'' begins with the camera moving toward a hotel-room window, through which the audience is introduced to Marion Crane (
Janet Leigh
Jeanette Helen Morrison (July 6, 1927 – October 3, 2004), known professionally as Janet Leigh, was an American actress, singer, dancer, and author. Her career spanned over five decades. Raised in Stockton, California, by working-class parents, ...
) and her divorced boyfriend Sam Loomis, played by
John Gavin
John A. Gavin (born Juan Vincent Apablasa; April 8, 1931 – February 9, 2018) was an American actor who was the president of the Screen Actors Guild (1971–73), and the United States Ambassador to Mexico (1981–86). Among the films he appeared ...
. They are partially undressed, having apparently had sex though they are not married and Marion is on her lunch "hour". Later, along with
Norman Bates
Norman Bates is a fictional character created by American author Robert Bloch as the main antagonist in his 1959 thriller novel '' Psycho''. He has an alter, Mother, who takes from the form of his abusive mother, and later victim, Norma, wh ...
(portrayed by
Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins (April 4, 1932 – September 12, 1992) was an American actor, director, and singer. Perkins is best remembered for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense thriller '' Psycho'', which made him an influential ...
), the audience watches Marion undress through a peephole.
MacGuffin
One of Hitchcock's favorite devices for driving the plots of his stories and creating suspense was what he called the "
MacGuffin
In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. The term was originated by Angus MacPhail for ...
". The ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...
'', however, credits Hitchcock's friend, the Scottish screenwriter
Angus MacPhail
Angus Roy MacPhail (8 April 1903 – 22 April 1962) was an England, English screenwriter, active from the late 1920s. He is best remembered for his work with Alfred Hitchcock.
Early life and education
Son of merchant clerk Angus MacPhail an ...
, as being the true inventor of the term.
Hitchcock himself defined the term in a 1962 interview conducted by
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut ( , ; ; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. After a career of more tha ...
, published as ''Hitchcock/Truffaut'' (Simon and Schuster, 1967). Hitchcock used this plot device extensively. Many of his suspense films use this device: a detail which, by inciting curiosity and desire, drives the plot and motivates the actions of characters within the story. However the specific identity of the item is actually unimportant to the plot.
State secrets of various kinds serve as MacGuffins in several of the spy films, especially his earlier British films ''
The Man Who Knew Too Much'', ''
The 39 Steps'', and ''
The Lady Vanishes
''The Lady Vanishes'' is a 1938 British mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. Written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the 1936 novel ''The Wheel Spins'' by Ethel Lina ...
''. Hitchcock has stated that the best MacGuffin, or as he put it, "the emptiest," was the one used in ''
North By Northwest
''North by Northwest'' is a 1959 American spy thriller film, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason. The screenplay was by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to ...
'', which was referred to as "Government secrets".
Sexuality
For their time, Hitchcock's films were regarded as rather sexualized, often dealing with perverse and taboo behaviors. Sometimes, the modest conventions of his era caused him to convey sexuality in an emblematic fashion, such as in ''North by Northwest'', when the film cuts abruptly from two aroused but visually chaste lovers to a train entering a tunnel.
Hitchcock found a number of ways to convey sexuality without depicting graphic behaviors, such as the substitution of explicit sexual passion with the passionate consumption of food. In a particularly amusing scene in ''Psycho'', Norman Bates (
Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins (April 4, 1932 – September 12, 1992) was an American actor, director, and singer. Perkins is best remembered for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense thriller '' Psycho'', which made him an influential ...
) carries on a conversation with Marion Crane (
Janet Leigh
Jeanette Helen Morrison (July 6, 1927 – October 3, 2004), known professionally as Janet Leigh, was an American actress, singer, dancer, and author. Her career spanned over five decades. Raised in Stockton, California, by working-class parents, ...
) while one of his hands strokes a dead animal and the other hand lingers on his crotch. Sexual feelings are often strongly associated with violent behavior. In ''The Lodger'' and ''Psycho'', this association is the whole basis of the film. The taboo subject of
homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to peop ...
is evoked in both ''Rope'' and ''Strangers on a Train'', while some have read ''Rear Window'' as dealing with fetishistic voyeurism and Hitchcock himself analogized specific scenes in ''Vertigo'' to
necrophilia
Necrophilia, also known as necrophilism, necrolagnia, necrocoitus, necrochlesis, and thanatophilia, is sexual attraction towards or a sexual act involving Cadaver, corpses. It is classified as a paraphilia by the World Health Organization (WHO) ...
. Biographers have noted how Hitchcock continued to challenge film censorship throughout his career, until he was allowed to show nudity in ''Frenzy''.
Blonde women
Hitchcock had a dramatic preference for blonde women, stating that the audience would be more suspicious of a brunette. Many of these blondes were of the
Grace Kelly
Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was an American actress who, after starring in several significant films in the early to mid-1950s, became Princess of Monaco by marrying Prince Rainier III in April 1956.
Kelly ...
variety: perfect, aloof ice goddesses, who also have a hidden red-hot inner fire. Hitchcock said he used blonde actresses in his films, not because of an attraction to them, but because of a tradition that began with silent star
Mary Pickford
Gladys Marie Smith (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-American stage and screen actress and producer with a career that spanned five decades. A pioneer in the US film industry, she co-founde ...
. The director said that blondes were "a symbol of the heroine". He also thought they photographed better in black and white, which was the predominant film for most dramas for many years. Although there is a commonly held view that Hitchcock treated women poorly, there is little evidence of this beyond the examples given by Tippi Hedren in The Birds. On the contrary, Hitchcock had many strong female characters within his movies, career women, who often triumphed over the men and subverted sexual stereotypes. One view suggests that Hitchcock’s films enacted “rituals of defilement” of women that evoked his fear of women and unconsciously defended against that fear by punishing and even killing them.
[Tania Modleski, ''The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Criticism'', New York, Methuen, 1988, Third Edition, New York, Routledge, 2016] However murder of both women and men is typical of the genre of horror or psychological thrillers, with Hitchcock bearing the brunt of scrutiny from being a trailblazer in this novel trend in cinema.
References
* Michael Walker, 2005, ''Hitchcock's Motifs'', Amsterdam University Press
{{Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
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