Alfred Hitchcock at 125: As enticing as ever

Alfred Hitchcock is so well-known and widely written about that saying anything new is very difficult. I will try to say what he means to me. 

Hitchcock was British but is best-known for his American films, and he is generally called the ‘master of suspense’. All his films involve crime but only a few tell ‘crime stories’. Any film that involves crime is not necessarily a crime story/thriller. Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, for instance, is not a crime story since it is not focused on the struggle between the law trying to enforce justice and the wrongdoer evading it (which crime stories show) but about the violation of a taboo and the subsequent remorse.

Crime stories suppose an impersonal and just law and individual free-will that prompts people to violate it. They are a product of modernity and are most effective in a democratic milieu in which moral choice is a given. In India the uncertainty over the fairness and impartiality of the law weakens its possibilities. 

But among Hitchcock’s films, one finds that the crime stories are, by and large, the less interesting. Young and Innocent (1937), Dial M for Murder (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955) arguably fall in the category of crime thrillers. They focus on apprehending the culprit.

To get an idea of how his best films work on us, an early British film Blackmail (1929) is more typical. In this film a police detective’s fiancée is forced to stab a potential rapist to death but leaves her glove at the scene of the crime. Her fiancé, from whom she is estranged, is assigned the case and he discovers the glove, understands, but conceals it from his superiors. Still, the girl has been spotted at the scene by a petty criminal who now proceeds to blackmail her.

This scenario is laid out as a moral problem and the girl evidently cannot be made to suffer punishment. What leaves us excited is how the story will unravel since the detective and the girl must be brought together; the issue of the crime itself and the solution matter less. Instead of the violation of the law being primary, the emphasis — in suspense — is on how expectations are belied or fulfilled; these expectations may have little to do with the violation at the centre of a crime story.

Hitchcock was enormously prolific and, as may be expected, uneven. But by the 1940s he was making films that were morally ambiguous and complex. It is difficult to name his first great film but Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Notorious (1947) could be candidates.

The first is based on the true story of the Merry Widow Murderer, a man who courted and murdered rich widows for their wealth. In the film a girl Charlotte is excited when her favourite Uncle Charlie, a ‘businessman’, visits bearing gifts. The first sign that something is amiss is when he presents her an emerald ring with someone else’s engraved initials on it. 

Notorious, a perhaps greater film, is about Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy recruited by government agent Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate an organisation of Nazis in Brazil after World War II. The two are in love but Devlin is required to persuade Alicia to seduce Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), her father’s friend and a leading member of the Nazi group in Rio. Devlin does it unwillingly but Alicia believes he has feigned love simply to use her in the assignment. When Alex Sebastian proposes marriage to her she informs Devlin but he does not dissuade her; instead, he coldly sticks to the task of being her handler. Notorious had a tremendous cast and the chemistry between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman gives it a deep ambivalence since Devlin is required to only see Alicia as an informant.     

But Hitchcock’s three greatest films came a decade later beginning with Rear Window (1954), based on a noir story by Cornell Woolrich, perhaps the greatest ever suspense writer. The other two are Vertigo (1968), which is currently voted the second greatest film ever made, and Psycho (1960) a horror masterpiece that may not be bettered.

Vertigo is such a complex film in its implications that several books have been written about it. In this film Hitchcock casts James Stewart against his ‘American ideal’ image — that was later inherited by Tom Hanks. After a rooftop chase when a colleague falls to his death John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson retires from the police force because of an irrational fear of heights.

Unemployed, he is surprised to hear from a former classmate Gavin Elster, a shipping magnate. Gavin wants Scottie to keep his wife Madeleine under surveillance since she has been acting strangely. Gavin believes she is possessed by a dead Spanish ancestor, Carlotta. Carlotta killed herself at around Madeleine’s age and Gavin is afraid his wife is following her.       

As Scottie tails Madeleine, he constructs a narrative that goes back in the city’s history and he is obsessed. After he saves her life when she throws herself into the bay, the mystique around Madeleine reaches its culmination. It is in the Sequoia National Park when Scottie and Madeleine (now together) gaze at the cross-section of a fallen tree, the rings marking the different centuries and going back to 1066 (The Battle of Hastings). Madeleine marks out Carlotta’s birth and death on it as if they were her own: “I was born here, I died here and you took no notice of me.” The sequence dazzles and it is as though Madeleine’s story now had the whole of history incorporated as a ghostly appendage.

His vertigo comes in the way and he is unable to save her later. She plummets from a church steeple and dies. Scottie finds himself destroyed emotionally until he meets Judy, a dead ringer for Madeleine. When Judy is drawn to him, he tries to refashion her as Madeleine until Judy unwittingly reveals that the ‘Madeleine’ he loved was actually Judy in the role – as part of an elaborate plot that ended with the actual Madeleine’s murder by her husband. 

Vertigo is a film about sexual obsession but its construction raises questions about reality that Hitchcock himself might not have consciously intended; still, an artiste creating at the subconscious level need not ‘understand’ the meaning of his or her work. As a beginning, since Scottie never met the real Madeleine, who was he actually in love with? This question, I suggest, has implications on our philosophical understanding of reality, that it can only take the shape of constructed fictions since we cannot ‘know’ it. The lattice of knowledge is that of these constructed fictions. 

Hitchcock had no peer or parallel although the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot has often been compared to him. But Clouzot’s films do not raise questions like those he raises. Though Hitchcock made no philosophical claims about his films. In recent times some unsavoury stories have emerged about his interpersonal relationships but this should hardly alter the way we regard his films.

Political correctness has created an exalted kind of philistinism because people who cannot respond to intellectual or artistic achievement can believe that holding an opinion about the person will somehow compensate. But since we cannot jettison Relativity if distasteful facts about Einstein emerge, we also cannot dislodge Picasso and Cubism because of the Spaniard’s ill-treatment of women. These are advances for humankind and not only the output of an all-too-human and vulnerable individual; the same thing can be also said of Alfred Hitchcock’s films since they transformed the generic content of film entertainment.   

(The author is a well-known film critic)