Hopelessly hooked on Hitchcock
As Vertigo heads back to the big screen, the Mail’s critic admits he’s . . .
HITCHCOCK. For more than 40 years just the name has had the power to thrill, and chill, me. it seems like a cosmic joke that Alfred hitchcock, director of some of the greatest films ever made, is only the second-most celebrated son of Leytonstone, the drab north- east London suburb that later spawned David Beckham. hitchcock outfamed by a peacock.
in July, the 1958 film Vertigo, which for many of his fans is the finest of all his pictures, is getting a shiny 60th birthday re-release.
it is an extraordinary film, a complex psychological thriller years ahead of its time, in which James Stewart excels as Scottie, a former detective suffering from a fear of heights following the fatal fall of a colleague in a rooftop chase.
When Scottie is hired by an old friend to follow his wife Madeleine ( kim Novak), who is behaving strangely, the pursuer becomes fixated by the pursued. he is knocked sideways by her apparent death, but then meets another woman (also played by Novak) and tries to mould her into an exact replica of the dead Madeleine, unaware that they are one and the same.
Scottie has become mixed up in a murder plot, yet in some ways that’s the least interesting thing about Vertigo. it is really a film about obsession and paranoia, exquisitely shot and enduringly compelling.
Yet it flopped on release, only to be voted — by a poll of directors, critics and academics in 2012 — the greatest film of all time. For my money, though, it’s not even
Hitchcock’s greatest. Wonderful as Vertigo is — and for all the virtues of the Birds, Rear Window, Rebecca, Dial M For Murder, North By Northwest and so many other classics — i will always be a Psycho man.
Yet i didn’t see Psycho (1960) for the first time until my early 20s. By the time i became acquainted with that masterpiece of suspense, with surely the creepiest of all screen weirdos in Norman Bates (so unforgettably played by Anthony Perkins), i already considered myself a hitchcock veteran.
By then, the film of his i knew best, thanks to its regular outings on tV, was the one thought by many hitchcock snobs to be unworthy of him, the 1955 romantic thriller to catch A thief. Even he deemed it lightweight.
But i loved it as a child and love it still. how can you not be smitten by a movie which paired cary Grant at his most handsome and debonair, with Grace kelly at her most luminously beautiful, against the most alluring backdrop on earth, the ineffably stylish French Riviera, before it became disfigured by ugly apartment blocks and creeping traffic?
if you watch to catch A thief now, there’s also a distinctly hitchcockian, though of course entirely unwitting, whiff of the macabre.
in one scene, kelly’s character, U.S. heiress Frances Stevens, puts the wind up Grant’s reformed cat- burglar, John Robie, by driving him at breakneck speed round the Riviera’s hairpin bends. in 1982, kelly (now Princess Grace of Monaco) died following a car crash on those same roads.
THEdirector had predeceased his favourite leading lady by just two years, with recognition of his genius arriving in the nick of time. the American Film institute waited until 1979 to anoint hitchcock with a lifetime achievement award.
then, just three months before his death in April 1980, aged 80, he received a long-overdue knighthood in the New Year’s honours List. ‘i guess she forgot,’ he said with a shrug, when asked what had taken the Queen so long. times have changed. these days, honours rain down on actors and directors like wedding confetti, celebrating careers much less accomplished than his.
one other stark difference between now and then is that, thanks to DVDs and the likes of Netflix, his films are infinitely more accessible than they used to be. When i was growing up in the North of England in the Seventies there was really only one place to find hitchcock, and that was the telly.
Mind you, i did once pull his book Stories that Scared Even Me from my parents’ bookshelves, and with a thumping heart, attempted to read it. By the time i was eight or nine his name was already synonymous with terror.
i can’t have been much older when i watched my first hitchcock film, Strangers on A train. i was a latchkey kid and an only child with a vivid imagination.
Strangers on A train floored me. i wasn’t a particularly ghoulish child, but i was sufficiently enthralled by the idea of murder to have read almost everything by Agatha christie.
And here was an extraordinary concept, unlike anything christie might have dreamt up; the notion that two men meeting on a train might ‘exchange’ killings — the vexatious wife of one, the domineering father of the other — so there would appear to be no incriminating motive.
the story was novelist Patricia highsmith’s, but hitchcock made it his own by having only one man, deranged mummy’s boy Bruno Anthony (played by Robert Walker) commit murder. he throttles the estranged wife of famous tennis player Guy haines (Farley Granger), so that Guy can marry his lover.
this was powerful stuff for a boy of ten or 11 in the early Seventies. i also realised — it was inescapable even to a child — that the psychotic Bruno was a far more intriguing character than wholesome Guy. that’s a useful lesson for anyone interested in writing, or reading, and it was Strangers on A train which first helped me to grasp it.
Moreover, one scene in particular stayed with me for years. When Bruno strangles Guy’s wife, we see it happen only as a reflection in the chunky lenses of her glasses, which have been knocked to the ground.
it is tame by today’s standards of screen violence, but in terms of its effect on me, it is still one of the dozen or so most arresting images i have ever seen on the silver screen.
Yet there were even more unsettling encounters with hitchcock to come. thanks to my meticulously- kept Letts schoolboy diary, i know that i first saw the Birds one thursday in April 1976.
My father had died unexpectedly just two months earlier and my mother, still paralysed by grief and shock, had stopped policing what i watched on tV on school nights.
Staying up late for the Birds — released in 1963 and generally regarded as the last really great movie hitchcock made — was probably a mistake.
the mighty director had been inspired by a U.S. newspaper report of a flock of around 1,000 birds that had plummeted down the chimney of a house, terrorising the woman who lived there.
that, in turn, reminded him of a short story by Daphne du Maurier about birds calculatedly attacking an English farmer and his family. he fused the two stories, to startling effect.
SITTINGat home, i shared the terror inflicted on tippi hedren’s character in the film — and indeed on poor hedren herself, who had been assured that the birds flying at her would be mechanical. they weren’t, and it showed.
Nor did it help that we lived by the sea. Seagulls weren’t as demonically belligerent in the Lancashire resort of Southport as they were in hitchcock’s chosen setting of Bodega Bay, california, but that didn’t stop my nightmares.
Many of hitchcock’s films are illuminated by shafts of wit, and by his own cheeky cameos and the red herrings he called McGuffins, so there’s lots to make you smile. But ever since primary school, i have always taken him in deadly earnest.
VERTIGO is re-released on July 13. Picturehouse Cinemas are holding a special season, The Genius Of Alfred Hitchcock, as part of their Vintage Sundays programme (picturehouses.com).