This is because while the imitators are visual stylists who know how to elicit shock from a camera move or angle, Hitchcock was also a visual thinker. Hard though they try, professional Hitchcock tribute-payers such as Francois Truffaut in The Bride Wore Black, Brian De Palma in Body Double and Curtis Hanson in B edroom Window in their hommages do not achieve the psychological subtlety of the master. (You might argue that in his later movies, such as Psycho and T he Birds, Hitchcock characterized the sin and expiation, but denied his audience cathartic redemption.) Thus Hitchcock movies are suspenseful parables of sin, expiation and redemption.
In Hitchcock films, as Durgnat astutely observed, the villains embody temptations to which, on some secret or unconscious level, the heroes have yielded and for which they must be punished or from which they must be purified. Think of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, whose secret wish to rid himself of girlfriend Grace Kelly is mirrored in Raymond Burr’s murder of his wife.
Think of Farley Granger’s tennis pro in Strangers on a Train, whose secret wish to rid himself of an inconvenient wife is actually acted upon by the homicidal Robert Walker. Hitchcock expressed this cinematically, implicating you, inno cent viewer, by filming from the killer’s vantage point, by using dynamically charged forward tracking shots that drew you forward into the frame and the story.Īs English film historian Raymond Durgnat noted, perhaps because Rohmer and Chabrol shared Hitchcock’s Roman Catholicism, they were sensitive to the director’s notion of original sin, that the apparently innocent are also guilty. Please donate to this good cause.Īlfred Hitchcock’s best movie, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), is not among his best-known, but is my favorite for the way Hitchcock invisibly weaves innocence and guilt.ĭuring the 1950s French critics Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol perceptively observed that in all of Hitchcock’s films they discerned the recurring theme of transference of guilt, the curious affinity between heroes and villains. Young Alfred Hitchcock wrote the title cards and designed the sets. Joseph Cotten, as Uncle Charley, threatens Teresa Wright, his namesake niece, in Hitchock's "Shadow of a Doubt," his personal favorite among his films.Ī post in For the Love of Film blogathon, raising money for the National Film Preservation Federation’s efforts to stream online three reels of the once lost, now recovered 1923 silent, The White Shadow.
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