Hitchcock I

Alfred Hitchcock - a name I have long associated with the greatness of cinema.  I italicize the word cinema there to emphasize the fact that appropriate word is most certainly cinema and not film or movies.  I first heard about Hitchcock while my dad read The Three Investigators books to me as a boy.  This was a Hardy Boys* style series with two main differences.

1.  There were three of them instead of two.

2.  Each story was bookended by the boys handing off their latest adventure to (a fictional version of) Alfred Hitchcock who would then publish them.

I remember starting one and there being this scene in Hitchcock's office.  My dad paused mid paragraph and asked "Do you know who Alfred Hitchcock is?"  Nope.  So he explained, telling me stories of great masterpieces far beyond the quality of anything I'd ever seen before.  There was an implied mysticism and an excited admiration in my dad's voice as he told me how great Vertigo was before we finally got back to the book.  I was hooked.

(Probably.  I'm sure some sort of scene like that took place.)

A few years later, I saw North By Northwest.  This movie is totally boss.  It's an action thriller that remains suspenseful in this modern era while steering clear of explosions.  Do you know how hard it is to make an action movie these days without explosions?  Even non-action movies usually have explosions!  Hitchcock did it, like, 50 years ago better than anyone can anymore.  Basic plot is that this businessman gets mistaken for someone else in a restaurant... except it turns out that the guy he's been mistaken for is a government spy and the people doing the mistaking are The Bad Guys.  Shenanigans ensue, and pretty soon our hero is wanted by the cops and some mysteriously evil dudes.  Plus there's a lady and at least one twist.  So good.

You go, Cary Grant

I'm fairly sure I was single digits in age when I saw North By Northwest, which means it was a good 5 or 6 years before I saw another Hitchcock movie.  Madelyn Hartke, token awesome female of my high school social group, decided one day that we needed to all watch Vertigo.  She was enthralled by it, loved it.  If it was a person, we said, she would probably marry it.  We watched movies all the time, I'd developed an interest in expanding the number of classics I'd seen, and plus she was a girl, so it wasn't hard to convince us to put it in one evening.

She did not enjoy that evening.

Danl and I tore it apart.  Dumb jokes flowed like a river out through our mouths as we ripped this classic piece of cinema to shreds, totally destroying any sense of atmosphere that otherwise would have been created.  And for a movie that's so much about atmosphere, that meant there was basically nothing left when we were done.  Needless to say, Danl and I didn't like it.  Madelyn was sore about us not even trying to appreciate the movie she'd been excited about.  Overall, a big failure.

Years later, I'd have to watch Vertigo again for my Intro to Cinema and Media Studies class.  I expected it to be better this time - the atmosphere would be creepy.  I was more mature, more patient with films.  I would be looking at themes instead of looking for dumb jokes.  But sadly, it sucked just as much as the first time I saw it, except this time I didn't have Danl around to help me joke through it.  It's just... It's a weird movie - this is common knowledge.  It's about perception and obsession.  I think my problem with it is just that I find the characters so alien.  I don't identify with anyone, so I don't care about anyone.  That kiss shot is really good, to be sure, but that doesn't mean I like the movie.  There's a certain amount of pure entertainment I expect from a movie, even one that I'm watching in order to think about.  And Vertigo... Vertigo does not reach that level of entertainment for me.

The summer before my Freshman year of college would bring me two more Hitchcock screenings:  Rear Window and The Birds.  I settled into a summer routine that involved watching lots and lots of movies, and it so happened that one of the people I was doing this with had the complete works of Hitchcock lying around the house.

Rear Window came first.  Like Vertigo, this movie had been severely over-hyped for me.  It was one of those titles that my dad had mentioned in a thrilling voice every time I asked for a movie suggestion.  "Oh yeaAH, Rear Window!  What a movie," he'd say.  You've got Jimmy Stewart as this cop (ex-cop?  Private eye?  I can't remember...) who breaks his leg and is confined to a wheel chair in his apartment for a while.  So naturally, he starts creeping on the neighbors.  Specifically, he starts creeping on this lady who he becomes convinced ends up murdered.  Investigations ensue.

After my experience with Vertigo I was skeptical, though this sounded like a better plot.  Still, for most of the movie I held the opinion that I didn't like Rear Window either.  Then came the final scene, and I realized I'd almost never been this tense watching a movie before.  Anything that can make me freak out as much as the last 15 minutes of this movie is very good.

The Birds was different.  This is a strange movie when looked at from the modern lens.  You can tell while watching it that it must have been creepy, atmospheric, and crazy suspenseful when it came out.  It was so widely acclaimed and there's the beginnings of so many modern horror tropes in there, but we all know what's going to happen next since we've spent so long watching all the tropes that evolved from the ones present in The Birds.  And then there's the plot, which goes something like "There's a guy.  Also there's a girl.  Oh, and then the birds start killing everyone all over the world.  Have fun with that."

That... that pretty much brings us up to speed.  I bring up Hitchcock because I've watched two of his earlier films for my film history class the past couple weeks and they are fine like a hot chick in the 50s.  I'm currently in the midst of some deepish analysis of both The 39 Steps and Sabotage, but rest assured I'll report my findings here when I'm done.

Until Hitchcock II!

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* I'm so excited for The Hardy Men even though it's probably stuck in development hell.