Limelight (1952)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 137 mins.


This review discusses details of the film's ending.

Although infrequently screened and often derided in contemporary conversations, Limelight is Charles Chaplin's most personal and autobiographical film. He would go on to make two more films after this 1952 comedy-drama, but this is unmistakably his swan song — and what a graceful and touching goodbye it is. In it he plays an aging music hall comedian named Calvero who helps a young and suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom) appreciate her life and her art. They form a bond, and she falls in love with him; but knowing he is in the twilight of his life, he bows back so she can form a relationship with a younger man. The only thing left is to take a final curtain call.

It says a great deal about Chaplin that he would try something as brazenly self-reflective as Limelight. Perhaps he believed he owed it to himself, or perhaps he believed he deserved it (his large ego could have simply wanted it). Whatever the reason, I'm not sure many other artists could pull this off as well as Chaplin does. The film is set it in England on the eve of World War I — 1914, to be exact, the year Chaplin himself debuted. His aged comedian Calvero (which, like Chaplin, is a C-name with seven letters) is inhabited so wholly by Chaplin that even those unfamiliar with the man can sense an immediate connection between the actor and his character. Limelight was one of the earliest Chaplin films I saw as a teenager, and there is a surprising amount of visibility in the emotional closeness of the two, both of whom have a prime that seems far behind them and whose audiences has abandoned them. Chaplin was often not given the credit he deserved for his acting, and when you consider how laudatory audiences can be when an actor or actress seemingly adopts a character persona similar to their own (Mickey Rourke in last year's The Wrestler, for example), it's a shame more credit hasn't been given to Chaplin for this touching and seasoned role.

Certainly it is no mistake that Calvero is the only Chaplin character to die on screen; other Chaplin incarnations have stepped back and allowed others to experience happiness (the Tramp does in The Circus, for example), and still others go to their deaths (Henri Verdoux, most notably), but as Chaplin was so in control of every aspect of his films, we must give proper consideration to the on-screen death of Calvero. The plot would work without it, but the meditation on life, death, art, and impression would be null.

Chaplin has success as well in what are his final set pieces of slapstick, odes to his early silent days. Like The Great Dictator, Limelight returns to the structure that alternates between the progress of the plot and the timeouts for sideshows. It's a quality to most of Chaplin's sound films that many dislike, but when executed well, the sketches can be timeless — Adenoid Hinkel dancing with the inflatable globe in The Great Dictator, or the most famous sequence of Limelight, the pitch-perfect pantomime routine performed by Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Limelight is the only narrative film both men appeared in, and indeed, the scene alone might singularly justify a screening of the film. Reportedly Chaplin's urged Keaton to join the film when he learned how down on his luck Keaton had become (although it's also been said Chaplin just wanted someone good at pantomime; others contend Keaton appeared after realizing how depressed Chaplin was). Over the years the scene has generated a great deal of rumors and controversy — whether Keaton was better than Chaplin, whether Chaplin selfishly cut Keaton's screen time, etc., all questions that originate in the unsolvable argument of which comedian is better. People familiar with production, as well as Keaton and Chaplin themselves, have practically squashed all the rumors as nonsense. I've always thought it showed maturity on Chaplin's part to share the necessary scene of Calvero's final triumph with Keaton.(But then again, it might be the only bit of maturity Chaplin showed toward Keaton; in Keaton's autobiography he called Chaplin the "greatest silent comedian of all time," and in Chaplin's autobiography he doesn't even mention Keaton.)

Outrage over Chaplin's politics prevented many in America from seeing Limelight for nearly two decades. While traveling in Britain for the premiere of the film, he was infamously denied reentry on the suspicion that he was a Communist. (In his autobiography, he corrected the U.S. government's paranoia: "My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.") Many theater owners, still angry about Chaplin's critique of capitalism and the Western war machine in Monsieur Verdoux, picked up on this line and did not screen it. It failed to meet the distribution standards for the Academy Awards in 1952, but when it was given a proper screening in Los Angeles during 1972, Chaplin, Ray Rasch, and Larry Russell won the Oscar for Best Score — the only competitive Oscar Chaplin ever won. The score is arguably Chaplin's best, memorably haunting and wonderfully expressive.

But such unfettered emotional displays fuel the typical strikes against Limelight, namely that it's too sentimental. Fair — but tell me this: what Chaplin film isn't too anything? As a filmmaker, Chaplin perfected emotion taken to the extreme; he is among the few who have made me cry from laughter (The Circus and Modern Times) and just flat out cry (The Gold Rush and City Lights). His critique of totalitarianism had him playing a blatant and buffoonish take-off of Adolf Hitler; his critique of Western society had him playing a polygamist Bluebeard who knocks off wealthy women so he can support his invalid wife and child. Chaplin was not a man to take a subtle approach to art, and if Limelight baldly teeters along the razor of sentimentality (and certainly it does), it's the sort of sentimentality and human drama that Chaplin himself thrived on and could make enjoyable in the most unabashed of ways. Stretches of Limelight are no more and no less sentimental than many of his silent films; only here emotion has been set to sound. Granted, if Limelight is guilty of anything (and it isn't perfect), it's the occasional over-reliance on platitudinous dialogue, which feels all the creakier when compared to the sharpened barbs in Monsieur Verdoux. But this is a film of warmth and remembrance, of frailty and finality, and such things are bound to offend the sterner sensibilities of others. As for me, Chaplin had my heart from start to finish.

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962)

Viewers who turned their television dials to CBS on the evening of October 2, 1955, were greeted with Charles Gounod's "Funeral March for a Marionette" played against a simple caricature of a rotund man in profile. After a beat or two, a silhouette appeared, a man also in profile, walking toward the drawing until becoming aligned with it. The silhouette lingered, Gounod's music twiddling away with the silhouette, forever linking the two. Then:

Good evening, I am Alfred Hitchcock. Tonight I'm presenting the first in a series of stories of suspense and mystery called, oddly enough, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I shall not act in these stories, but will only make appearances, something in the nature of an accessory before and after the fact, to give the title to those of you who can't read and to tidy up afterwards for those who don't understand the endings.

And so began the director's foray into television, a medium which, in his words, "brought back murder into the home – where it belongs."

The 1950s are generally remembered as docile years — picket fences and two-and-a-half kids and gin-and-tonics served under the sunny and grandfatherly smile of Dwight Eisenhower. When we think of 1950s television we tend to think of wholesomeness, sitcom fare like Leave It To Beaver. But lingering right underneath that serene illusion of the decade are darker elements, witch-hunts and duck-and-cover exercises done in the fear of nuclear annihilation. The darkness of the decade, or at least its moral ambivalence, is embodied wonderfully by Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the most sinister shows to run on network television. And that's all the more surprising when you consider that it debuted a full two years before Leave It To Beaver.

Lew Wasserman, a personal friend of Hitchcock as well as his agent, is credited with the idea of putting Hitchcock on television. And why not? It would be a clear opportunity for Hitchcock to cash in on the name he had spent years connecting with mystery and suspense. The director tried to launch a national radio series during the 1940s but never had much luck, and television was the new mass-media machine of the 1950s. Hitchcock was well known and generally liked (artistic respect, we now know, would have to wait a few years, and it would require this television show to reach the masses completely). Shrinking his popular aesthetic in scope and length to easily digestible episodes on home televisions seemed to have success written all over it. His contract was financially pleasing, and the rights to the episodes would revert to him after they ran.

Hitchcock's bank account benefited wildly from his television show, and he became more popular than ever, reaching a wider audience than merely his films, and for once, he was part of the show, not just a mind behind a lens. But what is not given much credit is how seriously Hitchcock took the television project. He was a savvy marketer — often heading up the publicity projects for his own films — and could have simply lent his name and image to the series, turned over the reins to any random person, and let the money come in. But no doubt part of the show's tremendous success comes from the fact that Hitchcock also lent his mind.

The first four seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents total 268 episodes, each thirty minutes. The final three seasons, totaling 93 episodes, were expanded to sixty-minutes and the program was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It would be disingenuous of me to say I've seen all of the episodes; but I have seen many, enough to discuss the show at large, including the eighteen total directed by Hitchcock. This essay, an installment in my retrospective on the director, will primarily be about those episodes and the show's historical effect and reach.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is another argument in the ongoing case that Hitchcock — the man and the mind — was like a lightning bolt, the likes of which we may never see again. Biographer Patrick McGilligan says the television series was "an enterprise that might have consumed a full year's attention for a man less well organized, less brimming with ideas and energy." The 1950s were Hitchcock's prime film-making years, and he had a similar drive in launching the show. Less than six months after the idea for the show was hatched, it premiered. Varying accounts exist of how intensely Hitchcock was involved in the show; obviously we know he wasn't ghost-directing in his free time, or participating in extensive re-writes or re-edits as he did with his films, but the extent to which he participated in the show's development was often undersold, primarily by Hitchcock himself, who preferred to defer credit to his long-time assistant Joan Harrison. (This was characteristic of the man whose films hardly bore his name as a contributing writer.)

Harrison produced more than 250 episodes of Presents, and without question was the chief ringleader behind the scenes. But with Hitchcock's name attached, he also put in grueling hours to make sure it reached success, particularly during the first two seasons. McGilligan notes that the director was involved in story and personnel choices and served as a liaison between the show and the network. As the series continued past the first two seasons, he delegated more authority and responsibility, but through to the end he was still working weekends to approve stories and writers and screening final episodes for any post-production suggestions. "A television show, like a souffle, reflects the taste of the person who selects and mixes the ingredients," Hitchcock once said. "It matters a great deal, for example, whether onions or garlic are used and when arsenic is added."

The television show gave Hitchcock, who had a penchant for short fiction, an outlet for hundreds of story ideas that couldn't be adapted into films. He preferred the simple, single-engine driven plot that keeps a short story pushing forward, and relished the twists that often came at the end. If stretched too far and unsupported with more details, Hitchcock believed short fiction could become tedious for a two-hour film; not so with thirty minutes. Since the launch of his directing career, he had been collecting favorite tales and stories. Much of what appears on Alfred Hitchcock Presents came from published works — the likes of H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Rebecca West, Julian Symons, V.S. Pritchett, Eric Ambler, John Moritmor, Roald Dahl, Stanley Ellin, Belloc Lowndes, Ray Bradbury, and Cornell Woolrich. Even with films, the director preferred the published world to the original world; adapting a published work required less story development, thus allowing the director to focus more exclusively on the cinematic rendering of the material. The show also gave opportunities to emerging and established directors, like Robert Stevenson, Ida Lupino, Robert Altman, George Stevens Jr., William Friedkin, and Robert Stevens.

At the end of the show's first season, the New York Herald Tribute wrote that "the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock Presents is Alfred Hitchcock presenting," a sentiment which I think holds up nicely even today. It's a remarkable feat that, as he was in the midst of directing his masterpieces, Hitchcock appears in every single episode of the series as its host. We hear stories of the director as a jokester and huckster on the sets of his films, and his films are often morbidly funny, but if you want to see Hitchcock pushing the boundaries of humor, you needn't look any further than any random episode of Presents. His droll wit, often self-inflicted and regularly cruel toward his network and his advertisers ("Crime does not pay, not even on television — you must have a sponsor," is one of his best lines), is utilized to great success. An actor he is not, but a performer — ah, yes, he is a performer. The man who fed him his words was James Allardice, a former journalist, television writer and playwright, who ghost-wrote most of Hitchcock's lines during the openings and conclusions of the show. It was a fruitful and productive relationship; Hitchcock loved a particular anecdote about a high school play Allardice wrote, in which an electric chair set under a sign that read: "You can be sure if it's a Westinghouse." (Not too difficult to understand why they got along so swimmingly.)

What of the show itself? It is great fun, with episodes often coming across like pressurized Hitchcock films. The hand of the director can be sensed behind nearly every aspect of the series, and the themes and motifs that recur throughout the show are Hitchcockian to the nth degree: murder, suspicion, betrayal, guilt, voyeurism, doppelgangers, crime. The plots are curved and twisted; although Presents predates The Twilight Zone by four years, the two are often connected simply by the skewed angle on humanity and the frequent moralistic twist endings. Presents is hardly political and rarely as fantastical, but no doubt it was a great inspiration for Rod Serling, whose show would also run on CBS. Hitchcock himself introduced to the show's attitude in the first episode as "striv[ing] to teach a lesson or point a little moral, advice like mother used to give – you know, walk softly but carry a big stick, strike first and ask questions later, that sort of thing."

The pilot episode, called "Revenge," has the Hitchcock sensibility in the plot and construction. A woman (Vera Miles, who's ravishing in an over-large white button-up draped across her swimsuit-clad boy) has suffered a mental breakdown and her protective husband moves her to a trailer park adjacent to the California coast. When she claims to have been attacked in their home, he seeks revenge, attacking the man she identifies as her assailant. All is well until she ... identifies another man as her assailant. The episode is a stylish debut, with close-ups and selected lighting, the camera positioned at oblique angles, and a great murder scene partially obscured and partially reflected in a mirror.

The rest of the first season's episodes (of which Hitchcock directed four) play out the same way. One Hitchcock-directed episode, "Back for Christmas," has a murderous husband undone by his wife's kindness. Joseph Cotton appears in the episode "Breakdown," a heavily stylistic episode where a man experiences a car crash and is completely paralyzed except for his single little finger. The story relies on many point-of-view shots — a rarity in television — and a haunting internal monologue to achieve an eerie feeling of inescapability and doom. But the crème de la crème of Hitchcock's work in the first season has to be "The Case of Mr. Pelham," which actually is the sort of thing Serling could have worked into The Twilight Zone. Starring Tom Ewell, the "case" is actually of doppelgangers. Pelham is an aloof and distant man of wealth who grows anxious and paranoid as he begins to suspect someone is impersonating him, not merely at certain moments of importance but in the mundane moments in life.

Throughout the series, Hitchcock ran afoul with the ambiguity of the episode endings — namely whether characters who committed crimes were receiving proper punishment for their deeds. Untethered with the Production Code, Hitchcock was still stuck with nervous advertisers that didn't want to run commercials along successful murders. Where an early episode like "Revenge," the series pilot, would directly imply punishment for the characters in the stageplay, later episodes had to state explicitly what was coming. In "One More Mile To Go," a country man who murders his wife is antagonized by a police officer on a motorcycle who is determined to have the man fix a broken taillight. Normally it'd be as easy as popping open the trunk — except, of course, the dead wife's body is in the trunk. "One More Mile To Go," a Hitchcock-directed gem from the second season, pushes boundaries; after the man murders his wife, he cleans off the weapon and burns a blood-stained handkerchief and decides how he's going to load the body into the car, all while the orchestra swells and sighs with music of unbridled romance. In the end, as the officer escorts the man to the police station where the resident mechanic "will have that trunk open in no time," Hitchcock zooms the camera in on the broken taillight, oval-shaped and flashing on and off to look like a blinking eye. And there the episode ends: a vague impression that the man is caught, but he's alone on a country road and already murdered once, so who knows?

In many instances, the story within the episode would literally take away all possibility of punishment and let the perpetrators get away with the crimes. Hitchcock, as you might expect, would need to toss something onto the ending, but would deflate the safety of punishment with bad jokes. In "The Perfect Crime," from the show's third season (tied with the first season as the best), Charles Courtney (played by Vincent Price) gets away with murdering a lawyer named John Gregory (James Gregory) and using the remains to make a vase out of "special clay." Except, as Hitchcock explains in self-consciously pathetic narration:

I regret to inform you that Courtney did not retain his last trophy very long. He was caught. A charwoman knocked over the precious vase breaking it into pieces, a few of them identifiable as, uh, bits of Mr. Gregory. You see, the gold fillings in his teeth had resisted the heat of the kiln. But all the good doctors and all the good police couldn't put Mr. Gregory together again.

He might as well be rolling his eyes, and by the time we arrive at the lame pun, Hitchcock understands no one except the advertisers really care. The same sense of safety in the ending is elusive in what might be the show's most famous episode, "Lamb to the Slaughter," directed by Hitchcock and adapted from a Roald Dahl short story where a pregnant woman (Barbara Bel Geddes), upon hearing the news that her husband is leaving her, kills him with a frozen leg of lamb. If it's not the best example of the show, it's certainly among the most perverse. The woman deceives the police from start to finish, and even though the lead detective essentially solves the mystery, he can't pinpoint the murder weapon. "For all we know it could be right under our noses," he says as he and his crew sit down to dinner — a perfectly cooked leg of lamb, as a matter of fact. The ending here, with the woman cackling at her masterwork, is blunted by criticism with another Hitchcock tacked-on anecdote: "she would have gone scot-free if she hadn't tried to do in her second-husband in the exact same way." It's a wonder anyone who had trouble with the on-screen murder ever found that excuse satisfying.

These are only a few of the hundreds of episodes in a series that is quite worth your time, and, as the cliche goes, still better than most of the stuff on television right now. As I said above, the first and third seasons are probably the show's strongest — the strongest episodes directed by Hitchcock and the strongest episodes not directed Hitchcock, which still carry the hallmarks of the director. The series is a curious and rewarding departure from his longer, more nuanced cinematic artwork, but because he never let the show venture too far away from his watchful eyes and ever-spinning mind, you know it has the quality the Hitchcock name is known for.

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North by Northwest (1959)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 131 mins.


Alfred Hitchcock had been covering his tracks with Macguffins for years, but he told François Truffaut he thought the Macguffin of North by Northwest was his best: "And by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd." Later he would admit he didn't even know who is in the crop-duster that attacks the film's hero, and furthermore he didn't care. "So long as the audience goes through that emotion." In that way, the superficiality of North by Northwest becomes one of its greatest attributes; without the psychological baggage, it's among the purest of external Hitchcockian experiences. The director could speak at great length about the intricacies and flaws of the human mind, but he was a film craftsman first, always concerned with how the audience would respond to thrills, suspense, and romance. North by Northwest is whimsical, enrapturing, and adroit in its consummate technique, and it is a film that has often been reduced to a single frame of Cary Grant being chased by an airplane. It's so much more, but it's also nothing more, which strangely turns out to be more than enough.

For seven years Hitchcock had carried with him an idea he called "The Man in Lincoln's Nose." At first, it was just an image: someone dangling from the nostril of the sixteenth president's chiseled face on Mount Rushmore. Then the idea grew larger: a story about a CIA decoy mixed up with international intrigue and a prominent assassination, leading to a climax set atop the South Dakota landmark. It was an original idea – something Hitchcock did not dabble in often – and as such, it was in need of substantial development, which sidelined it for years while other projects, adapted from previous sources, passed through the director's mind. But he talked about it regularly with friends and associates, including Rear Window writer John Michael Hayes, and never lost interest in producing the espionage thriller.

Who knows how much longer the film might have simply been an idle thought for Hitchcock had screenwriter Ernest Lehman not taken interest. Lehman and Hitchcock were teamed up for an MGM film, and were getting along splendidly but were burning through a number of non-starters. That is, until Hitchcock mentioned "The Man in Lincoln's Nose." The idea excited Lehman, who, like Hayes before him, was part of a new generation of movie industry workers that were entirely familiar with the director's aesthetic and recurrent thematic motifs. The screenwriter famously said he wrote the film to be "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures"; while that's certainly up for spirited debate, it's clear that he and the director made what is today certainly among the Hitchcock's most famous films.

North by Northwest is the lighter side of Hitchcock's genius – and genius it must be, for few directors would have been able to pull off this extraordinarily illogical film as unquestioning entertainment. It is often dismissed as a featherweight because it falls between two heftier films (Vertigo and Psycho), and as far as psychological resonance is concerned: sure, the film could be blown over by a light gale. Yet there's something magical here, rooted in the mind of a director that knew how to entertain and manipulate an audience. By all accounts it probably shouldn't work: a rakish Manhattan advertising executive named Roger Thornhill (Grant) is mistaken for a secret agent, and nothing he can do will convince a murderous ring of spies that are stalking him that he is not the man they think he is. The police are equally immovable and don't believe there are spies at all, so Thornhill is stuck in a no-man's-land and must prove he is neither the secret agent the spies think he is nor the murderer the police think he is. Along the way there's an assassination at the United Nations, a daring stowaway on a train with a beautiful woman named Eve Kendall (Eve Marie Saint), a pissed off crop-duster pilot, a couple espionage twists, and a breathless climax atop Rushmore.

But that's not what North by Northwest is about. It's about point-A to point-Z, and rearranging the alphabet in between. The paradox in describing a Hitchcock movie is that the synopsis is never what the movie is about. Some are easier to describe than others – Rear Window is voyeurism; Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train are the science of doppelgängers; Vertigo is obsession; The 39 Steps is the thrill of the wrong man. North by Northwest is in the "thrill of the wrong man" tradition, but it is more abstract than any previous attempt at the theme. Part of its supreme joy is that it only makes sense up to the point of being a thriller; everything else is essentially illogical or unimportant, existing only to make it as much of a white-knuckle chase as possible. Even the title doesn't make any sense. (It was originally, and awkwardly, called "In a Northwesterly Direction." Hitchcock changed it, and included a quick shot of Thornhill at a Northwest Airlines counter. But those close to Hitchcock say he had known his Shakespeare front and back since boyhood, and he might have pulled the title out of Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.")

James Stewart had his eye on the role of Thornhill, but tangled post-production on Vertigo and a cancer diagnosis for Hitchcock's wife Alma delayed the start of North by Northwest and the role went to Grant, his last with Hitchcock. He had previously sworn never to work with the director again, but the money – nearly half-a-million, plus a share of the profits – lured him in. It was the prissiest he had ever been on the set of Hitchcock film, but the director knew better and shrugged it off. Almost as soon as Grant signed on, he wanted out: he complained about the script, which he repeatedly said he couldn't understand and doubted anyone else would either; he argued Hitchcock's humor wasn't funny; he kept an air-conditioned limousine on hand during the hot days of filming the crop-duster sequence; his contract charged $5,000 a day for each day the film went over schedule. But hindsight is a lovely thing. James Naremore has written Grant's performance is one of the most restrained and detail-oriented of the star's career. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan writes that after North by Northwest opened, Grant spotted Hitchcock having lunch then walked over "knelt down on the floor, and salaamed the director exaggeratedly." McGilligan writes:

Why? Take a look at Operation Petticoat, a perfectly entertaining film made in the same year as North by Northwest, but one in which Grant is reduced to mannerisms. Not only were Grant's Hitchcock films among his very best, no director gave him better roles, and extracted livelier performances.

If Grant was overly anxious on the set, it doesn't show in his loose and funny performance. The great thing about Grant is that even when his characters are out of their elements, as Thornhill certainly is in the espionage plot, he is still as graceful and cool as ever. He works well with Eve Marie Saint because the script keeps her character and motives intentionally hidden while Grant is so prominently on display. (The chemistry isn't quite as strong when we begin to know more about her.) Likewise with James Mason, as the leader of the spy-ring, and Martin Landau as Mason's henchman. Aside from harboring homicidal thoughts, everyone is on his best behavior, and watching Mason and Grant attempt to outclass each other proves one of the film's most wicked thrills.

Lehman's script is dazzling and funny, and surprisingly suggestive for the 1950s. The overtly sexual relationship between Thornhill and Eve is unmistakable, and Hitchcock tossed in a throwaway line suggesting marriage at the end to please the censors. Of course, they would miss the film's final shot: a sleek train sliding into a darkened tunnel, which Hitchcock scholar Bill Krohn calls "the most explicit depiction of the bottom-line facts of the sexual act ever pulled off under the Production Code."

North by Northwest is perhaps the director's most recognizable example of incorporating well-known public places into his thrillers, a motif that began with Blackmail (the British Museum) and continued through The Man Who Knew Too Much (the Royal Albert Hall), Saboteur (the Statue of Liberty), and Vertigo (the Golden Gate Bridge). The United Nations and Mount Rushmore are both featured prominently in the film, and both severely limited Hitchcock's on-location shooting, giving the director the only choice of trick angles and recreations to reach the effect he wanted. Production director Robert Boyle steals the technical show in North by Northwest with his elaborate set work, ranging from Rushmore to the cornfield. I'd remiss not to mention the utterly brilliant title sequence designed by Saul Bass, which is widely considered to be the first cinematic example of moving typography. (It's also a contender for my favorite first few moments of any film.) The crosshatch lines on the opening green screen reveal themselves to be a perfect overlay of the lines on the side of a skyscraper, reflecting the city below. Cinematographer Robert Burks continues the beautiful geometric patterns of crossing lines throughout the movie, and Bernard Herrmann's score is one of his best with a Hitchcock film, a balance of thunderous percussion and brass and delicate woodwinds that imitate a marching forward sensation that reflects the constant state of pursuit in the film.

Part of me would like simply to end here and pretend the infamous crop-duster doesn't exist. McGilligan, in his biography of Hitchcock, calls it a "textbook montage that will be studied and enjoyed as long as cinema exists," and quite frankly, you can't top that description. If ever a list were to be constructed of single shots that sum up the entire experience of cinema, certainly Grant and the airplane must be among the top few. It is remarkable in its execution (a series of splicing and matting), absent of music and almost all dialogue, consisting only of natural noise. For a scene that takes place in the middle of nowhere and in a wide open field, it is surprisingly suspenseful. Chapters of books have been devoted to deconstructing the sequence in all its technical glory, and there's no need in repeating them here. The image I've used above is from moments before the "famous shot," and I decided to use it because I appreciate it more for what it stands for. You don't need me to tell you it's Cary Grant. You don't need me to tell you it's North by Northwest. It's one of those things you know, one of those things you'll always know, something you'll fall back on time and time again and enjoy endlessly, something that's been imitated for years but never done as well in the fifty years since its premiere and no matter how much time passes, it'll be a mainstay. That's the genius of Hitchcock.

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Vertigo (1958)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 128 mins.


"We could all tell that this was a very important project for Hitch, and that he was feeling this story very deeply, very personally." - Vertigo screenwriter Sam Taylor.

The Alfred Hitchcock film I have screened more often than any other is Vertigo, his 1958 masterpiece that may be the purest cinematic expression of obsession ever made. It is the film often considered to be not only his greatest, but one of the greatest in all of cinema. Although my personal preferences lie with a thriller released four years prior, I won't argue with either of these accolades. Great films, like all great art, are treasures that affect someone differently with each viewing, films that require and reward your frequent participation but are never a burden to experience; they are great and live on because they have reached some truth-filled corner of our psyche, and never grow old. Vertigo lends itself to multiple viewings, each occasion more rewarding than the previous. From the worn VHS copy loaned to me by my high school art teacher, to the film poster that adorned the walls of my dormitory rooms and apartments through college – that tableau of construction-cone orange, the silhouetted cutouts falling into a white spiral vortex – through film classes and repeated viewings on television, it's been a storm cloud surrounding my brain, always thought-provoking, always complicated, always beautiful in its accomplishment. From periphery to upfront analysis, I'll consider myself lucky if I have Vertigo swirling around in my mind for the rest of my life.

Of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Roger Ebert wrote: "I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo. " Although the comparison was not done for the purposes of discussing Vertigo, perhaps it should have been. Cinema's most obsessive director regarded the film as one of his most personal, yet what we know about him allows us to know that even without this confession. He was a man of phobias, made impotent by his fears and forces he could not control. What he could control were his movies, all meticulously constructed in his head before cameras even rolled. Hitchcock was most controlling with his actresses, his "blondes" as they became known: Joan Fontaine, whom he tore apart emotionally just so she would give the wrought performance he desired; Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly, objects of impossible love; Vera Miles and Tippi Hendrin, whose careers he longed to sculpt.

In Vertigo, the Hitchcock proxy is a retired detective crippled by acrophobia named Scottie, played by James Stewart, recruited by college friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to track the friend's wife, now feared to be suffering from mental illness. Everything after this point is a feat of supreme narrative dexterity: that the woman (Kim Novak) is not who she says she is, that the plot is an elaborate ruse where Scottie functions solely as a cog and a witness, that love and obsession become stronger than anyone can anticipate, that the hired stand-in impersonating Madeleine could be seen later by Scottie and become subservient in love to his molding of her back into Madeleine. If Rear Window is the director's clearest exploration of voyeurism and the cinema, and The Wrong Man his clearest exploration of the nihilism and the unjustly accused, then Vertigo is the director's closest interpretation of what it means to be, of all things, a director – to arrange the pieces in a complex and satisfying way, to make individuals into who you desire them to be at a seemingly unlimited cost, to project your desires and fears onto a blank canvas.

The atmosphere was different in the making of Vertigo, and it's important to consider how this film many say is Hitchcock's best took a course of development unlike any other Hitchcock picture. Between his first Hollywood release in 1940 and his last release before Vertigo in 1956, Hitchcock produced 21 feature films, at a rate of roughly one film every nine months (like children, one might say). He was a director of great efficiency, which rarely translated to a decrease in quality – not all of his films from that period are great, of course, but the great ones were produced with the same rigorousness that many of the lesser ones were. The time devoted to Vertigo, however, would be different. There is no way to know from sure if the extra time spent on Vertigo equates to a superior motion picture, but we do know it allowed numerous revisions of the script and copious notes from the director to himself that included specific camera movements and plans for what emotions the music should evoke. The extra time came from necessary recuperation after Hitchcock suffered a hernia, and by the time Vertigo began production at the end of September in 1957, more than one year had passed from its intended start date. (Once in better health and awaiting the beginning of filming, the director worked on episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.)

Delays in pre-production came from the process of screenwriting. Early drafts of the Vertigo script are reportedly quite messy – a far cry from the remarkably complex story that unwinds for the audience. (I have lost track of how many times I have seen Vertigo, but still I don't think I understand everything that is going on. Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent, sure, but not everything, and that's exactly the way I like it.) Maxwell Anderson, the playwright who helped pen Hitchcock's most underrated film, The Wrong Man, wrote the first treatment of Vertigo, and that treatment, according to scholar Dan Auiler, was reportedly awful. Long-time Hitchcock friend Angus MacPhail helped after Anderson, but quit the project citing an inability to be particularly imaginative. (MacPhail's is one major contribution, according to scholar Bill Krohn, may be in developing the film's introductory rooftop chase). The two men who ultimately shared screenwriting credit are Alec Coppel and Sam Taylor. Coppel came recommended from his regular work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the version of the script he inherited shows Hitchcock had his most meticulous in terms of planning: "four typed notes about key matters such as the opening rooftop chase, and dictated a list of twenty-three sequences he already had in his head" (per Krohn). Coppel left amicably and Taylor, a playwright, came in to add depth and dimension.

Vertigo became a passionate love of the Cahiers crowd in the 1960s, and the reason not only has to do with the brilliant auteurism of Hitchcock but the direct invocation of French cinema. Biographer Patrick McGilligan notes The Wrong Man exists almost as a cinematic conversation between Hitchcock and the Italian neo-realists, and Vertigo – based on the French novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac and set in Paris and Marseilles during World War II – has a similar conversation with the slower, methodical, character-driven work from France. (As he, Coppel, and Taylor worked on the script, Hitchcock reportedly screened Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques numerous times.) The film's reputation has grown steadily since its 1958 premiere, and today it is the film that duels with Citizen Kane for the top spot in the revered Sight & Sound poll, only five votes short in the most recent survey. Hitchcock, whose feelings on a film were always remarkable transparent even at the time, was quite serious about Vertigo, tinkering with it long into post-production to achieve the perfect effect.

Stewart starred in four Hitchcock productions, matched only by Cary Grant. While Hitchcock always seemed to want to be Grant – debonair, traditionally handsome, prissiness tolerated by nearly all – it was Stewart who was the more analogous counterpart for the director. Vertigo was his last film with Hitchcock, and it is one of his most disturbing performances. Little known is the fact that Stewart worked as a creative partner with Hitchcock. He wanted the role of Scottie in Vertigo, and the richness of his performance is due in large part to conversations he had with Taylor. Stewart's work with Hitchcock and western director Anthony Mann in the 1950s allowed him to dig deeper into the darkness of the human soul, and the actor told Taylor he was willing to go deep to create the hurt and tortured aspects of Scottie. The effect was cyclical: Stewart gave Taylor permission to let the writing become more complex, which only strengthened Stewart's performance. Scottie is dark, psychological, complex, and has such regard for the illusion of Madeleine that he has little regard for Judy's emotions. Like Jeff in Rear Window, he is the protagonist but a difficult man to root for because his goodness is undercut by his more abnormal tendencies. Still, we sympathize with him during the entire movie, even as his darker side emerges; Stewart plays it subtle, close to the chest, and steel-jawed throughout much of the film, and when he becomes prone to episodes of viciousness, we have become so attached to the character we still sympathize with him; he is not angry to mean, but angry to release the pain stored in his emotional valves.

Of course we sympathize with Novak's Judy in this ordeal, too, maybe as much as the audience has ever sympathized with a female lead since Rebecca; while Vertigo straddles the line of patriarchy and misogyny, it is never callous. It is clear Judy does her actions willfully and her love seems real; as much as Scottie seeks to mute the natural for the artifice, her emotions are never muted. The source of her pain is the zigzag course of manipulation: first by Gavin, then of Scottie, then again by Scottie. Most production accounts of the shooting of Vertigo make clear that Novak and Hitchcock never got along. She disagreed with many of his decisions (most notably, she didn't want to wear grey), and she sought counsel and advice from Stewart regularly because she didn't receive the feedback she wanted from Hitchcock. Years later, she said wasn't sure he really liked her. Those on the set with Hitchcock in other productions knew how much he could dote on the men and women he loved, and accounts indicate that attitude was not present for Novak. But her performance in Vertigo is one of the chilliest from a Hitchcock woman: she is a world-class example of restraint, broken and tormented just below the surface. Perhaps not surprisingly, Hitchcock worked her to this successful degree, and in a great coincidence of life-reflecting-art, for the role of Madeleine, Novak was dressed against her will and forced to carry herself in a certain way. If there ever proof needed that Hitchcock thrived on a sordid vicariousness of what the men in his films did, and what the camera was able to capture, it was on the set of Vertigo, where his own treatment of Novak eerily mirrors Scottie's treatment of Madeleine.

The director's team of regulars each played important roles in making Vertigo the masterful film that is, and the man who deserves a large portion of the credit is Robert Burks, Hitchcock's most trusted cinematographer. It is one thing to visualize certain shots, as Hitchcock often did, sometimes sketching them and story-boarding them so tightly the final result hardly deviates from the design; it is a whole other to execute them as flawlessly as Burks does. The cinematographer only won a single Oscar for his body of work – To Catch a Thief, a dazzlingly shot but relatively unremarkable Hitchcock film – but his talents are better displayed in the noirish black-and-white of Strangers on a Train, the claustrophobic complexities of Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, and the highly geometric work on North by Northwest. Of all Hitchcock's color films, however, Vertigo has the best look – luscious reds and greens painted throughout as important emotional symbols, and the hazy shots of an ethereal San Francisco capture the ghostliness and intrigue of the film's mysteries. Thanks to a 1996 restoration project, today we have much of the intended color still popping and humming with electricity. But still, beyond the gorgeous color, there is the issue of the astounding technical wizardry. There is the memorable kiss sequence, where the camera spins around Stewart and Day as they embrace and the dizzying effect creates both bewilderment and ecstasy. And of course, there is the camera shot named for the film: the Vertigo effect, or dolly zoom, developed by Paramount cameraman Irmin Roberts and which beautifully distorts the perspective in the film by zooming and dollying in opposite directions. It is a pièce de résistance in the canon of Hitchcock visuals, and he later discussed it by saying, "I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk, and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me."

It is fitting that the film called Hitchcock's best also features some of the best work by his traditional crew. Edith Head worked on costumes, George Tomasini was editor, and Herbert Coleman, a second-unit director and associate producer on many Hitchcock films, was an instrumental part of many post-production discussions. Vertigo was also the first three collaborations Hitchcock with title designer Saul Bass. The opening title sequence, where images of a woman's face overlap with Lissajous spirals, is Hitchcock in one of his most surreal moments. (The orange poster I mentioned earlier was also designed by Bass.) Of all the collaborative successes on Vertigo, however, perhaps none is more important than Hitchcock's work with Bernard Herrmann, who scored the film. Herrmann's Vertigo score is perhaps the best of any of Hitchcock's films, and certainly among the greatest film scores completed. It is instantly chilling with its spiraling notes and mournful repetition, like an addict's return to bad habits. I haven't ever heard the score defined better than by Martin Scorsese, who said in 2004: "Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession." It was a stroke of genius on Hitchcock's part to allow Vertigo to slide along for long stretches without any dialogue at all, only Herrmann's score floating above the actors and locations like a light and spooky fog. The violin strings of Psycho could be Herrmann's most culturally familiar composition, but the entire score of Vertigo, from start to finish, is his magnum opus.

And so Vertigo is commonly referred to as Hitchcock's magnum opus. In a lot of ways, it's difficult to refute that title – there was a strange and heavenly intersection of material, time, desire, and teamwork that went into producing this film. My favorite Hitchcock film, Rear Window, has always been to me a testament in the goal of all moviemaking, but even I must admit the aura on Vertigo is more magnetic than on Rear Window. You cannot learn everything about Hitchcock simply by watching this film (you need to consider him across all his many splendid films), but Vertigo has the feeling of closeness between a great artist and his great art, that kind of feeling that connects Vincent van Gogh with The Starry Night, Miles Davis with Kind of Blue, Frank Lloyd Wright with Fallingwater, F. Scott Fitzgerald with The Great Gatsby, and so on. When we watch Vertigo, we are watching Hitchcock, and what's inside is at once breathtaking and terrifying.

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The Wrong Man (1956)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 105 mins.


The Wrong Man is Alfred Hitchcock's bleakest and most discomforting motion picture, and it's also his most underrated. It was not the director's final word on a topic that troubled him his entire life – being accused for a crime one didn't commit – but it is his most claustrophobic exploration of that situation and, considering its foundation in real life, his most plausible. While most Hitchcockian heroes are merely fingered for a crime and forced to go on the run to prove their innocence, the protagonist of The Wrong Man – a jazz musician with one of those faces you'd swear you've seen before – is in an elliptical hell where eyewitnesses think he's guilty, the police think he's guilty, and there is nothing he can do to prove his innocence. When a shadowed Hitchcock struts out in front of the camera at the film's beginning to tell the audience it is a true story, it not only makes what comes after seem all the more horrifying, but it's as if Hitchcock is saying of his own fears, Look! I told you it wasn't just all in my head!

The incident depicted in the film is based on the story of Manny Balestrero, first brought to wide attention in a 1953 article for Life magazine. He was a jazz bassist who, through a case of mistaken identity, was arrested on the charge of stealing from an insurance company. Once in police custody, Balestrero becomes victim to a freakish coincidences that keep aligning him squarely with the description of the suspect, leading to his bizarre trial and his wife experiencinc mental breakdown from the stress. I won't discuss any more details about Balestrero's case; although The Wrong Man doesn't follow "every word" of the story as Hitchcock claims in his introduction, it is similar enough that any more would spoil the film.

Balestrero is played by Henry Fonda – that great Everyman actor, in his only collaboration with Hitchcock. It's difficult to imagine anyone else for this role. Fonda's subtlety fits Balestrero's predicament, stirring a mixture of impotent anger, remorse, sadness, and fear. The immediate connection Fonda had (and continues to have) with audiences makes his selection more effective, too. Essentially The Wrong Man is the story of person sent through the ringer of an imperfect system of justice, where fate and accident can be more powerful forces than rationality and investigation, and our empathy and vicariousness fears occur with ease. Balestrero is by no means a strong man, only a man who has a will to be exonerated, and weaker people would certainly crack under the pressure (as his wife Rose, played here by Vera Miles, does).

Jonathan Rosenbaum has called The Wrong Man "the closest Alfred Hitchcock ever came to making an art film," and indeed, so much of the pleasure here comes from the execution of technique. It is not neorealism in the strictest sense of course, but Hitchcock challenged himself to bring a specific documentary-style to the film that was undoubtedly influenced by the post-war Italian directors. (He frequently screened films from all over the globe, and from Italy he was particularly interested in Roberto Rossellini, who had romanced Ingrid Bergman.) The director tossed out many of his cinematic tricks to give The Wrong Man the closest feeling to reality he could, shooting on location in New York City and filming scenes in a real prison that was housing actual criminals. (In the film one can hear a prisoner refer to Fonda by name.) Hitchcock gave cinematographer Robert Burks the opportunity to leave if he didn't want to be part of the project, but Burks stayed and his black-and-white cinematography is subdued and chilling. Likewise with Bernard Herrmann, whose scores are typically so powerful and identifiable in his films with Hitchcock; Herrmann's score for The Wrong Man is quiet, peppered with hints of jazz to reflect Balestrero's career. Edith Head, known for her extravagant costume design, did uncredited consulting on Miles's simple and monochromatic wardrobe. For a director who relished in the stylistic excesses afforded to him by fame and movie studio cash, The Wrong Man is as low-key as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a filmmaking device the director would utilize to great (some might say incalculable) success four years later in Psycho.

Hitchcock kept the film's screenwriters, Angus MacPhail and playwright Maxwell Anderson, to task with the story and intervened when they drifted too far into fiction or organized elements outside of chronological order. MacPhail and long-time Hitchcock collaborator Herbert Coleman, an associate producer, interviewed numerous people who were involved in the actual Balestrero case, including the judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and psychiatrists. The first half of the film, with its uncomfortable and fatalistic worldview, is as engaging as the best work done by the director. The second half, which shifts to the story to a greater distribution between Manny and Rose, can't quite maintain the intensity. But the film is so unique among Hitchcock's that it's also something that shouldn't be missed; a full assessment of Hitchcock-cum-Experimentalist would not be complete without examining this often ignored film. It is a nightmare of epic proportions, slightly shy of masterpiece status, and delivered to the screen through one of Hitchcock's subtlest maneuvers.

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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 120 mins.


If the question is which of Alfred Hitchcock's two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much is better, the answer is not as clear cut as some would have you believe. Both films have their defenders – although to be fair, the lion's share tend to side with the 1934 British version instead of the 1956 Hollywood remake. Both films are successful thrillers, strumming bizarreness at the right moments and twisting suspense at others. But I have never found either film to be unequivocally great; interestingly enough, too, both films succeed and fall short in rather parallel ways. If it were possible to go in and seamlessly splice the two films together, you might just have yourself a Hitchcock masterpiece.

The 1956 film is biographically notable because it is the only film Hitchcock remade, although that fact alone doesn't necessarily make it a complete anomaly in the director's work. Ever since Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood in 1940, he'd been itching to return to one of his earlier British films. His overwhelming preference was The Lodger – a 1927 silent feature that was officially his third film but in many ways his true debut as a suspense director. His dream was that a new version of The Lodger would be his first film in color, and "color for a reason, not just color to knock people's eyes out." He wanted the yellow fog of London and blood red liquids on white fabrics. But during those early Hollywood days, he discussed as frequently the notion of remaking The Man Who Knew Too Much (the film he and many others consider his breakthrough), and the project began picking up steam when he imagined James Stewart in the lead.

There was desire within him to do more with the material, but the remake wasn't motivated entirely by artistic desires. Hitchcock's friend Angus MacPhail, who had helped in developing the 1934 version in Britain, had become a drunkard and fallen into debt. Hitchcock had given MacPhail money directly and also contributed to a friendly group collection to help pay down MacPhail's debt, but he wanted to get MacPhail an American screenwriting credit so that he might be able to get into a screenwriting guild and acquire some health insurance. MacPhail brainstormed and imagined scenes with Hitchcock, but his final contribution to the film wouldn't even be credited (he would receive credit on Hitchcock's next film, The Wrong Man). Instead, screenwriting credit would go to John Michael Hayes, his fourth and final collaboration with the director. Hayes had written his three previous films by himself, and his ego was bruised.

The remake is grander, curiously darker, more complex, and more technically accomplished. It is also bloated, occasionally too cheeky, and, with its plot-based emphasis on a pop song, perhaps too slick for its own good. Stewart and Doris Day are Ben and Jo McKenna, American tourists vacationing in Morocco. They accidentally stumble onto the knowledge of a planned assassination, and their son is taken hostage by conspirators as leverage for their silence. Released during Hitchcock's most productive and best period of film-making, of course there is enough to enjoy in The Man Who Knew Too Much to make it easy to watch. There are a number of memorable scenes here, including confusion about a specific name that leads Stewart to a bizarre taxidermist's office to investigate the whereabouts of his son.

The '34 version and the '56 version both contain the famous assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall concert, but the version here is superior. Because of a tight budget in the British film, Hitchcock had built an eye-trick replica of the Hall, but for the remake he was given permission to film on location. The sequence was lengthened (Arthur Benjamin actually added minutes to his cantata), and the suspense is brought to a brilliantly new level. Anyone interested in Hitchcock should be required to watch his expert handling of the scene: 12 minutes, 124 shots, not a single line of dialogue as George Tomasini's impeccable editing and the crescendoing cantata curl the suspense around and around, tighter and tighter, until the moment it seems like the world is about to be shattered and then everything is broken with a scream from Day, a witness to the crime. (Look for Bernard Herrmann, in a cameo as the orchestra conductor.)

The strength to the remake, besides its polished veneer, is greater depth and emotion to the main characters. While I don't prefer Day to Edna Best, the mother from the '34 film, there isn't much doubt that Day is given more room to explore the psychology of a mother whose child is taken from her. I'm not much of a fan of her "Que Sera Sera" number – it works in terms of the plot, even if I don't like the music – and ironically, although she would embrace it as her signature song later in life, she resisted it at first when it was played for her during production. (The song, written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, would nevertheless win an Oscar – one more than Hitchcock ever won.) Stewart is solid, although there's a case to be made that The Man Who Knew Too Much is his weakest collaboration with Hitchcock; he still exudes more charisma than Leslie Banks, who occupied the same role previously.

What is lacking is the presence of a meaty villain. The threatening storm cloud coming from the interior of the European continent in the 1930s provided plenty of spookiness to the villains in Hitchcock's British version, and although Peter Lorre might have been insurmountable to recreate, someone with his beguiling weirdness would have helped even out the cast here. The villains for the remake are faintly veiled to be communists, but the threat isn't as potent and they aren't as wicked. But while some fun villains would improve the periphery of the film, the chief problem with the remake is that there are about ten to twenty minutes of inadvertent fat that should have wound up on the cutting room floor. Some of it is smart (the expanded Royal Albert Hall sequence, to be sure), but most of it is quite tedious, including too much front-loaded exposition that weigh the film's start.

Often it is attributed to Hitchcock that he preferred the large-scale Hollywood release to his shoe-string British version, but that's not the whole story. The source of the quote is the director's book-length interview with Francois Truffaut, who insisted "the remake is by far superior to the original." Hitchcock's uneasy reply was: "Let's say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." However, notice the diplomatic circumvention of Truffaut's declarative review, and notice the adjective talented on amateur and the lack of an adjective on professional. Later, Hitchcock would say the primary difference between the films is that he was "audience-conscious" with the remake and not with the first, which, considering that the director was at the height of his powers, is quite logical. Cutting through Hitchcock's wordplay, however, I think there is a sense that he was satisfied with both films, but perhaps they were not among his own favorites. And what can I say – I enjoy, but don't love, both films and can totally sympathize.

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The Trouble with Harry (1955)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 99 mins.


What's the difference between tragedy and comedy? Charles Chaplin famously said it was the difference of close-up and long-shot. But if you're Alfred Hitchcock, it all has to do with how many times the body gets buried.

The Trouble with Harry is the director's only official Hollywood comedy. (It was also his first collaboration with composer Bernard Herrmann.) Hitchcock had made lighter fare in England while he was honing his skills, and all of his films often have macabre and bawdy humor, but few can be labeled straight up comedy. There's no doubt this is Hitchcockian comedy, though: a group of rural Vermonters find a dead man's body in the woods. Concerned with how any of them might be implicated in the death of the gentleman (but really not concerned with the fact that he's dead), they hatch a few schemes to avoid being investigated by the authorities. The dead man, Harry, gets buried a few times, dug up a few times, hidden in a bathtub, hidden in a closet, and so on and so far. "A nice little pastrole," as Hitchcock called it.

Harry, it turns out, is the now-late husband of a young woman named Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine, in a role Hitchcock wanted for – you guessed it – Grace Kelly), and he wasn't a particularly good man. Because this was the 1950s in Hollywood, his death was accidental, and many of the locals fear they've had something to do with it. A hunter (Edmund Gwenn, in his forth Hitchcock film) thinks he has accidentally shot the man, and a local spinster (Mildred Natwick) thinks she accidentally killed him with her hiking boot. As they seek to rid themselves of the body, they turn to a carefree painter (John Forsythe) to guide them and help them evade the dimwitted police.

Although Hitchcock was a great cinematic experimenter, all of his projects don't merit attention today. (Waltzes from Vienna, for example, that disastrous Hitchcock musical.) The good news is that The Trouble with Harry is both a curious trip outside the director's norm and a generally enjoyable one. It's is not a terrific Hitchcock film and it's not a terrific comedy, but it succeeds where the two overlap.

It's funny, which is important, and the acting is smooth and comfortable. Hitchcock never saw The Trouble with Harry as anything more than a break from his traditional work, which was probably for the best. That casual attitude seems to serve the film well. It's been called underrated, but that implies a certain amount of excellence that isn't entirely present here. It improves on multiple viewings, yes, but after two or three, it hits a ceiling. The screenplay was adapted by John Michael Hayes from a slim novel by Jack Trevor Story, and there's a hefty amount of Hayesian tongue-in-cheek humor. (If Hayes could do anything as a screenwriter, it was writing a good double entrendre). Robert Burks – Hitchcock's A-list cinematographer – turns in another beautifully shot film. Rural Vermont in the autumn perhaps has never looked so gorgeous than here in Technicolor and VistaVision. Hitchcock's wife, Alma, served as editor. But the film's crucial collaboration came about through happenstance. When post-production on To Catch a Thief slowed, composer Lynn Murray recommended his friend Bernard Herrmann to take over.

Hitchcock worked with many of the same crew members from film to film, but unless you've combed through his film's credits or dived into the man's biography, you might only recognize the reappearing faces of his favorite actors: Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, etc. The one exception is Bernard Herrmann, whose scores are as instantly recognizable as the faces of any of those actors. Today when we think Hitchcock and music, we think Herrmann's work on Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. His scores gave so much depth to many of Hitchcock's greatest films that it's a shame they didn't come into contact with each other until the mid-1950s. (Coincidentally, they both arrived in Hollywood within only a year of each other.)

Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan notes that Herrmann might have been one of the director's unlikeliest collaborators despite their tremendous success with each other. Both men were egotistical and occasionally moody, but they also both had a mutual comfort with artists they liked and admired. Even after Herrmann and Hitchcock had a bitter falling out in 1966 after a grand clashing of egos, the composer said, "Many directors can make one or two good movies, but how many can make fifty great ones like Hitchcock?"

Yet the same might be said of Herrmann, perhaps Hollywood's greatest composer. Before teaming up with Hitchcock, he had not only won an Oscar for The Devil and Daniel Webster, but composed scores for Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, among others. Strangely enough, The Trouble With Harry has a slight score that doesn't stand out, but these sorts of collaborations have to start somewhere.

I suppose it's a good thing the film has a dead body to keep us otherwise preoccupied.

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To Catch a Thief (1955)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 106 mins.


Is it an insult to call an Alfred Hitchcock movie "cute"? The word is likely not one that might jump to mind in the same sentence as the so-called Master of Suspense, but To Catch a Thief – a flashy blur of romance topped with a sprinkling of intrigue that stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly and is set in the French Riviera – is cute. I can't think of another word for it. The jokes are cute, the romance is cute, even the MacGuffin is cute. (It's also cute the way the film thinks you won't be able to figure out the mystery identity of one of the characters, but more on the screenplay in a moment.)

Not that there's anything terribly wrong with cuteness. It can put a smile on your face, but it is all too fleeting. One needn't reach the end of To Catch a Thief to feel the cuteness already waning away. Grant stars as John Robie, a reformed jewel thief known as "the Cat," who abandoned thievery to fight with the French Resistance movement. Robie is living quietly and keeping to himself in the south of France when jewels begin to go missing, often lifted using the exact same tactics Robie once. After receiving some help from an ex-fling (Brigitte Auber) who knows all his secrets too well, Robie makes his way to coordinate with an insurance agent (John Williams). Robie's plan is to go incognito and use the agent's list of wealthy clients to predict where the thief will strike next, catch the thief in the act, and prove himself innocent. The first potential victim is a sassy and wealthy American (Jessie Royce Landis, who would later play Grant's mother in North by Northwest) and her beautiful daughter, Francie (Grace Kelly).

Robie and Francie hit it off, naturally, and most of To Catch a Thief is devoted to their romance. (In a famous Hitchcockian sequence, Robie and Francie seduce each other in front of a terrace while orgasmic fireworks burst and pop in the night sky.) The screenplay – by John Michael Hayes, who adapted it from a novel by David Dodge – is laced with expected double entrendres; some are worth a chuckle or two, particularly those stretch the limits of sexual innuendo, but most fall flat. It has been said of Hitchcock that often the screenplay was never as important as the playing on the screen. I'm not sure I entirely believe that, especially when you consider the fact that his most successful films contain scripts of unexpected density and depth. To Catch a Thief often feels like an excuse to put Hitchcock's most revered male and female leads in a scene together, watch them voyeuristically and experience their chemistry in a vicarious way. (It seems like something about of abnormal psychology, yes, but that's Hitchcock.)

As such, it's a rather appropriate follow-up to Rear Window, which, it should be noted, Hayes also wrote with Hitchcock. The most rewarding aspect of To Catch a Thief is merely watching it – two pretty people flirting and romancing each other on the Riviera, and it's a process that comes across as something even dirtier than Rear Window because, at least with that film, we're supposed to be making the connection between how we feel about voyeurism and the fact that we are engaging in it. The same thing can be said of other Hitchcock endeavors, like Vertigo, where you can feel the obsessions swirling, but in a way that is intellectually worthwhile for the audience to explore. Here, it is all too implicit and greedy on the director's part, although strangely not wholly unpleasant. (While this potent sensation tends to overwhelm the film and its flimsy script, it should be noted that Landis is a wonderful supporting high-roller here, effective in a way that supersedes the gravitational pull of Hitchcock's voyeurism, and she keeps up with the antics of Grant and Kelly with sparkling aplomb.)

Robert Burks, a Hitchcock loyalist who helmed the camera for nine of the director's films, won only one Oscar in his career, and it was for To Catch a Thief, an unlikely choice in a portfolio that includes strong black-and-white photography on Strangers on a Train, I Confess, and The Wrong Man, and the equally impressive color work he did on Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and Vertigo. One might consider a win for this film as a consolation prize for being passed over the previous year. (The winner in 1954, Milton R. Krasner, was a prolific cameraman and certainly deserving of an Oscar at some point – just perhaps not for a film that is less impressive than Rear Window.)

Burks shot To Catch a Thief in widescreen VistaVision, the first of five widescreen films from Hitchcock. There's no doubting the film is gorgeous; Grant, Kelly, and the Riviera seem naturally born to be captured in Technicolor. But To Catch a Thief lacks the daring stylistic flourishes one expects in a Hitchcock film. There is only one worth noting, and it occurs near the end when a spotlight on the ground shines on Grant, who is crouched on a rooftop, and the result is a split-second silhouette of beauty. It's a pretty film, and it seems like a dream straight out of Hitchcock's unconscious, but that's all it seems to have going for it.

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Rear Window (1954)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 112 mins.


The Pauline Kael school of film criticism ushered in the acceptable practice of making sweeping observations on movies and passing them off as truths, which is a practice I consciously try to avoid. However, perhaps this moment requires that style of opining.

Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film is Rear Window, a 1954 masterpiece that smolders on the topic of voyeurism and then brazenly sets fire to the audience, incorporating them as a definitive statement of what we do when we think we're alone and taking in the lives of others. It might not be controversial to say it is the director's best (most agree it is surely among the best), but the conviction with which I write that is an emotion unparalleled in a typical review. I have some personal investment here; Rear Window is my favorite movie, with ninety-nine films in a tie for second-place. Hitchcock frequently brushed philosophy, and his subtle explorations of the darker side of the human psyche were continually rewarding, but there is something so explosive and exciting about the flagrancy of Rear Window. Here is a film that has no illusions as to what it is about: it is about people looking at people. The characters in the film look at people and learn things perhaps they shouldn't; but it is also about we the people – the audience – pulling apart the venetian blinds and peering through the slats at a fully realized fictional universe. It is magnificent entertainment, multi-layered art, academic fodder, and a white-knuckle thriller wound together and refracted through a lens.

This is a grand movie in the history of film, and fittingly everything about it is grand: the director, the stars, the concept, the message, and, most famously, the set. Rear Window is the story of L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart), an international magazine photographer set up in his Greenwich Village apartment with a broken leg in the sweltering heat of the summer. He is visited regularly by both a smart-ass insurance nurse named Stella (the great Thelma Ritter) and his model-turned-socialite girlfriend Lisa Freemont (Grace Kelly), but he is primarily restless and ready for adventure again. In the absence of such adventure, he largely occupies himself by looking out the rear window of his apartment and into the courtyard, where he has a cinematic view of the world. There is a dancer, a songwriter, an artist, a lonely woman, a couple with a yappy dog, a newly wedded couple in the bliss of their honeymoon, and finally Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), a barrel-chested salesman who Jeff, after watching a bit more than he probably should, comes to suspect has murdered his invalid wife.

John Michael Hayes, the film's screenwriter, worked on four films with Hitchcock, who by that time had become so established as a film figure that Hayes and other writers was part of a second-generation of moviegoers that joined forces with the director after having already ingested dozens of his films and absorbing his aesthetic. (Ernest Lehman famously said he wrote North by Northwest to be "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.") According to Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan, while stationed in Aleutian Islands during World War II, Hayes claimed to have seen Shadow of a Doubt some ninety times. Logic might suggest that writers consciously trying to produce Hitchcockian material might dilute the powerful waters rippling around the man, but if anything, many of his films produced in this era of his career are those counted among his best (Rear Window of course, but also Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, etc.). The source material for Rear Window was a short story written by Cornell Woolrich called "It Had to be Murder," the essence of which remains the same but Hayes and Hitchcock beefed up with considerable alterations. Consider that the short story had no girlfriend character and Lisa is a Hitchcock creation, or that the short story gives us no indication of Jeff's profession, and it was Hitchcock's idea to make him into a a professional voyeur – a photographer who zips around the globe covering exciting moments.

Rear Window goes further than Hitchcock's previous films as revealing the moral trespasses of human nature, and much of that was due to Hitchcock's gracious schmoozing (he gave the Production Code officials a tour of the large set and casually said the most objectionable material would seem far away from the camera's lens) and pure luck. Joseph Breen, the straitlaced head of the Code, retired shortly before filming commenced, and the new head – Geoffrey M. Shurlock – was more in tune with contemporary values (contemporary for the 1950s, at least). This isn't to say that Rear Window gets away with murder, so to speak, but there is a surprising amount of tawdry moments that made it into the final cut, including not only the voyeurism, but the obvious implication that Lisa regularly sleeps at Jeff's apartment; the oversexed bride from the newly-marrieds who live in a neighboring apartment; and the bouncing bra and toplessness of Miss Torso, the perky and frequently sparsely dressed dancer across the courtyard.

But the real strength of the script is its wonderful suspense and mystery. David Bordwell devotes a significant amount of space to Rear Window in his film studies manual Narrative and the Fiction Film, which he considers among the most classically effective examples of how a narrative grinds against an audience and throws furniture in our way as we try to make ends out of what we are watching. (The experience of taking in a movie, or any work of art, is one of the most active tasks our brains perform.) The suspense is Hitchcock at his best, and Rear Window proves itself to be such a resounding triumph because the director knew not only how to manipulate the audience's loyalty and emotions but how to manipulate their own internalized sense of cinematic expectation. Thorwald is an archetypal film heavy, but because the limited camera flattens our knowledge to essentially what Jeff knows, the audience fluctuates up and down on the question of Thorwald's guilt even though a small voice in the back of our minds knows – it just knows despite a lack of evidence – that he had to have done it. The same goes with the film's subplot (or plot-equal?) of Jeff and Lisa's relationship. Our expectations of guy-gets-the-girl are routinely derailed by the fact that Jeff seems to be actively pushing away from Lisa, attempting to wiggle his way out of the relationship while she tries to pin him down.

Yet Hitchcock lines up this series of tropes with no intention of shooting them down; in many ways, Rear Window is as conventional as movies get, with the conflict, the humor, the romance, the mystery, and the deceptively simple resolution. But its subject matter is certainly unsettling for many people, and its craft is wholly unconventional. The staging of the camera is crucial to making the film succeed. Nearly every camera shot originates from Jeff's apartment, which naturally makes us guilty of the voyeurism perpetrated by Jeff, Lisa, and Stella. There are only a few key moments where the camera is rooted elsewhere on the gigantic set, and we spend most of our time gazing out the rear window of the apartment or even peering through Jeff's telephoto lens. The lens shots are obvious implications of placing us literally into Jeff's point of view, but the film itself contains a great deal of hidden point-of-view shots, or shots that position us over someone's shoulder. But the point-of-view shots are capable of staggering amounts of emotion. When Lisa, donned in a beautiful black-and-white dress, leans in and awakens Jeff, her radiating presence fills the frame and it is impossible to look away. But later, when Lisa is across the courtyard in Thorwald's apartment and he suddenly realizes someone has been watching him, he looks up and directly into the telephone photo lens. His eye contact and the fury across his face makes it impossible to do anything but look away. (It feels dirty to get caught, doesn't it?)

Of course, a film can be brilliant and an exasperating success in its construction, but if it isn't fun to watch, it can't go all the way. Fortunately, Hitchcock gives the audience two great reasons to watch: James Stewart and Grace Kelly. Rear Window was the second of four films Stewart made with Hitchcock, all of which are good. Stewart himself is quite good under Hitchcock's direction, but that is not an entirely surprising reality, considering he was talented actor whose kind-hearted, good-natured, all-American image often undercut just how convincing he was and how much of the emotional spectrum he was able to cover. His performance here, along with his role as the obsessive detective Scotty in Vertigo, is a testament to his ability to navigate the darker currents of human psychology. Hitchcock delighted in twisting the images of stars, and Hitchcock knows we root for Jeff because beneath those blue pajamas and that full cast, he is Jimmy Stewart. Jeff is a protagonist in every sense of the word, but not necessarily a hero. The director has planted us firmly onto the same plane as Jeff, allowed what Jeff knows to be largely what we know (and the dialogue allows him to reaffirm the details and facts for us), and transfers our allegiance to him. But Stewart's performance is unsettling in the greatest of ways because he allows Jeff to be so oblivious to the fact that he is violating the rules of society. Looking into the courtyard is similar to photographing an object, but it is the act of interpreting – or simply allowing that which you see to become more important than your own personal business – that leads him into trouble. (Yes, he breaks his other leg as a "punishment" for his actions, and he gets the girl, which can be seen as either reward or punishment for his character. But what to make of the fact that the story seems to reward the peeping by allowing Jeff's assumptions to be true?)

Hitchcock loved no actress more than Grace Kelly. She only made three films with the him, but I'm sure if it had been up to him, she'd have appeared in every one until his retirement. They came together through a bit of coincidence and his keen eye. While searching for a woman to play lead in Dial M for Murder that same year, he remembered a screen test he had seen of her, only twenty-four and still unknown, having only made impressions in High Noon and John Ford's Mogambo. It was cheap for Warner Bros. to acquire her from MGM, and with the budget being so tight on Dial M for Murder, she got the role. Rear Window is her best performance in her all-too brief career (eleven films in only five years before her royal retirement). She plays cool and seductive as well as she plays impish; Lisa never loses her steadiness as the film goes on, although she becomes surprisingly excitable and more inclined to put herself in danger at the unexpected pleasure it seems to bring Jeff. (He never seems to love her as much as he does looking through the rather phallic-shaped telephoto lens.)

Thelma Ritter is almost under-utilized as the wry insurance nurse, and Hayes gave the character many of the films best lines, including "Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence," "Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin' yet," and "We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change." (Hayes believed if you were going to rattle an audience with suspense, you first needed to bring them together with comic relief.) Raymond Burr's suspicious Thorwald is chillingly effective as Jeff's murder suspect, a chain-smoking salesman who prowls around with curly hair, glasses, and white-button down shirts. Hitchcock would claim later that Burr was selected and costumed as such to intentionally evoke David O. Selznick, the perfectionist producer who feuded repeatedly with Hitchcock over films. (Ironically, however, it is Thorwald whose life is interfered with by Jeff, the Hitchcock stand-in.) Although Burr spends most of the movie across the courtyard and in an apartment opposite Jeff's, his immense physical presence is still felt in the film and his imposing body towers over the wheelchair-bound Jeff toward the film's end; leave it to Hitchcock to turn the rather unremarkable act of a man entering through a door into a moment of shock.

Two frequent Hitchcock collaborators play critical supporting production roles in Rear Window. The impeccable Edith Head, who costumed many of Hitchcock's leading ladies and gentlemen, designed a series of dresses almost as memorable as Kelly herself. This was also the first time Hitchcock worked with editor George Tomasini, who be involved with every Hitchcock production between Rear Window and Marnie except one. In order to insure he could obfuscate the censors if necessary, Hitchcock filmed many sequences two or three times (or more), and Tomasini's work with him is flawless, which is no small task considering the necessary steps of linking together all of the point-of-view shots and pushing the boundaries of the film's intensity with such a limited operating position of the camera.

Although Hitchcock could work wonderfully within the constraints of a tight budget (the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much comes to mind), while with Paramount Pictures in the 1950s he had access to hefty amounts of cash. For Rear Window, he capitalized on the available construction funds (about $100,000) by building what was at the time the largest indoor set at Paramount Studios. There is Jeff's apartment, an entirely functional courtyard, and the neighboring apartments – thirty-one total, a dozen fully furnished and some with running water. Hundreds of lights were necessary to create the illusion of day and night, and Hitchcock directed everything from the position of Jeff's apartment. (A bit of technical innovation was required for the film so Hitchcock could communicate with all the actors on the large set; those not in Jeff's apartment were fitted with microphones and earpieces.)

Noting the film's clear and self-conscious invocations of how we watch and make movies is nothing new, and there aren't any points to be earned writing about it in a new way. Rear Window so obviously conjures both of those subjects that it was clear in 1954 what Hitchcock wanted us to notice, and it's clear today. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who also can be considered among those who think of Rear Window as Hitchcock's greatest film, has written eloquently that the film is most closely associated with Hitchcock's general philosophy because "it sums up so many of his ideas about filmmaking": voyeurism, technical challenges and constraints, certain actors and actresses, the manipulative editing that draws the audience in. Few films create the fidgeting that Rear Window does, and like a frame within a frame within a frame, the audience is driven crazy with fear that is spread among all the characters. When Lisa breaks into Thorwald's apartment and is trying to find the proof that his wife's wedding ring has been taken off her finger, we are nervous for her that she will get caught; but we are more nervous for Jeff, who knows on one level that is wrong to send his girlfriend into harm's way but answers to a more primal urge that realizes how satisfying it is to experience a thrill vicariously through her dangerous actions, the sort of thing he cannot do with a broken leg. It's not difficult to imagine Hitchcock wanting us to experience what it must have been like to be him, standing slightly off-camera and putting characters in dangerous situations, curling with fear and anxiety as we watch them worm their way out.

Rear Window was the forth of Hitchcock's five best director Oscars nominations, and the second of eight Director's Guild of America nominations. (In a heavy crowd of sixteen in 1954, he was nominated at the DGA twice that year – separately for Rear Window and Dial M for Murder.) At the Oscars, Burks was nominated for color cinematography, Hayes for screenplay, and the sound recording was also nominated. (Today it is almost unthinkable that it was not considered for best picture, art direction, or editing.) That year was a big one for On the Waterfront, and no one from Rear Window took home anything; Kelly won in the lead actress category for The Country Girl, but it is noteworthy to say she also appeared in Rear Window and Dial M for Murder in the same year and were lauded for those performances.

Time has been more favorable to the film, as far as critical appreciation is concerned. (Time has been slightly unkind to it to the extent that an apartment without cable television, air conditioning, and digital music feels remarkably alien, although the same skepticism of our neighbors remains as true as ever.) Rear Window was unavailable for three decades until the Hitchcock estate re-released first in 1984 and then again in 2000, after a careful and miraculous restoration; the print was, and it makes me shudder to write this, literally on the brink of ruin. But how lucky we are to have DVDs, knowing you needn't wait for a cinematic re-release and can acquire a movie today on a whim. Thinking this touchstone film was unavailable to an entire generation of moviegoers in the 1960s and 1970s is sad, and thinking about it being beyond a state of repair is even more terrifying. Even now, despite its retro setting (this is one of those films that you can say, "That never would have happened if they had mobile telephones or Google"), Rear Window is essential because it functions so transparently as a simple-premised mystery and as a holy act of sanctifying the purpose and creation of film. It manipulates the audience, implicates the audience, and satisfies the audience; it is suspenseful, glamorous, and universal.

And that might just be the reason Rear Window is the title I give whenever someone asks me what my favorite movie is.

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