The man who sold nightmares
By Vikramdeep Johal

ALFRED HITCHCOCK must be chuckling in his grave. The queer coincidence of his birth centenary falling this August on the dreaded Friday the 13th says a lot about the man who never missed an opportunity of chilling the audience’s marrow. Exploiting the film medium with tremendous dexterity, he spent over 50 years shocking, tantalising and, above all, entertaining viewers. More than any other director, this master craftsman had the genius for balancing the artistic and commercial sides of cinema.

He did not even have to build up his own legend; enthusiastic French critics-turned-film makers like Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol did it for him. They subjected his movies to rigorous analysis, wrote books on him and made films inspired by his style. With modesty, he admitted ignorance of the convoluted meanings attributed to him by these highbrow fans, confessing to no motives more profound than a showman’s desire to entertain. Indeed many of his films were based on pulp novels and stories, be it Cornell Woolrich’s Rear Window, Robert Bloch’s Psycho or Winston Graham’s Marnie.

His feature film career can be divided roughly into two phases: In England (1925-39) and in America (1939-80). His first success was the The Lodger (1926), which really started the tradition of suspense dramas in Britain. In this movie, he introduced the theme that was to recur in many of his later works — the innocent man caught in a web of condemning circumstances. Incidentally, the previous year had seen the publication of The Trial, Franz Kafka’s seminal novel that dealt with a somewhat similar subject. Years later, talking about super spy James Bond, he said: "Bond is not identifiable with the public. He can shoot anybody on sight. My kind of men cannot. They are average men caught in bizarre situations". Ironically, his ordinary men were often played by matinee idols, be it Cary Grant, Robert Donat and Ivor Novello.

Having distinguished himself with the espionage thrillers The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), he was invited to America by MGM boss David O. Selzinck to film the bestseller Rebecca. This was the turning point for him (most probably he would not have gone on to acquire a cult status had he continued to work in Britain). In Hollywood, he retained his English outlook which greatly separated his cinema from the American film noir with its private detectives and gangsters. His popularity peaked in the fifties, with releases like Rear Window, North by Northwest and Vertigo.

His intentions, like his pictures, were often shrouded in mystery. Why was Hitchcock obsessed with the idea of making his audience suffer as much as possible? Why did the entertainer double as a sort of sadist? Perhaps, if one is to believe him, he was out to give the public "good, healthy mental shake-ups", which, he felt, our sheltering civilisation was incapable of providing. Freudians, however, would point towards his childhood. By his own admission, his strict Catholic upbringing and a disciplinarian father led to religious fear and a dread of the police (According to one story, five-year-old Alfred was sent to the police station by his father with a message for the superintendent urging him to teach the kid a lesson in good manners). Looking from this angle, film making was a cathartic activity for him.

Repeatedly, with a lot of flair, he made it a point of counterbalancing tension with humour, suspense with romance to serve the ideal Hitchcocktail. His fleeting appearances in the films, with the familiar lugubrious expression and rotund figure, never failed to amuse. Though shooting scenes of murder was considered to be his forte, his handling of love scenes was commendable too. One instantly recalls the naughty close encounter between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious (1940), which led to what is perhaps the longest kiss on celluloid (lasting three minutes). Instead of a continuous smooch, which would have been chopped by the prudish censors, Hitchcock went for a continual one, Bergman and Grant started kissing on a hotel balcony and moved inside when the phone rang. Then they resumed their labial sport, punctuated by Grant’s monosyllabic phone conversation. It is also difficult to forget the witty romantic scene from The 39 Steps, where the fugitive hero, handcuffed with the heroine in a train compartment, offered to help the latter to remove her stockings, thereby generating quite a few sparks.

He clearly knew himself to be typecast as a suspense man. "If I made Cinderella, the audience would be looking for a body in the coach", he joked. On becoming an established name in the thriller genre, he never really made an attempt to be eclectic. The Trouble with Harry (1955), his personal favourite, was one exception — a provincial comedy about, guess what, a missing corpse(!).

For the better part of his career, he kept on exploring various possibilities of his pet genre, testing his ingenuity by setting himself difficult technical problems to solve. Lifeboat (1943) was photographed entirely in one set — a boat full of motley characters isolated in a vast and perilous ocean. For Rope (1948), set in a New York flat, he played out the drama in the actual time of the story — 81 minutes — dispensing with the usual cutting techniques and shooting in ten-minute takes with no interruptions for the different camera set-ups (the walls and furniture moved on silent rollers out of shot to let the camera pass). In Rear Window (1955), he again cramped his protagonist — a broken-legged photographer resting in his apartment — and filmed all the significant action in long shots. His tricks impressed some critics, while others found them gimmicky.

Despite a reputation for treating artists roughly, which he himself encouraged with comments like "actors are cattle", he repeatedly attracted the same actors, notably Cary Grant (Notorious, Suspicion North by Northwest) and James Stewart (Rope Vertigo, Rear Window). As for the actresses, he showed a predilection for elegant, beautiful and icily sexy ladies. Always determined to be provocative, he remarked: "Blondes are the best victims. They are like virgin snow which shows up the bloody footprints". Indeed, he directed many of them, be it Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh or Tippi Hendren. His relationship with them, according to some biographers, was influenced by his own sense of physical unattractiveness. Hendren rejected his advances during the making of The Birds and he presumably took his ‘revenge’ by bringing her to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Leigh too had a tough time working under him in Psycho, particularly while shooting the famous murder in the shower scene, which he approached with much indulgence.

Hitchcock was most skilful at manipulating and controlling the emotions of the audience. He knew precisely how and when to conceal or reveal secrets, to heighten tension, to cheat viewers to raise or kill expectations and to stun with ferocious shock. His macabre masterpiece Psycho (1960) is a good proof of his genius. A marvellously orchestrated picture, it scared the daylights out of most watchers. Many critics at that time, outraged by its gory sensationalism, received further shocks when Hitchcock disclosed that he had intended it as a fun film(!). Nevertheless, it broke all the existing rules for horror films and set the example — a bad one, some claimed — for a generation of new ones about psychotic killer wrecking mayhem on innocent victims. Although low in subtlety (compared with his other top films) and high in blood-letting, it was later raised to the status of a classic and is widely regarded today as his finest work.

Not only the viewers but his producers too were made to imbibe a good dose of his smartness. He tackled the self-important studio bosses with his meticulous pre-planned working methods. Having visualised the film frame-by-frame at the storyboard stage, he stuck stubbornly to his script while shooting, leaving no extra footage and thus precluding any possibility of manipulation by them during editing.

What exactly is the secret of his success? Perhaps, it is the visceral kick one gets from watching his films, which is closely linked to our masochistic and voyeuristic instincts. Deftly he turned into stunning image our violent fantasies, breaking the monotony and placidity of our lives, successfully selling nightmares to the audiences instead of dreams, more often than not with his tongue firmly placed in his cheek.