Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

second's the james bond

hmmmm, NxNW is more like Bond with humanity.

btw From Russia w/ Love ripped off the cropduster scene.

Yes (xp). It has the escapism, free spirit and pacing of a Bond movie (Bond applies screwball tropes to action), but it has a believable, confused and wholly sympathetic character in the main role, and James Mason as some sort of awesome Bond/Bond villain superhybrid. It's Bond but with acknowledgement that life is one big accident. It has you cheering where Bond has you glazed.

I was saying to myself throughout 'this is James Bond! but three-dimensional'

NxNW totally rips off 39 steps.

(and with a killer script. OH btw the train scene in Casino Royale...take out the Rolexes and the Oxbridge oneupmanship, and put in a bit of chemistry...)

NxNW totally rips off 39 steps.

Not seen 39 Steps for about 10 years (true story) and need to see it again but there's nothing wrong with a director trying to refine his own craft and express something he can express in terms he prefers.

it's a refinement. xp

a believable, confused and wholly sympathetic character in the main role

sort of, but Grant is established as enough of an asshole in the first 3 minutes to make his predicament a blast.

He's a fast-talking, illusory ad exec, and his taxi patter is intended to be both boring and assholish, yeah. Plus, he's an entertainingly coarse drunk. He's not a 'nice guy' at all; he's a city slicker half living on his wits and half barely surviving a gloriously escalating situation.

However, he's sympathetic, because he's assholish in ways we can see in ourselves! Aspirational, well-to-do, grand.

...and then he becomes a superhero.

he has that line about "expedient" lying, and then no one believes him for most of the film.

Call it Morbs' feminine intuition.

(an accidental superhero)

Haha! This is actually true. Especially in the auction scene where he plays that to his advantage. He's never quite pinned down by anyone (except the girl).

The very last shot is one of the funniest things I've ever seen btw

It's like the end of Preston Sturges' Hail The Conquering Hero turned up to 15

Hitchcock called it "the only symbol" in the movie. xp

Love the look on Mother's face when she snatches the bribe from his hand in the Plaza lobby.

"That was mother" might be the funniest line of the film

just saw 'stage fright' and i'd say it's possibly my favorite hitch without stewart or grant. genuinely unpredictable and funny, and the acting somehow feels a lot more natural than the other hitch films of that period (much as i love AH, i often find the acting in a lot of his work off-puttingly wooden).

and jane wyman, damn!

http://www.classicfreemoviedownloads.com/jane%20wyman%2001%20500.jpg

I still haven't seen Stage Fright, the only one post-Jamaica Inn of which that's true, I think.

Glenn Kenny via Dave Kehr: Hitchcock borrows an image from Cecil B DeMille (37 years later):

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/04/demillehitchcock.html

Got a DVD of The Lodger in Oxfam for 2 quid. Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but pleased.

Probably won't get much agreement here, but I was writing about Hud the other day, and I said that I consider it a much, much better film than The Birds. They both came out in '63; because of Hitchcock's auteurist standing--as opposed to Martin Ritt, who has none--The Birds is the much more famous and written about film.

I love Hud, and, yeah, it's better than The Birds.

like both, prefer The Birds, but haven't seen Hud in awhile.

last night i couldn't sleep so i watched the first two episodes of hitchcock presents. what fun!

i liked 'the spy who came in from the cold' and maybe a few other ritt films but im not sure he is as distinctive a filmmaker as hitchcock. i don't like 'the birds' much but it's sort of obvi why hitch has the auteurist standing he has. for sure too much is written about him but all the same.

They're hard to compare, being so different...I'll concede that there's probably more going on visually in The Birds, even though James Wong Howe's black & white cinematography in Hud has a nice spare, classical look to it. But when you get down to performances, it's not even close. Taylor and Hedren are typically wooden, whereas Newman and O'Neal are fantastic. Especially O'Neal--she'd be on my short-list of favourite female performances ever. Anyway, I'm glad you guys have a favorable opinion of it; I feel like it's an unfairly neglected film. (Love The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, too.)

The Birds always strikes me as Hitchcock challenging himself to see if he could make a suspense flick using the most outlandishly silly premise he could imagine. It only works if you allow yourself to swallow (no pun) the premise entirely. I never can, so it has always seemed to me a very silly film.

read a good book saying he was shooting for a 'real art-film' with the birds, having realized all these serious young men took him seriously now -- had its debut at MoMA iirc

Yeah, you have to turn your brain off a bit. I do like The Birds, though, especially how it clears the ground for something like Night of the Living Dead.

I've been getting Hitchcock Presents discs from Netflix for a while now, I'm up to season 4 (though they stream on Hulu too.) Absolutely love them. (Season 1 #1 "Revenge" is ultra-awesome.)

One more vote for Hud > Birds, but yeah they're so different stylewise it's really oranges/apples. (I just prefer oranges.) I just saw Hud for the very first time not long ago, so the "newness" of it for me may color my judgement a bit. Great, great film.

I've been getting Hitchcock Presents discs from Netflix for a while now, I'm up to season 4 though they stream on Hulu too.

YES!!! :D

Just this image gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies -- conjures up late night TV as a kid:

http://epguides.com/AlfredHitchcockPresents/logo.jpg

sorry, I like the CHARACTERS in The Birds, and the way the fantastic menace comes out of their interpersonal tensions. (It took me awhile to look at the film this way, I guess Robin Wood gets the credit.)

I mean, you don't think it's ABOUT birds massing and attacking people, do you?

that's the problem!

read some Robin Wood, yo

Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette ("How do you like our little hamlet?") are particularly amazing, and the Cartwright girl.

I didn't find Wood particularly convincing on The Birds; he trod suspiciously auteurist ground.

Wood's regard for The Birds and Marnie was...off the charts. I think it's fine to approach the The Birds either way. But because Taylor and Hedren are so bland, to me it's not worth the effort to parse out what's going on psychologically; I think it's a better film if you stick with the birds massing and attacking people.

I suspect you are a Paulette, Soto!

I think it's fine to approach the The Birds either way. But because Taylor and Hedren are so bland, to me it's not worth the effort to parse out what's going on psychologically;

otm

how do you feel about Hedren and Sean Connery? I think she's quite good in Marnie particularly.

I've only seen Marnie once, about 10 years ago (introduced by Wood). It's one of those films where I'll finish reading Wood and think, "Wow, I'd love to see that," and then you see the film and it's "Huh?" I hesitate to say any more because it was so long ago. Another major Wood puzzler: Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

weird, just today i was reading david thomson's bk abt psycho etc, including this paragraph abt The Birds: "The screenwriter, Evan Hunter, who had witnessed Hitch's indifference to what the birds might mean firsthand, was now amused, yet distressed, by the way the director was available for any and every parable of significance. Hunter had known that Hitch had no other aim except to frighten the audience. But the subject of earnest interviews needed more weight. And so The Birds - which was in postproduction during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 - became a story about the end of the world and man's complacency. In truth, of course, it was a strange sadomasochistic transference between actress and director."

i think 'the birds' is great, and agree with morbs about the supporting performances being excellent. plus it's the only hitch i've ever found genuinely scary --- the last scene with hedren coming up the stairs espec.

also tbi i don't find the premise 'silly' at all -- i mean, hell, it could happen! if anything it strikes me as more plausible than the setup of 'vertigo.'

The Birds is also very much a companion piece to Psycho, in themes and obv the shower scene's resemblance to some of the Tippi-attacked scenes.

I thought growing awareness of his reputation among cineasts triggered Hitch's about-face. When were his interviews with Truffaut?

around the time of Torn Curtain, I think.

That's kind of a weird quote from Thomson. Hitch didn't talk with the screenwriter about subtext, so therefore there isn't any?

the truffaut interviews were in 62 or 63

don't trust thomson much these days

"In truth, of course, it was a strange sadomasochistic transference between actress and director."

in truth. of course.

Yeah, the Thomson bk is a big mess - there's a horribly under-researched chapter on films that were directly inspired by Psycho that ends with the Red Riding trilogy and doesn't mention Mario Bava, ffs - and liable to enrage you, history mayne. Funnily enough, by far the best chapter is on Hitchcock's critical reception post-Psycho, that takes in the Cahiers crowd and the Truffaut interviews (mainly recorded in August 1962, just after Hitchcock had finished the Birds, published 1966), VF Perkins and Movie, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael (the Birds is 'a bad picture at every level'), and Penelope Houston's similarly anti-auteurist essay 'The Figure in the Carpet', published in Sight and Sound, and (in truth, of course) Robin Wood.

that penelope houston essay is rly good iirc. i 'used it in class' the other week

but if you only get one book about psycho...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Long-Hard-Look-Psycho-Silver/dp/1844573583/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1301991166&sr=8-3

DT reviewed it the first time it came out