A friend lent me a copy of The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures by Donald Spoto. Despite being a huge fan of the master director, especially after meeting my (future) wife in 1997, I have never really read anything about him or his movies. What I enjoyed about this book was that it analyzes each of his thirty-six films, from 1935 to 1976, in that critical way of thinking that only literary or film critics tend to think. You read it and slap your head and say, “So that’s what that means,” and want to immediately go out and rent the movie.
One of my favorite recent memories was Halloween four or five years back, when the Little One was a newborn. It was cold and rainy (when hasn’t it been, lately, on Halloween?), the baby swaddled up and napping in her crib, and I was loaded up on candy bars. Earlier, when we were renting, living in an apartment, and had lots of discretionary cash, we were black-and-white film junkies, patronizing a neighborhood rental place for a few bucks more that had a special “classics” room and we went through it. So now, this Halloween, we were quite excited to watch Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, which for some reason we had overlooked those few years ago.
For the record, I’ve seen sixteen Hitchcock flicks:
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935)
Rebecca (1940)
Suspicion (1941)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Lifeboat (1943)
Spellbound (1945)
Notorious (1946)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Dial M for Murder (1953)
Rear Window (1954)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
The Wrong Man (1957)
Vertigo (1958)
North by Northwest (1959)
Psycho (1960)
The Birds (1963)
My top three would have to be Strangers, Shadow, and a undecidable-tie between NxNW, Psycho, and Birds, depending on my mood. Of course, anything with Cary Grant in it is always watchable, so Thief is always up there, too. A few I saw years and years ago and hardly remember – Lifeboat, Spellbound, Wrong Man – and I’d like to see these again after reading Spoto’s book. Do the simple math and you’ll note I’ve got twenty major flicks yet to see.
But enough about my cinematic past. How about the book?
The old Freudian quote, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” often came to mind reading Spoto’s hefty work. However, in a Hitchcock movie, every detail, every image, every angle is thought-out well in advance. The master’s m.o. was to hole up with the screenwriter for several weeks going over each and every scene slowly, thoughtfully, mapping everything the camera will do and see. Nothing is left to chance, and every single detail has a meaning. Hitchcock often said that a viewer needed to watch his movie a minimum of three times before every nuance and every plot and character detail could be appreciated and even spotted in some cases.
To pepper this post with example after example would be rather burdensome for me, and maybe boring for you if you haven’t seen any Hitchcock movies lately. So I was kinda at a loss about what really to say when an idea popped into my head. I still have an unused gift card from my birthday last month; I’d been saving it since I have a backlog of about two dozen books to wade through and my wife’ll absolutely go banzai on me if I bring another one into the house. This weekend, I think, I’ll use the card to pickup a Hitchcock flick and take his advice: watch it three times, say, once a weekend for three weeks. The first time without any aid. The second after re-reading my notes from Spoto’s book. And the third, with a movie review in mind.
One of my favorite recent memories was Halloween four or five years back, when the Little One was a newborn. It was cold and rainy (when hasn’t it been, lately, on Halloween?), the baby swaddled up and napping in her crib, and I was loaded up on candy bars. Earlier, when we were renting, living in an apartment, and had lots of discretionary cash, we were black-and-white film junkies, patronizing a neighborhood rental place for a few bucks more that had a special “classics” room and we went through it. So now, this Halloween, we were quite excited to watch Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, which for some reason we had overlooked those few years ago.
For the record, I’ve seen sixteen Hitchcock flicks:
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935)
Rebecca (1940)
Suspicion (1941)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Lifeboat (1943)
Spellbound (1945)
Notorious (1946)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Dial M for Murder (1953)
Rear Window (1954)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
The Wrong Man (1957)
Vertigo (1958)
North by Northwest (1959)
Psycho (1960)
The Birds (1963)
My top three would have to be Strangers, Shadow, and a undecidable-tie between NxNW, Psycho, and Birds, depending on my mood. Of course, anything with Cary Grant in it is always watchable, so Thief is always up there, too. A few I saw years and years ago and hardly remember – Lifeboat, Spellbound, Wrong Man – and I’d like to see these again after reading Spoto’s book. Do the simple math and you’ll note I’ve got twenty major flicks yet to see.
But enough about my cinematic past. How about the book?
The old Freudian quote, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” often came to mind reading Spoto’s hefty work. However, in a Hitchcock movie, every detail, every image, every angle is thought-out well in advance. The master’s m.o. was to hole up with the screenwriter for several weeks going over each and every scene slowly, thoughtfully, mapping everything the camera will do and see. Nothing is left to chance, and every single detail has a meaning. Hitchcock often said that a viewer needed to watch his movie a minimum of three times before every nuance and every plot and character detail could be appreciated and even spotted in some cases.
To pepper this post with example after example would be rather burdensome for me, and maybe boring for you if you haven’t seen any Hitchcock movies lately. So I was kinda at a loss about what really to say when an idea popped into my head. I still have an unused gift card from my birthday last month; I’d been saving it since I have a backlog of about two dozen books to wade through and my wife’ll absolutely go banzai on me if I bring another one into the house. This weekend, I think, I’ll use the card to pickup a Hitchcock flick and take his advice: watch it three times, say, once a weekend for three weeks. The first time without any aid. The second after re-reading my notes from Spoto’s book. And the third, with a movie review in mind.
Sounds interesting, as an experiment? Definitely, for me, but for you … ?
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