Master of the macabre, avatar of evil, intensifier of suspense, Hitchcock is the acknowledged king of the thriller genre he virtually invented. Hitchcock cheerfully poked ironic fun at the evil nesting inside the nicest of people. At the height of his...
[more]Master of the macabre, avatar of evil, intensifier of suspense, Hitchcock is the acknowledged king of the thriller genre he virtually invented. Hitchcock cheerfully poked ironic fun at the evil nesting inside the nicest of people. At the height of his career in 1950s Hollywood, his sophisticated blend of sex, suspense, and black humor alternately titillated and terrified his delighted audiences.
Hitchcock had an inauspicious start in film in 1919, illustrating title cards for silent movies at Paramount's London-based studio. Fascinated by the infant industry, he absorbed all aspects of scripting and art direction, moved up the lackey ladder, and finally reached assistant director in 1922. His directorial debut, "The Pleasure Garden" (1925), was filmed in Munich; this experience, plus a stint at Germany's UFA studios, tinged his work with a tell-tale Expressionistic flavor. "The Lodger" (1926), his breakthrough film, sports the classic Hitchcockian plot: an innocent bystander falsely accused of a crime becomes enmeshed in a knotty web of intrigue.
Hitchcock created his special brand of suspense by letting the audience in on information that is denied to the hapless protagonist. Yet to achieve the greatest level of catharsis, he insisted that the innocent protagonist always escape unharmed. Hitchcock's gift for capitalizing on any genre and infusing it with suspense became apparent in his Hollywood films. There, his access to advanced cinema technology led to the glossy thrills of the Gothic "Rebecca" (1940), the domestic drama of "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943), the wartime propaganda of "Lifeboat" (1944), and the spy-thriller romance of "Notorious" (1946).
In Hitchcock's world, the tentacles of evil curl caressingly around primitive acts of violence, but also touch on psychological, institutionalized, and systemic forms of cruelty. Hitchcock's best work involves ordinary people suddenly hurled into chaos. "Rear Window" (1954) turns viewers into voyeurs who watch while the protagonist, also a voyeur, sees normal life spin out of control. "Vertigo" (1958), a gloomy, gripping romance about faked identity, provides its despairing hero with enough plot reversals to leave him, and us, gasping.
"Psycho" (1960), his relentless black comedy, violates his own sanction against harming a protagonist and kills off the heroine within 30 minutes. Later films offered intriguing amplifications of his main themes. "The Birds" (1963), Hitchcock's apocalyptic wild card and a film about fear itself, accepts evil as an environmental fact of life.
Hitchcock's sly humor, development of character and theme, and unflagging devotion to fear made him the world's best-known director. Mere months before his death, Hitchcock was knighted. It was a fitting end to a career that tracked the swinging pendulum of good and evil while scaring the pants off us all.
[show less]
