alfred hitchcock

Hitchcock was a director who was a household name and star in his own right, cherished not only by the paying public but by his cinematic peers, by cultural commentators and by film academics. He accomplished this through his expertise in one particular genre. "If I made Cinderella, audiences would be looking for the body in the coach," as he put it.

"I have brought murder back into the home," he would say, adding, with a twinkle in his eye, "where it belongs." Part of his power was precisely the creation of terror in places where normally one would feel secure - whether it be a public arena such as London's Royal Albert Hall (The Man Who Knew Too Much) or somewhere as mundane as a motel shower (Psycho). Nowhere is safe in Hitchcock's world.

Where did all this come from? Hitchcock's favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, once told his wife that Hitchcock had revealed to him "a terrible secret" which he could not disclose before the director's death - but then he died before Hitchcock.

He knew that suspense was sexy: all about foreplay, fraught expectation, release. But if suspense was sexy, sex was also suspenseful, so romance in his films is always full of tension: think of the torments of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946). He saw the darkness behind Cary Grant's debonair facade, and disclosed the neurosis lurking beneath James Stewart's apparent normality.

His heroes strive for dominance and power in their relationships; his ice-cool, blonde heroines, like Grace Kelly (To Catch a Thief) and Tippi Hedren (The Birds), resist submission and subservience. There are highly charged moments in films such as Suspicion (1942), Spellbound (1945), and North by Northwest (1959). Hitchcock's most loyal disciple, Francois Truffaut, once said: "He filmed murder scenes as if they were love scenes, and love scenes as if they were murder scenes."

Murder in Hitchcock is rarely part of a narrative puzzle: it is an inevitable eruption of overpowering feeling. He thought cinema was essentially emotion, and therefore suspense served his end perfectly, for a thriller compels an audience to identify with the events on screen. He wanted to make audiences feel, and he would talk not just about theme, but about the way technique induced response. Audiences scream at the murder of the detective in Psycho, he explained, because of the way he cuts from the smallest image he could contrive (a high shot of the assailant rushing out at the victim) to the largest (a huge close-up of the detective at the moment of attack). "It's like music, you see," he would explain. "You go from the violins quietly playing to suddenly bringing in the brass."

Hitchcock's technique also demonstrates the power of the visual. He is superb at setting up a counterpoint between dialogue and image, where verbally a scene seems to be about one thing but visually it is about another.

Did Hitchcock appeal to the baser side of human nature? Even though a murderer is finally caught in Rear Window, there is a troubling peeping-tom sub-theme and a moment in the middle of the film where the hero and heroine are plunged into temporary gloom when it appears that that their suspect might not be a murderer at all. He believed he was being truthful about human nature, and one thing you could never accuse his films of being is sentimental. Yet he balanced this observation of human frailty with a saving comedy that seems peculiarly modern.

He thought the secret of his success was his understanding of the psychology of audiences, their willingness to dip their toe into the fear-experience, their pleasure in the terror of the game. Oscar Wilde expressed this wittily: "The suspense is terrible," says Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, adding, "I hope it will last." In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, it certainly will.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Film/The-suspense-still-kills/2005/06/03/1117568359543.html