Alfred Hitchcock Films | Alfred Hitchcock Filmography | Alfred Hitchcock Biography | Alfred Hitchcock Career | Alfred Hitchcock Awards

In a career spanning just over fifty years (1925-76), Hitchcock completed fifty-three feature films, twenty-three in the British period, thirty in the American. Through the early British films we can trace the evolution of his professional/artistic image, the development of both the Hitchcock style and the Hitchcock thematic. His third film (and first big commercial success), The Lodger, was crucial in establishing him as a maker of thrillers, but it was not until the mid-1950s that his name became consistently identified with that genre. In the meantime, he assimilated the two aesthetic influences that were major determinants in the formation of his mature style: German Expressionism and Soviet montage theory. The former, with its aim of expressing emotional states through a deformation of external reality, is discernible in his work from the beginning (not surprisingly, as he has acknowledged Lang's Die m?de Todas his first important cinematic experience, and as some of his earliest films were shot in German studios). Out of his later contact with the Soviet films of the 1920s evolved his elaborate editing techniques: he particularly acknowledged the significance for him of the Kuleshov experiment, from which he derived his fondness for the point-of-view shot and for building sequences by cross-cutting between person seeing/thing seen.

The extreme peculiarity of Hitchcock's art (if his films do not seem very odd it is only because they are so familiar) can be partly accounted for by the way in which these aesthetic influences from high art and revolutionary socialism were pressed into the service of British middle-class popular entertainment. Combined with Hitchcock's all-pervasive scepticism ("Everything's perverted in a different way, isn't it?"), this process resulted in an art that at once endorsed (superficially) and undermined (profoundly) the value system of the culture within which it was produced, be that culture British or American.

During the British period the characteristic plot structures that recur throughout Hitchcock's work are also established. I want here to single out three examples of his work, not because they account for all of the films, but because they link the British to the American period, because their recurrence is particularly obstinate, and because they seem, taken in conjunction, central to the thematic complex of Hitchcock's total oeuvre.

The first Hitchcock theme is the story about the accused man this is already established in The Lodger (in which the male protagonist is suspected of being Jack the Ripper); it often takes the form of the ?double chase,? in which the hero is pursued by the police and in turn pursues (or seeks to unmask) the actual villains. Examples in the British period are The 39 Steps and Young and Innocent. In the American period it becomes the commonest of all Hitchcock plot structures: Saboteur, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, and Frenzy are all based on it.

A second Hitchcock plot device is the story about the guilty woman: although there are guilty women in earlier films, the structure is definitively established in Blackmail, Hitchcock's (and Britain's) first sound film. We may also add Sabotage from the British period, but it is in the American period that examples proliferate: Rebecca (Hitchcock's first Hollywood film), Notorious, Under Capricorn, The Paradine Case, Vertigo, Psycho (the first third), The Birds, and Marnie are all variations on the original structure.

It is striking to observe that the opposition of the two themes discussed above is almost complete; there are very few Hitchcock films in which the accused man turns out to be guilty after all (Shadow of a Doubt and Stage Fright are the obvious exceptions; Suspicion would have been a third if Hitchcock had been permitted to carry out his original intentions), and no Hitchcock film features an accused woman who turns out to be innocent (Dial M for Murder comes closest, but even there, although the heroine is innocent of murder, she is guilty of adultery). Second, it should be noticed that while the falsely accused man is usually (not quite always) the central consciousness of type one, it is less habitually the case that the guilty woman is the central consciousness of type two: frequently, she is the object of the male protagonist's investigation. Third, the outcome of the guilty woman films (and this may be dictated as much by the Motion Picture Production Code as by Hitchcock's personal morality) is dependent upon the degree of guilt: the woman can sometimes be ?saved? by the male protagonist (Blackmail, Notorious, Mamie), but not if she is guilty of murder or an accomplice to it (The Paradine Case, Vertigo).

Other differences between the two types of films are also evident. One should note the function of the opposite sex in the two types, for example. The heroine of the falsely accused man films is, typically, hostile to the hero at first, believing him guilty; she subsequently learns to trust him, and takes his side in establishing his innocence. The function of the male protagonist in the guilty woman films, on the other hand, is either to save the heroine or to be destroyed (at least morally and spiritually) by her. It is important to recognize that the true nature of the guilt is always sexual, and that the falsely accused man is usually seen to be contaminated by this (though innocent of the specific crime, typically murder, of which he is accused). Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps can stand as the prototype of this: when he allows himself to be picked up by the woman in the music hall, it is in expectation of a sexual encounter, the notion of sexual disorder being displaced on to ?espionage,? and the film systematically moves from this towards the construction of the ?good? (i.e. socially approved) couple. The very title of Young and Innocent, with its play on the connotations of the last word, exemplifies the same point, and it is noteworthy that in that film the hero's sexual innocence remains in doubt (we only have his own word for it that he was not the murdered woman's gigolo). Finally, the essential Hitchcockian dialectic can be read from the alternation, throughout his career, of these two series. On the whole, it is the guilty woman films that are the more disturbing, that leave the most jarring dissonances: here, the potentially threatening and subversive female sexuality, precariously contained within social norms in the falsely accused man films, erupts to demand recognition and is answered by an appalling violence (both emotional and physical); the cost of its destruction or containment leaves that ?nasty taste? often noted as the dominant characteristic of Hitchcock's work.

It is within this context that the third plot structure takes on its full significance: the story about the psychopath. Frequently, this structure occurs in combination with the falsely accused man plot (see, for example, Young and Innocent, Strangers on a Train, Frenzy,) with a parallel established between the hero and his perverse and sinister adversary, who becomes a kind of shadowy alter ego. Only two Hitchcock films have the psychopath as their indisputably central figure, but they (Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho) are among his most famous and disturbing. The Hitchcock villain has a number of characteristics which are not necessarily common to all but unite in various combinations: a) Sexual ?perversity? or ambiguity: a number are more or less explicitly coded as gay (the transvestite killer in Murder!, Philip in Rope, Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train); others have marked mother-fixations (Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, Anthony Perkins in Psycho, Bob Rusk in Frenzy), seen as a source of their psychic disorder; (b) Fascist connotations: this becomes politically explicit in the U-boat commander of Lifeboat, but is plain enough in, for example, Shadow of a Doubt and Rope; (c) The subtle associations of the villain with the devil: Uncle Charlie and Smoke in Shadow of a Doubt, Bruno Anthony in the paddle-boat named Pluto in Strangers on a Train, Norman Bates's remark to Marion Crane that ?no one ever comes here unless they've gotten off the main highway? in Psycho; (d) Closely connected with these characteristics is a striking and ambiguous fusion of power and impotence operating on both the sexual and non-sexual levels. What is crucially significant here is that this feature is by no means restricted to the villains. It is shared, strikingly, by the male protagonists of what are perhaps Hitchcock's two supreme masterpieces, Rear Window and Vertigo.

The latter aspect of Hitchcock works also relates closely to the obsession with control (and the fear of losing it) that characterized Hitchcock's own methods of filmmaking: his preoccupation with a totally finalized and story-boarded shooting script, his domination of actors and shooting conditions. Finally, it's notable that the psychopath/villain is invariably the most fascinating and seductive character of the film, and its chief source of energy. His inevitable destruction leaves behind an essentially empty world.

If one adds together all these factors, one readily sees why Hitchcock is so much more than the skillful entertainer and master craftsman he was once taken for. His films represent an incomparable exposure of the sexual tensions and anxieties (especially male anxieties) that characterize a culture built upon repression, sexual inequality, and the drive to domination.?ROBIN WOOD