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The Savage id
Camille Paglia talks about why Hitchcock has more to do with Madonna than he does with pomo theorists.
By Michael Sragow
[08/13/99]

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All in the family
Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell recalls working with her father, Alfred, on "Strangers on a Train" and "Psycho."
By Michael Sragow
[08/13/99]

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What's particularly annoying about Hitchcock's shortcomings is that they so often turn up as the dead cockroach at the bottom of a near-perfect cinematic sundae. His endings are chronically weak, tacked-on affairs that give the impression the portly director was late for supper. Even after a legitimate gem like "Vertigo," it's quite possible to leave the theater wondering, why exactly did Kim Novak topple so readily off that tower? Perhaps she borrowed some pants from Joseph Cotten?

If Hitchcock has been turned into a plaster saint, it was not always so. Kael once called him "lazy," and complaints about lame contrivances in his films were sufficiently common to inspire a defensive retort from the director. "A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow," Hitchcock sniffed. In the sympathetic biography "Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock" (Pantheon), John Russell Taylor wrote: "He never cared too much ... about giving more than a formal nod towards what he considered technical inessentials." Perhaps that explains scenes like the plane crash in "Foreign Correspondent": We are inside the cabin as the doomed aircraft screams toward the sea. Then, impact -- and a serious mussing of hair, along with some minor handbag displacement. The effect is that of a station wagon that has just run over a possum.

"Foreign Correspondent" has other gaping plot holes, but they're the kind that require you to hit the pause button and think for a bit, whereas the airplane scene is one of those spell-breaking moments that invite derision and disbelief as surely as the sight of a boom mike atop the frame. Implausible scenes and devices are common to a great many movies ("Casablanca's" supernaturally powerful "letters of transit" being a particularly famous example). The trick is to have them glide by unnoticed, and Hitchcock is not always adept in this regard. Sometimes the problem is heightened by the passage of time. The pop psychology of "Spellbound" (1945), for instance, has aged hilariously. (Hitchcock was more prescient with his next film, "Notorious," which centers on a plan to smuggle uranium for use in atomic weapons. Pitched on the idea in pre-Hiroshima 1945, producer David O. Selznick sold the movie to RKO because he found the central plot device unbelievable.)

But it's in the final act that Hitchcock's films so often disappoint. Rare is an example like "Rope" (1948), in which the ending flows naturally from the preceding events. "Psycho" works too, although by now it's hard to remember if it was ever a surprise. On the laziness front, actor William H. Macy recently pointed out that when Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) first attempts to stab the detective (Martin Balsam) at the top of the stairs, he actually misses. Hitchcock evidently didn't feel it was worth a retake. "To be blunt, I think a lot of Hitchcock is really lame," Macy says. "He hated actors and I think it shows."

When was the last time you saw "The Birds"? Those once-acclaimed special effects look cheesy now, but that's to be expected. Once again it's the ending that really bites. Trapped in a house by marauding fowl that we've been led to believe would just as soon peck out your eyeball as chirp at you, our heroes devise an ingenious escape. The plan: Tiptoe out the door past the pernicious poultry, get into the waiting car and drive away. It works! Who knew? Twelve years later, on Amity Island, Richard Dreyfuss should have explained to Roy Scheider that if you simply ignore the big shark, it will lose interest and swim off in search of sea-going carrots.

Hitchcock did contemplate other endings, such as the couple's discovering that the evil crows have overrun San Francisco, but opted for the vague finish. It was apparently considered more "arty." Hitchcock even decided to forego the traditional screen title reading "The End" -- the movie simply stops. The end title should have read, "We Ran Out of Film. Good Night. Drive Safely."

Whether it's a Hitchcock or some other dubious classic showing up in the late listings accompanied by a multi-stellar rating, you may want to deduct a star and a half for the rosy glow of nostalgia. For every legitimate masterpiece like Carol Reed's "The Third Man" or Fred Zinnemann's "High Noon," there's a revered stretch of tedium like John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath" or Billy Wilder's mirthless "Some Like it Hot." Remember, even the verdict of history sometimes comes from a jury of chuckleheads -- 20 years after they left the air, the Monkees were seriously being hailed as trendsetters.

In most cases though, a Hitchcock movie is still an exciting and romantic journey, so long as you're prepared for a big letdown once you finally check into the honeymoon suite. And many of the man's masterpieces are truly deserving of the title -- "The 39 Steps," "The Lady Vanishes," "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "North by Northwest," "Psycho."

And then again, "Strangers on a Train" is actually kind of fun. So never mind.
salon.com | August 13, 1999

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