Alfred Hitchcock (146 page)

Cast: Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Albert Basserman, Robert Benchley, Edmund Gwenn, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harry Davenport, Martin Kosleck, Frances Carson, Ian Wolfe, Charles Wagenheim, Edward Conrad, Charles Halton, Barbara Pepper, Emory Parnell, Roy Gordon, Gertrude Hoffman, Martin Lamont, Barry Bernard, Holmes Herbert, Leonard Mudie, John Burton, Jane Novak, and Alfred Hitchcock (pedestrian reading a newspaper as he strolls past McCrea’s hotel early in the film).

(B & W, Walter Wanger for Walter Wanger Productions, 119 mins.)

“
With so much that is brilliant—the realism of the wrecked plane, the beautiful scenes in the darkness of the windmill amid the turning wheels, the superb melodramatic shot of the torturers’ faces seen by the victim under the arclamps—I scarcely noticed the blemishes. This film is worth fifty
Rebeccas.”

Dilys Powell,
Sunday Times
, October 10, 1940

1941

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

As director.
Sc: Norman Krasna, based on his original story. Music: Edward Ward. Ph: Harry Stradling. Art Dir: Van Nest Polglase. Assoc Art Dir: L. P. Williams. Gowns: Irene. Set Dec: Darrell Silvera. Sound: John E. Tribby. Special Effects: Vernon L. Walker. Ed: William Hamilton. Asst Dir: Dewey Starkey.

Cast: Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Gene Raymond, Jack Carson, Philip Merivale, Lucile Watson, William Tracy, Charles Halton, Esther Dale, Emma Dunn, Betty Compson, Patricia Farr, William Edmunds, Adele Pearce, and Alfred Hitchcock (passing Robert Montgomery in front of his building).

(B & W, Harry E. Edington for RKO-Radio Pictures, 95 mins.)

“
It swings along a merry path with only a smattering of dull episodes, providing many marital pyrotechnics and maneuvers familiar to most couples. Story, as is the case with most marital farces, is not too solidly set up, but its deficiencies in this regard will easily be overlooked in the general humorous melee.
”

Variety
, January 22, 1941

Suspicion

As director.
Sc: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, and Alma Reville, from the novel
Before the Fact
by Francis Iles. Music: Franz Waxman. Ph:
Harry Stradling. Special Effects: Vernon L. Walker. Art Dir: Van Nest Polglase. Assoc. Art Dir: Carroll Clark. Gowns: Edward Stevenson. Set Dec: Darrell Silvera. Sound: John E. Tribby. Ed: William Hamilton. Asst Dir: Dewey Starkey.

Cast: Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty, Isabel Jeans, Heather Angel, Auriol Lee, Reginald Sheffield, Leo G. Carroll, and Alfred Hitchcock (posting a letter at the village postbox).

(B & W, Harry E. Edington for RKO-Radio Pictures, 99 mins.)

“Suspicion,
while seeming to gratify the commonplace desire for a romantic thriller, simultaneously urges us to take a closer look and thereby to become self-conscious viewers, aware that the commercial spectacle can entertain us only by entrapping us. Like all of Hitchcock’s most successful films
, Suspicion
invites us to penetrate its surface, to cease watching as escapists and attempt an unflinching (and still generally unheard-of) critical spectatorship, one that might enable us to grasp, not just the exquisite strategies of spectacles far more suasive than
Suspicion
seems even to its most credulous viewers. That is
, Suspicion
asks us to become aware of the manipulations made routine by the very industry that produced it.
”

Mark Crispin Miller, “Hitchcock’s Suspicions and
Suspicion
,”
Boxed In: The Culture of TV

1942

Saboteur

As director.
Sc: Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker. Ph: Joseph Valentine. Art Dir: Jack Otterson. Assoc. Art Dir: Robert Boyle. Ed: Otto Ludwig. Asst Dir: Fred Frank. Set Dec: R. A. Gausman. Set Continuity: Adele Cannon. Music Dir: Charles Previn. Music: Frank Skinner. Sound: Bernard B. Brown. Sound Technician: William Hedgcock. Special Effects: John P. Fulton.

Cast: Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Otto Kruger, Alan Baxter, Clem Bevans, Norman Lloyd, Alma Kruger, Vaughan Glaser, Dorothy Peterson, Ian Wolfe, Frances Carson, Murray Alper, Kathryn Adams, Pedro de Cordoba, Billy Curtis, Marie Le Deaux, Anita Bolster, Jeanne Romer, Lynn Romer, and Alfred Hitchcock (standing in front of Cut-Rate Drugs in New York).

(B & W, Jack H. Skirball for Frank Lloyd Productions-Universal, 108 mins.)

“
To put it mildly, Mr. Hitchcock and his writers have really let themselves go. Melodramatic action is their forte, but they scoff at speed limits this trip. All the old master’s experience at milking thrills has been called upon. As a consequence—and according to Hitchcock custom
—Saboteur
is a swift, high-tension film which throws itself forward so rapidly that it permits slight opportunity for looking back. And it hurtles the holes and bumps which plague it with a speed that forcefully tries to cover them up.
”

Bosley Crowther,
New York Times
, May 8, 1942

1943

Shadow of a Doubt

As director.
Sc: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell. Ph: Joseph Valentine. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin. Art Dir: John B. Goodman. Assoc Art Dir: Robert Boyle. Sound: Bernard B. Brown. Sound Technician: Robert Pritchard. Set Dec: R. A. Gausman. Assoc Set Dec: E.R. Robinson. Musical Dir: Charles Previn. Set Continuity: Adele Cannon. Ed: Milton Carruth. Asst Dir: William Tummell. Teresa Wright’s Gowns: Adrian. Costumes: Vera West.

Cast: Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, MacDonald Carey, Henry Travers, Patricia Collinge, Hume Cronyn, Wallace Ford, Edna May Wonacott, Charles Bates, Irving Bacon, Clarence Muse, Janet Shaw, Estelle Jewell, and Alfred Hitchcock (on the train to Santa Rosa, holding thirteen spades in a bridge game).

(B & W, Jack H. Skirball for Universal-Skirball Productions, 108 mins.)

“
Very rarely have I seen a picture where it ceases to be a picture and you are sitting there in the theatre not realizing you are, transported completely into the life which is there upon the screen. Never before has such an experience happened to me in a murder picture. I do think it is a masterpiece which you have created.
”

From a letter from Gordon McDonell to Hitchcock upon seeing
Shadow of a Doubt
, January 10, 1943

1944

Lifeboat

As director.
Sc: Jo Swerling, from a story by John Steinbeck. Ph: Glen MacWilliams. Art Dir: James Basevi, Maurice Ransford. Set Dec: Thomas Little. Assoc Set Dec: Frank E. Hughes. Ed: Dorothy Spencer. Costumes: René Hubert. Makeup: Guy Pearce. Special Photographic Effects: Fred Sersen. Technical Adviser: Thomas Fitzsimmons. Sound: Bernard Freericks, Roger Heman. Music: Hugo W. Friedhofer. Musical Dir: Emil Newman.

Cast: Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn, Canada Lee, and Alfred Hitchcock (seen in Reduco newspaper advertisement).

(B & W, Kenneth MacGowan for Twentieth Century–Fox, 96 mins.)

“Lifeboat
is not only an extraordinary film, it is also an extraordinary Hitchcock film. Here, he has expanded his mathematical formula of mere suspense until it fully exploits a pathos that never becomes sleek or slick. Despite the fact that only nine characters carry the action which is laid entirely within the confines of a life-craft, there is no strain in the development, no sense of the mechanical ingenuity necessary to keep the events taut and moving. The characters are dimensional, fresh and human, all quite free of the formula
quality with which Hollywood habitually endows a collection of antitheticals in group-dramas.
”

Herb Sterne,
Rob Wagner’s Script
, January 22, 1944

Bon Voyage

As director.
Sc: J. O. C. Orton and Angus MacPhail, from a story by Arthur Calder-Marshall. Ph: Günther Krampf. Prod Design: Charles Gilbert. Music: Benjamin Frankel. Technical Adviser: Claude Dauphin.

Cast: John Blythe, the Molière Players.

(B & W, British Ministry of Information for Phoenix Films, 26 mins.)

“…
earnestly and somewhat melodramatically unmasks the dastardly duplicity of the fascists.
”

Sidney Gottlieb, “
Bon Voyage
and
Aventure Malgache
,”
Hitchcock Annual
, 1994

Aventure Malgache

As director.
Sc: J. O. C. Orton and Angus MacPhail. Ph: Günther Krampf. Prod Design: Charles Gilbert.

Cast: the Molière Players.

(B & W, British Ministry of Information for Phoenix Films, 31 mins.)

“…
focuses on the shrewd, witty, and endearing theatricality of a Resistance fighter.
”

Sidney Gottlieb, “
Bon Voyage
and
Aventure Malgache
,”
Hitchcock Annual
, 1994

1945

Spellbound

As director.
Sc: Ben Hecht. Adaptation: Angus MacPhail, suggested by the novel
The House of Dr. Edwardes
by Francis Beeding. Ph: George Barnes. Music: Miklós Rózsa. Art Dir: James Basevi. Assoc Art Dir: John Ewing. Supervising Ed: Hal C. Kern. Assoc Ed: William H. Ziegler. Prod Asst: Barbara Keon. Special Effects: Jack Cosgrove. Interior Dec: Emile Kuri. Asst Dir: Lowell J. Farrell. Sound: Richard DeWeese. Dream Sequence Designs: Salvador Dalí. Psychiatric Adviser: May E. Romm.

Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll, John Emery, Norman Lloyd, Steven Geray, Wallace Ford, Regis Toomey, Bill Goodwin, Donald Curtis, Art Baker, Rhonda Fleming, and Alfred Hitchcock (carrying a violin case and smoking a cigar as he emerges from the Empire Hotel elevator).

(B & W, David O. Selznick for Selznick International Pictures, 111 mins.)

“
A frantic chase through hospitals, hotels, stations, trains and consulting rooms, culminating on a ski run, is the route Alfred Hitchcock takes, armed
with Ben Hecht’s Freud-slanted script. It is very simplified Freud, to be sure—simplified to the point of being rather incredible if you can stop long enough to think about it. But Hitchcock doesn’t give much time for critical contemplation, what with his dazzling use of pace, mood, camera and detail.

“Arthur Beach,
New Movies
, November 1945

Memory of the Camps (unfinished)

As treatment adviser and director.
Sc: Richard Crossman and Colin Wills. Ph: Service cameramen with the British, American, and Russian armies. Ed: Stewart McAllister, Peter Tanner.

(Sidney Bernstein and Sergei Nolbandov for Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, 55 mins.)

“
I got Hitchcock over—he was a great friend of mine—because I wanted somebody to compile it together. There was a very good man called [Peter] Tanner, and a number of good editors, but I wanted the imaginative touch that somebody like Hitchcock could give.
”

Lord Bernstein to Elizabeth Sussex, “The Fate of F3080,”
^*

Sight and Sound
, Spring 1984

1946

Notorious

As director and producer.
Sc: Ben Hecht. Prod Asst: Barbara Keon. Ph: Ted Tetzlaff. Special Effects: Vernon L. Walker, Paul Eagler. Art Dir: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D’Agostino. Set Dec: Darrell Silvera, Claude Carpenter. Music: Roy Webb. Musical Dir: C. Bakaleinikoff. Orchestral Arr: Gil Grau. Ed: Theron Warth. Sound: John E. Tribby, Terry Kellum. Miss Bergman’s Gowns: Edith Head. Asst Dir: William Dorfman.

Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, Madame Leopoldine Konstantin, Reinhold Schünzel, Moroni Olsen, Ivan Triesault, Alex Minotis, Lester Dorr, Eberhard Krumschmidt, Charles Mendl, and Alfred Hitchcock (drinking champagne at the party at the mansion).

(B & W, Alfred Hitchcock for RKO Radio, 101 mins.)

“Notorious
lacks many of the qualities which made the best of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies so good, but it has more than enough good qualities of its own. Hitchcock has always been as good at domestic psychology as at thrillers, and many times here he makes a moment in a party, or a lovers quarrel, or a mere interior shrewdly exciting in ways that few people in film seem to know. His great skill in directing women, which boggled in
Spellbound,
is
functioning beautifully again: I think that Ingrid Bergman’s performance here is the best of hers that I have seen. One would think that the use of the camera subjectively—that is, as one of the characters—would for many years have been as basic a movie device as the close-up, but few people try it and Hitchcock is nearly the only living man I can think of who knows just when and how to.”

James Agee,
The Nation
, August 17, 1946

1947

The Paradine Case

As director.
Sc: David O. Selznick. Adaptation: Alma Reville, from the novel by Robert Hichens. Ph: Lee Garmes. Music: Franz Waxman. Prod Design: J. McMillan Johnson. Art Dir: Thomas Morahan. Costumes: Travis Banton. Supervising Ed: Hal C. Kern. Assoc Ed: John Faure. Scenario Asst: Lydia Schiller. Sound Dir: James G. Stewart. Sound Recording: Richard Van Hessen. Interiors: Joseph B. Platt. Set Dec: Emile Kuri. Asst Dir: Lowell J. Farrell. Unit Mgr: Fred Ahern. Special Effects: Clarence Slifer. Hair Styles: Larry Germain.

Cast: Gregory Peck, Ann Todd, Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn, Ethel Barrymore, Louis Jourdan, Alida Valli, Leo G. Carroll, Joan Tetzel, Isobel Elsom, and Alfred Hitchcock (carrying a cello and getting off the train at Cumberland Station).

(B & W, David O. Selznick for Selznick International Pictures, 116 mins.)

“The film is a study in sexual obsession, flawed by certain compromises (Hitchcock wanted the lover to be played by Robert Newton, as a squalid lower class type), but nevertheless underrated and stunningly beautiful as an example of Hitchcock’s visual bravura. The camerawork by Lee Garmes is probably the greatest ever seen in a Hitchcock film. Incomparable are the circling, sinuous movement around Mrs. Paradine as she is arrested at the outset, the shadowy prison cell interview, and the almost incredible Old Bailey sequences, transcendently brilliant in terms of cutting, lighting and direction.”