The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (193 page)

Hitchcock in England is a career unto itself, no matter that the American films take on a greater power and ease—like driving a Cadillac after a Morris Minor. The English films are playful, and sometimes facetious or silly. But they have dark moments and there are stirrings of sexual menace. The comic adventure of
The Lady Vanishes
, for instance, turns into a parable on appeasement, in which stock English fools get hurt. The first
Man Who Knew Too Much
is startlingly grim and cruel, and
Sabotage
is not unworthy of Conrad’s novel
The Secret Agent
. But it was Hitch’s storytelling flair—and visual storytelling—that got him to America, where his new boss, Selznick, saw the need to teach that Brit plausibility and character. Selznick was a pompous teacher, but he had a point. And the sardonic Hitchcock did study in those first years. Thus, immediately,
Rebecca
moves us.

The first point to make about Hitchcock, therefore, is the variability of his work. That is the more important in that Hitchcock’s defenders frequently praise his technical and commercial knowingness. But no matter how many times the profit ratio of
Psycho
is repeated, it does not alter the fact that Hitchcock made several flops, several films in which the entire narrative structure—over which he spent such time and care—is grotesquely miscalculated.
Stage Fright, The Trouble with Harry, Lifeboat
, and
Torn Curtain
seem to me thumpingly bad films, helpless in the face of intransigent plots, true delicacy of humor, and uncooperative players.
Spellbound, The Paradine Case
, and
Rope
are flawed by unwieldy or wrongheaded situations.
Dial M for Murder
is unadventurous suspense,
Saboteur
a monotonous chase film. The rich emotional undertones of
North by Northwest
show how simple many of the other thrillers are. Furthermore, those defects often affect much better films.
Strangers on a Train
is one of Hitchcock’s most fascinating films, but Farley Granger and Ruth Roman are coldly abandoned by their director. Even
Psycho
, made with a torturemaster’s refinement, stumbles over the implausibility of the car-purchase scene. And while it is legitimate to defend and praise his use of back projection as proof of the preference for emotional to actual reality, it is equally clear that so celebrated a technician ought to be able to achieve such inner realism without jolting the audience from its identification with the film.

To see Hitchcock’s films, in my opinion, is not to confront an author of supreme technical and narrative confidence, or a moral philosopher of great wisdom. I believe him when he said he was nervous about whether
Psycho
would prosper. After all, he swapped endings on
Topaz
, allowed bizarre passages of inconsequential chatter in
Frenzy
, and watched stonily over drab performances from Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in
Torn Curtain
. And all this in the years when virtually every quarter of the film world was prepared to acknowledge the significance of his work. One might argue that age was catching him up, except that
Frenzy
is almost a parody Hitchcock film, packed with moments that spring from his best work, which are persistently ruined by the uneasy jokiness of the film and by its ignorance of the real world.

Ignorance and fear are the abiding impressions left by his films. Just as his suspense works through deliberately withheld knowledge—and withheld from the hypersensitive voyeurist curiosity that he has aroused—so he teaches us to share the fear of the world that he always owned up to. Why not face the implications of his two celebrated admissions: that he feared, above all, arrest; and that his aim in cinema was to put the audience through it? I would not deny that his films can lead to great insights of an intensely pessimistic vision. But I do not see how a man so fearful, and so chronically adept at conveying fear, can be judged as a profound artist. Suffering in his films invariably depends upon the victim’s being unbalanced or demented. The pain felt by Perkins in
Psycho
or Stewart in
Vertigo
is savage, yet it is more limited than that in Renoir, Mizoguchi, or Welles because of Hitchcock’s resort to mania and melodrama.

Hitchcock’s most profound subject and achievement is the juxtaposition of sanity and insanity, of bourgeois ordinariness and criminal outrage. The crisscross motif, derived from thriller fiction, is itself a map of the way audiences willingly cross over from their seats to involve themselves in a film. James Stewart being drawn into Kim Novak in
Vertigo
is a model of the way we are sucked into films. Charming Robert Walker and boring Farley Granger make a trap for our need to identify. The method of
Rear Window
—a voyeur in the dark inspecting other lives—is the principle of cinematic spectacle. Hitchcock’s best films all grow out of his instinctive employment of our impulses and fantasy life in the cinema. And his moral seriousness consists of showing us the violent, psychotic fruits of some of those impulses and shyly asking us to claim them as our own. I say “shyly” because Hitchcock did not properly own up to his seriousness. It is not enough to paint Hitchcock the interviewee as a sly legpuller who teased earnest questions. The truth may be that he did not fully grasp his own films. Truffaut’s book amply reveals a man of very mundane, shallow moral and social attitudes, flip rather than witty, genuinely more interested in technique than in meaning. And, it must be said, there is a degree of spiritual coarseness and callousness in Hitchcock’s work that chimes with the career-long taste for brutalizing our nerves.

So how does Hitchcock stand? There are astonishing achievements:
Rebecca
is a gorgeous Gothic women’s picture;
Notorious
a tragic love story;
Under Capricorn
, a rich account of emotional self-sacrifice;
Strangers on a Train
, a key exposition of the madman hero;
Rear Window
and
Vertigo
, superb commentaries on watching films;
The Wrong Man
, an exemplary study of chance and routine in conflict;
North by Northwest
, a brilliant view of a frivolous Cary Grant being sobered by feelings;
Psycho
, a scream of horror at the idea of madness;
The Birds
, an audacious use of science-fiction apocalypse to dramatize intimate emotional insecurity. Here are ten films that are masterly and repay endless viewing. Gothic melodrama runs through his work, as does the cruel tenderness toward suffering of the women’s picture. Hitchcock never forsook the dream-dotty England of the 1930s, just as he never really noticed anything in America beyond the equipment resources of the big studios and the tourist sites. Film is his world, and other filmmakers his sole points of reference, especially Fritz Lang and Val Lewton (The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse
was the source of many of the English thrillers, while Lewton’s sense of undisclosed horror is an essential influence on Hitchcock’s stimulated voyeurism).

His great films are only partly his; they also belong to the minds that interpret them. There is an artistic timidity in Hitchcock that, having put the audience through it, must allow them to come to terms with the experience. But his own personality is withdrawn, cold, insecure, and uncharitable. The method, despite its brilliance, is equally private and restrictive. To plan so much that the shooting becomes a chore is an abuse not just of actors and crew, but of cinema’s predilection for the momentary. It is, in fact, the style of an immense, premeditative artist—a Bach, a Proust, or a Rembrandt. And beside those masters, Hitchcock seems an impoverished inventor of thumbscrews who shows us the human capacity for inflicting pain, but no more. Such precision can only avoid seeming overbearing and misanthropic if it is accompanied by creative untidiness. In the last resort, his realized blueprints affirm film’s yearning for doubt and open endings.

Mike Hodges
, b. London, 1932
1971:
Get Carter
. 1972:
Pulp
. 1974:
The Terminal Man
. 1979:
Damien: Omen II
. 1980:
Flash Gordon
. 1985:
Moron from Outer Space
. 1987:
A Prayer for the Dying
. 1990:
Black Rainbow
. 1999:
Croupier
. 2004:
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
.

This is not an easy career to explain. By the late nineties, for instance,
Get Carter
was a cult movie, famous for its abrupt violence and poker-faced comedy, and for its absolute logical fatalism. Not that
Get Carter
wasn’t a hit in its day. Nearly thirty years later, with a good script by Paul Mayersberg,
Croupier
was one of the pleasant surprises of its season, and an assured handling of underworld material. What happened in between? Why, close to the age of seventy, is Hodges so little appreciated? The films made between
Carter
and
Croupier
are not as good, but they’re not that terrible, either. Plenty of lesser talents have had steadier careers, but Hodges—who was experienced in TV directing in the late 1960s even—looks like a novice. Indeed, if
Croupier
had been a first film, its director would have been hailed and offered a portion of the world.

Dustin Hoffman
, b. Los Angeles, 1937
Hoffman’s screen character is reticent but stubborn. He is small and often timid, but a nucleus of hard identity never wavers, never seems fully threatened, and never floods us with animation. In an age of dynamic male stars who toss opposition aside, Hoffman has had the courage and the need to be inept. A wary and sometimes pious liberalism lurks in his anticipation of suffering at the world’s rough hands. His hangdog charm resists radiant winners ideologically; indeed, there has often been a suspicion that he was more a character actor than a lead. Things have always happened to him, as witness his success as the least active person in
The Graduate
. He has chosen his parts carefully, avoiding the standard Hollywood product and often employing makeup or impersonation to vindicate the role of craftsmanlike acting.

Al Pacino has all the authority of self Hoffman avoids, and may well have taken some of Hoffman’s better prospects because of it. Either of them could have played in
Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico
, or
Scarecrow
, but only Pacino could summon up the passion for power in Michael Corleone or the dispassionate self-regard that drives Bobby Deerfield. Hoffman is not a credible screen lover: he does not idealize himself enough to make a woman’s awe natural. He’s best as a muddler, or the forlorn creature swept back and forth by fate. However, such haplessness is rare in American film actors if not cushioned by the sentimental dismay of a clown. Early on, a helpless kindness hovered within Hoffman’s nature, too shy or too sure of the world’s harshness to venture into the open. But he has grown harder, and more controlling: in his very set looks, we may guess how difficult he is to direct.

He was the son of a props man at Columbia, and studied music at the Santa Monica City College before acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. But he soon transferred his base and all his cultural allegiances to New York. He soldiered on there for ten years, in TV and theatre, before his big opportunity. Interestingly, he was nearly thirty when he played
The Graduate
(67, Mike Nichols). It seemed brilliant casting, though, and Hoffman was very appropriate as the numb focus of comic disasters and sexual opportunity. It is not often noticed, but he is the only innocent in the picture; a more subtle or demanding treatment would be bound to see him as an insufferable prig. He was less plausible toward the end of the film, when a little boy’s urgency is supposed to take him over. But the passivity that could not stop the tide of Mrs. Robinson, or hold on to its own moral reserve, was funny and absorbing.

His Ratso in
Midnight Cowboy
(69, John Schlesinger) was a dazzling assembly of technical devices, as emotionless as it was compelling to watch. The script, the direction, and the acting all settled for pathos as Ratso’s due from an audience, and made him a sleazy exotic more than a failed street urchin and a chronic cheat. Schlesinger is too sloppy an artist to let Ratso emerge as less than adorable, but Hoffman was probably capable of nastiness had he been trusted. The actor was at a loss in the entirely unnecessary
John and Mary
(69, Peter Yates), one of his few concessions to the big-salary syndrome. He was near his best in
Little Big Man
(70, Arthur Penn), managing the old age easily and riding the picaresque adventures of a put-upon outcast all the better because of his own denial of starriness. Still, it was easier to accept Hoffman as Penn’s spokesman than as someone actually living through the film.

Feeling established and unsatisfied by Hollywood ventures, he had a year of odd experiments: to Italy for
Alfredo, Alfredo
(71, Pietro Germi); to England to play the mathematics graduate in
Straw Dogs
(71, Sam Peckinpah); and, in America,
Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?
(71, Ulu Grosbard—Hoffman’s longtime friend).

Straw Dogs
was the only one of those three seen by the general public, and Hoffman is not the most memorable element in its deadly ritual. His adoption of violence at the climax is the more troubling because Peckinpah never seems to have explained its need to the gentle and perplexed actor. The gloating contrivance of
Straw Dogs
is accentuated by Hoffman’s guardedness. He fights back like someone under orders; he never concedes the thrill of revenge or the trembling orgasm of blood. The one aspect of his character that works is the appeal of mathematics; but the actor’s cerebral dimension never appeared to win Peckinpah over. Pacino might have shocked us with a sudden appetite for destruction—but Hoffman is as unlikely a killer as he is husband to the very ripe Susan George.