Word: hitchcocked
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...Hitchcock did not seem to care very much about these neglects and misunderstandings. He had plenty of prizes; Queen Elizabeth knighted him this year, even though he had moved to Hollywood when he was 40 and had long since become a U.S. citizen. Young European c?astes, such as French Director-Critics Fran?s Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, began to write about Hitchcock's work with a seriousness that sometimes became unconsciously funny. But it was the beginning of a necessary reevaluation...
...interested in content," Hitchcock said. "It's the same as a painter not worrying about the apples he's painting?whether they're sweet or sour. Who cares? It's his style, his manner of painting them?that's where the emotion comes from." Acting, he declaimed, did not really count in movies: it was photography, editing, "all the technical ingredients that [make] the audience scream...
Undeniably Hitchcock was the greatest handler of film who ever lived. He was not an innovator. Nothing he did called attention to his technique. But it was always there, if virtually invisible. His most famous scene, the shower-murder episode in Psycho, contains 78 separate shots in 45 seconds of screen time. Though a grisly homicide is portrayed, moviegoers never actually see the knife touch Janet Leigh's naked flesh; they just think they...
Then there is Hitchcock's masterly alternation of objective and subjective points of view in almost every scene. The first is used to present the audience with a few scary facts that the protagonist does not know. Then Hitchcock cuts to the subjective, showing events from the protagonist's incomplete point of view. Thus insinuated into the hero's shoes?or sometimes the villain's?the director could induce agonies of suspense in the viewer...
Over time, the vision controlling Hitchcock's exercises in suspense darkened. The tongue-in-cheekiness of the lovely little English films (notably The 39 Steps in 1935 and The Lady Vanishes in 1938) gradually became more subdued, replaced first by the broody romanticism of movies such as Rebecca (1940) and Notorious (1946), then by the assured slickness of Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959). It was in the middle of that last group that, in two superb, underrated films, The Wrong Man (1957) and Vertigo (1958), he directly, quite humorlessly, confronted his belief...