Hitchcock's early Hollywood masterwork. One of his most disturbing films, Shadow was nominally the story of a young woman who learns that a favourite uncle is a murderer, but at heart it is a sobering look at the dark underpinnings of American middle-class life. Fully as horrifying as Uncle Charlie's attempts to murder his niece was her mother's tearful acknowledgment of her loss of identity in becoming a wife and mother. "You know how it is," she says, "you sort of forget you're you. You're your husband's wife." In Hitchcock, evil manifests itself not only in acts of physical violence, but also in the form of psychological, institutionalised, and systemic cruelty.
During his most inspired period, from 1950 to 1960, Hitchcock produced a cycle of memorable films which included minor works such as I Confess (1953), the sophisticated thrillers Dail M For Murder (1954) and To Catch A Thief (1955), a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). He also directed several top-drawer films like Strangers on a Train and the troubling early docudrama (1956), a searing critique of the American justice system.
His three unalloyed masterpieces of the period were investigations into the very nature of watching cinema. Rear Window (1954) made viewers voyeurs, then had them pay for their pleasure. In its story of a photographer who happens to witness a murder, Hitchcock provocatively probed the relationship between the watcher and the watched, involving, by extension, the viewer of the film. Vertigo (1958), as haunting a movie as Hollywood has ever produced, took the lost-feminine-identity theme of Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious and identified its cause as male fetishism.
North By Northwest (1959) is perhaps Hitchcock's most fully realised film. From a script by Ernest Lehman, with a score (as usual) by Bernard Herrmann, and starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, this quintessential chase movie is full of all the things for which we remember Alfred Hitchcock: ingenious shots, subtle male-female relationships, dramatic score, bright technicolor, inside jokes, witty symbolism and above all masterfully orchestrated suspense.
 |
Go To Page: 1 2
