ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Hitchcock, Sir Alfred
born Aug. 13, 1899, London
died April 29, 1980, Bel Air, Calif., U.S.

English-born motion-picture director whose suspenseful films won immense popularity.

The son of a London poultry dealer, Hitchcock attended St. Ignatius College, London, and the University of London, where he studied engineering. In 1920 he began to work in the motion-picture industry, designing title cards for the Famous Players-Lasky Company. Within a few years he had become a scenario writer and an assistant director, and he directed his first film (The Pleasure Garden) in 1925. With The Lodger (1926), the story of a family who mistakenly suspect their roomer to be Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock began making the “thrillers” with which he was to become identified. His Blackmail was the first successful British talking picture.
During the 1930s he directed such classic suspense films as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-nine Steps, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes. In 1939 Hitchcock left England for Hollywood, where his first film, Rebecca (1940), won an Academy Award for best picture.

During the next three decades Hitchcock usually made a film a year in the Hollywood motion-picture system. Among the important films he directed during the 1940s were Suspicion , Shadow of a Doubt , Lifeboat , Spellbound , and Rope .
He began functioning as his own producer in 1948, and he went on in the 1950s to make a series of big-budget suspense films starring some of the leading actors and actresses of Hollywood. These films include Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder , Rear Window , To Catch a Thief , The Man Who Knew Too Much (a remake of the 1934 film), Vertigo, and North by Northwest .
In the 1960s Hitchcock turned to making thrillers with new and original emphases, among them Psycho , The Birds , and Marnie . His Torn Curtain and Topaz are conventional espionage stories, while in his last films, Frenzy and Family Plot , he returned to his original themes. From the 1940s on Hitchcock usually made a fleeting, wordless appearance in a bit part in each of his films.

Hitchcock's films usually centre on either murder or espionage, with deception, mistaken identities, and chase sequences complicating and enlivening the plot. Wry touches of humour and occasional intrusions of the macabre(horrid) complete this mixture of cinematic elements.

Three main themes predominate in Hitchcock's films. The most common is that of the innocent man who is mistakenly suspected or accused of a crime and who must then track down the real perpetrator in order to clear himself. Examples of films having this theme include The Lodger, The Thirty-nine Steps, Saboteur, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, and Frenzy.



The second theme is that of the guilty woman who enmeshes a male protagonist and ends up either destroying him or being saved by him; examples of this theme include Blackmail, Sabotage, Notorious, Rebecca, Vertigo, and Marnie. The third theme is that of the murderer(frequently psychopathic) whose identity is established during the working out of the plot; examples of this theme include Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Rear Window, and Psycho. The psychopathic killer theme may sometimes be combined with the plot of the falsely accused innocent man, as in Frenzy.

Hitchcock's greatest gift was his mastery of the technical means to build and maintain suspense. To this end he used innovative camera viewpoints and movements, elaborate editing techniques, and effective soundtrack music. He had a sound grasp of human psychology, as manifested both in his credible treatment of everyday life and in the tense and nightmarish situations encountered in his more chilling films. His ability to convincingly evoke human menace, subterfuge, and fear gave his psychological thrillers great impact while maintaining their subtlety and believability.

Hitchcock produced several popular American television series in the 1950s and '60s, which he introduced and sometimes directed. His name also appeared on a series of mystery-story anthologies. He received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1980.

Signature appearances in his films
Many of Hitchcock's films contain cameo appearances by Hitchcock himself: the director would be seen for a brief moment boarding a bus, crossing in front of a building, standing in an apartment across the courtyard, or appearing in a photograph. This playful gesture became one of Hitchcock's signatures. As a recurring theme he would carry a musical instrument — especially memorable was the large double bass case that he wrestles onto the train at the beginning of Strangers on a Train.

In his earliest appearances he would fill in as an obscure extra, standing in a crowd or walking through a scene in a long camera shot (e.g. in his film The Lodger). But he became more prominent in his later appearances, as when he turns to see Jane Wyman's disguise when she passes him on the street in Stage Fright, and in stark silhouette in his final film Family Plot.


Cinematic experimentation
Hitchcock seemed to delight in the technical challenges of filmmaking. In the film Lifeboat, Hitchcock stages the entire action of the movie in a small boat, yet manages to keep the cinematography from monotonous repetition (his trademark cameo appearance was a dilemma, given the limitations of the setting; so Hitchcock appears in a fictitious newspaper ad for a weight loss product). Similarly, the entire action in Rear Window either takes place or is seen from a single apartment.

In Spellbound, two unprecedented point-of-view shots were achieved by constructing a large wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the camera took) and outsized props for it to hold: a bucket-sized glass of milk and a large wooden gun. For added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was hand-coloured red on some copies of the black-and-white print of the film.

Rope was another technical challenge: a film that appears to have been shot entirely in a single take. The film was actually shot in 10 takes of ranging from four and half to 10 minutes each, 10 minutes being the maximum amount of film that would fit in a single camera reel; some transitions between reels were hidden by having a dark object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera in the same place.

His 1958 film Vertigo contains a camera technique that has been imitated and re-used many times by filmmakers, it has become known as the Hitchcock zoom.

Character and its effects on his films
Hitchcock's films sometimes feature characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers. In North by Northwest ,Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant's character) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him (in this case, they are). The killer in Frenzy has a loathing of women but idolizes his mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has an incredibly close relationship with his mother . And, of course, Norman Bates' troubles with his mother in Psycho are infamous.

Hitchcock heroines tend to be lovely, cool blondes who seem proper at first but, when aroused by passion or danger, respond in a more sensual, animal, or even criminal way. As noted, the famous victims in The Lodger are all blondes. In The 39 Steps,Hitchcock's glamorous blonde star, Madeleine Carroll, is put in handcuffs. In Marnie , the title character (played by Tippi Hedren) is a kleptomaniac. In To Catch a Thief , Francie (Grace Kelly) offers to help a man she believes is a cat burglar. And, most notoriously, in Psycho, Janet Leigh's unfortunate character steals $40,000 and is murdered by a reclusive lunatic.

Storyboards and production
Hitchcock would storyboard each movie down to the finest detail. He was reported to have never even bothered looking through the viewfinder, since he didn't need to do so, though in publicity photos he was shown doing so. He also used this as an excuse to never have to change his films from his initial vision. If a studio asked him to change a film, he would claim that it was already shot in a single way, and that there were no alternate takes to consider.

However this view of Hitchcock as a director who relied more on pre-production than on the actual production itself has been challenged by the book Hitchcock At Work written by Bill Krohn, the American correspondent of Cahiers du Cinema. Krohn after investigating several script revisions, notes to other production personnel written by or to Hitchcock alongside inspection of storyboards and other production material has observed that Hitchcock's work often deviated from how the screenplay was written or how the film was originally envisioned. He noted that the myth of storyboards in relation to Hitchcock, often regurgitated by generations of commentators on Hitchcock's movies was to a great degree perpetuated by Hitchcock himself or the publicity arm of the studios. A great example would be the famous cropduster sequence of North by Northwest which wasn't storyboarded at all. After the scene was filmed, the publicity arm asked Hitchcock to make storyboards to promote the film and Hitchcock in turn hired an artist to match the scenes in detail. While Hitchcock did do a great deal of preparation for all his movies, he was fully cognizant that the actual film-making process often deviated from the best laid plans and was flexible to adapt to the changes and needs of production. Even on the occasions when storyboards were made, the scene which was shot did differ from it significantly.

* Montage is a technique in film editing that can refer to:
a montage sequence, a segment which uses rapid editing, special effects and music to present compressed narrative information

* Mise-en-scène is a French term and originates in the theater. It means, literally, "put in the scene." For film, it has a broader meaning, and refers to almost everything that goes into the composition of the shot, including the composition itself: framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and gen eral visual environment, even sound as it helps elaborate the composition. Mise-en-scène can be defined as the articulation of cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about. Cutting is about time; the shot is about what occurs in a defined area of space, bordered by the frame of the movie screen and determined by what the camera has been made to record. That space, the mise-en-scène, can be unique, closed off by the frame, or open, providing the illusion of more space around it.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is a 1956 suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart and Doris Day. The film is a remake in widescreen VistaVision and Technicolor of Hitchcock's 1934 film of the same name.

In this newer version, one of the most financially successful films of its year of release, Brenda De Banzie and Bernard Miles play an apparently benign British married couple, Christopher Olsen plays the son of Day and Stewart, and Reggie Nalder and Daniel Gélin are featured as assassins.

In the book-length interview, Hitchcock/Truffaut (1967), Hitchcock told fellow filmmaker François Truffaut that he considered his 1956 remake to be superior, saying that the 1934 version was the work of a talented amateur, the 1956 version the work of a professional.
The film won an Academy Award for Best Song for "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," sung by Doris Day at several points in the action.




Plot
An American family, Dr. Ben McKenna (James Stewart), his wife Jo (Doris Day) and their son Hank (Christopher Olsen) are on vacation, traveling in Morocco. They befriend a fellow traveler, the mysterious Louis Bernard (Daniel Gelin), on a bus. Later that same day, the couple meets another vacationing couple, the Draytons (Bernard Miles and Brenda de Banzie), at dinner in a local restaurant.
The next day, outdoors in a busy Marrakesh marketplace, the McKennas are shocked to witness the assassination of a spy. Before dying, the spy whispers into Ben McKenna's ear a terrible secret: that someone's life is in danger. The Draytons, who are not nearly as wholesome and innocent as they seem, kidnap the boy Hank in order to be able to pressure Dr. McKenna into not telling the local police what he has learned.
After following a number of leads, McKenna tracks the kidnappers to a simple old church, where Drayton is posing as the minister. Ben escapes, and learns that the Draytons are involved in a plot to assassinate a European head of state, on the orders of that country's ambassador, during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, where the film's famous climax takes place.
Ben and Jo separately track the killer to the concert, where he is to shoot the head of state at the exact moment of time when the music features a loud and climatic cymbal crash. However, in the musical pause right before the cymbal crash, Jo screams. The sudden unexpected sound causes the assassin to misfire. Ben chases the assassin through the seats and finally the assassin falls to his death from the balcony of the theater.
The couple then track the kidnappers to the ambassador's place in London, where they are welcomed as heroes for saving the head of state's life. Mrs. Drayton, unable to be complicit in the plan to kill Hank, helps the boy find his father. Mr. Drayton tries to escape with the two as hostages, but is struck by Ben and falls down the stairs to his death.
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. In The Man Who Knew Too Much he can be seen (25 minutes into the film) watching acrobats in the Moroccan marketplace, with his back to the camera, just before the spy is killed.

Music
Music plays an important part in this film.Although the film's composer, Bernard Herrmann, wrote relatively little "background" music for this film, the performance of Arthur Benjamin's cantata Storm Clouds, conducted by Herrmann, is the climax of the film. In addition, Doris Day's character is a well-known, now retired, professional singer. Several times in the film, she sings the Livingston & Evans song "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" which won the 1956 Best Song Oscar under the alternate title "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)." The song reached number two on the U.S. pop charts and number one in the UK.
Bernard Herrmann was given the option of composing a new cantata to be performed during the film's climax. However, he found Arthur Benjamin's cantata Storm Clouds from the original 1934 film to be so well suited to the film that he declined. Herrmann can be seen conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and singers during the Royal Albert Hall scenes. The sequence in Albert Hall runs 12 minutes without any dialogue, from the beginning of Storm Clouds until the climax, when the Doris Day character screams.