By “human conflict” Hitchcock presumably meant conflict within the human mind, the psychological struggles of the individual. Ideology, religion, and the wounds of history held no intrinsic interest to Hitchcock the filmmaker.
Hitchcock felt “typed” and unable to shake himself loose from the straitjacket of his own reputation. “I’m in competition with myself,” he complained. The last two films of his career were Frenzy—a variation on the Ripper theme—and Family Plot, an enjoyable caper that lacks the sharp edges of Hitchcock at his best. The critical response to the final two films was markedly more generous than that afforded the previous three. At this advanced stage, Hitchcock was yogi-like, beyond praise or disparagement as meted out to other directors. As Truffaut observed, “a director who is over seventy years old and still working enjoys what might be defined as critical immunity.”
Attempting to make sense of “late style,” the work of great artists in their final years, Edward Said contrasted those whose efforts display a serene wisdom, with those such as Beethoven whose final works are defined by “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction,” a challenge to the idea that art can ever bring resolution and harmony, “a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness.” The academic Mark Goble contends that this description fits Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, in which Hitchcock pursued outsized commercial ambition with films that were darker, more ambiguous, and more provocative than any he had made, each one featuring a different sort of technical complexity, and challenging expectations of what a mainstream Hollywood movie could or should be. But no matter how pioneering or provocative Hitchcock thought himself, he was wedded to the movie business, and therefore incapable of using his films as a form of self-exile in the way Said believes Beethoven did with his final compositions. After Hitchcock’s late style came a post-late style—or “too-late style,” in Goble’s words—a heavily self-referential period in which the master exhibited some of his enviable skills, but to no great effect. In trying to re-create the magic of times past, he drifted further from the present.
As Hitchcock was wont to say, style is the act of self-plagiarism. For his entire career, he returned to, and then innovated on, a tradition he—with vital contributions from his collaborators—created for himself. This is why a Hitchcock film becomes more fascinating the more one watches other Hitchcock films; each of his works is in deep conversation with the rest. After Marnie, the conversation became more of a circular monologue about the Hitchcock canon rather than an attempt to take it somewhere new. The clever elaborations that allowed Hitchcock to revisit old ground while staying fresh and vital had vanished. Finally, the master had run out of reinventions.
* Two years after The Birds was released, Iwerks won an Academy Award for his special effects work on Mary Poppins, which used the same sodium vapor process.
11
THE LONDONER
Hitchcock preferred to begin his fairy tales by giving the audience a sense of time and place—“once upon a time in a land far, far away.” Sometimes, these openings were performed with real style and imagination, of a piece with the rest of the film. The opening sequence of North by Northwest, for instance, has Saul Bass’s Mondrian-like graphics, beautiful in their clever, sleek economy, appearing on the side of a Madison Avenue skyscraper; the yellow cabs reflected in its glass panes tell us we could be nowhere else but 1950s New York. It was only Hitchcock’s overspending that prevented him from realizing the opening he first devised, in which the camera would float through a window into the office of Roger Thornhill’s advertising firm, where the credits would appear as designs for a new ad campaign, immersing us in Thornhill’s world of pretense and artifice before a single line of dialogue was spoken.
It was a simple matter of story structure, said Hitchcock: begin in wide shot, and by degrees allow the audience to get closer and closer, until nestled right inside the heads of the characters. Repeatedly, he tried to take that principle to its conclusion, starting up in the clouds and homing in on a small pocket of action, some tiny scene that would turn out to be something scandalous. It wasn’t until his penultimate film, Frenzy, that he managed to do it just as he’d envisaged. Against a stirring orchestral score, the camera swoops down a great stretch of the Thames, showing London, new and old, magisterial and modern. As the music fades, the camera zooms in on the bankside, where a pompous official boasts to a small crowd that the dank stretch of water on which the city’s fortunes have been built will soon be “clear of industrial effluent, clear of detergents, clear of the waste products of our society.” Then, a startled bystander points out a naked floating corpse, quickly identified as another victim of the “necktie murderer,” a serial killer who strangles women with his own clothing before disposing of their bodies. Staring at the dead woman, the crowd gossips about the psychopath and his victims, with a mixture of morbid curiosity and terror.
For anyone with a knowledge of London’s past, it’s an obvious evocation of Jack the Ripper; for anyone with a knowledge of Hitchcock’s past, it’s a revival of The Lodger, which begins with the discovery of a female corpse by the side of the Thames and the reactions of gawking locals. Now in his seventies, Hitchcock was back on his old turf, the city that made him, telling the world that despite all this talk of a new, swinging London, this was the same glorious and rotten place it had always been, the greatest shithole on earth.
Like many before and since, Hitchcock was frequently guilty of eliding “British” with “English,” using them interchangeably, saying one when he really meant the other. In his
