To the Editor:
Alfred Hitchcock is overrated, says Terry Teachout [“The Trouble with Alfred Hitchcock,” February]. He would have us believe that the legendary director, “far from being a great creative artist, was actually a minor master,” admittedly one with a certain knack for visual storytelling. In making this claim, however, Mr. Teachout uses arguments he would never use or countenance in music criticism.
His brief against Hitchcock has three parts. First, that his critical stature has been artificially inflated by the postmodern refusal to distinguish between high art and pop culture.
Second, that his films are pervaded by a repellent sexual fixation that reaches its peak in Vertigo, which is the “work of a sexually frustrated man whose view of women was—to put it mildly—unattractive.”
Finally, that the films are simply a string of exciting set pieces, meager in plotting and character development, and with all the aesthetic integrity of a roller coaster ride.
The first two charges, even if true, say little about the value of Hitchcock’s art. That his critical reputation has fluctuated is neither here nor there. Reputations are fickle things, as Mr. Teachout regularly shows in these pages. One cites critics like Dwight Macdonald, Graham Greene, and Ingmar Bergman not as final arbiters of Hitchcock’s achievement but to illuminate aspects of his work and technique.
Likewise, it may be titillating that Hitchcock became infatuated with his leading ladies, and that this infatuation carried over into the films, but this hardly discredits them.
Surely any art of intense feeling draws on the emotional life of its creator, and it is arbitrary to exclude one rather large lobe of the human condition from being a legitimate wellspring of artistic expression. Mr. Teachout does not first investigate the secret longings and hungers of his subjects before letting us know if we may enjoy the symphony.
His most serious charge is that Hitchcock’s films lack content and reveal “little about human nature.” This he demonstrates by comparing them to such diverse works as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and the farces of Noël Coward. But none of these is a film, and one does not judge a film by the same standards that one does a play, an opera, or a novel. Film is a visual medium, and its expressive instruments are composition (the way the figures and objects are disposed in the picture plane) and momentum (the way that images change to establish rhythm and tempo).
Of course, one might film a performance of Figaro, with a static camera, but the best directors are those who most imaginatively exploit film’s visual potential. Mr. Teachout faults Hitchcock for not creating the fully realized characters one might find in a naturalistic Russian novel, but this hardly means his films have nothing to teach us about human nature. Hitchcock’s art was created in his encounter with German Expressionism during the silent-film era, and he mastered its abstract language of light, shadow, and heightened emotional tension.
He found that that language suited his own preoccupations—desire, guilt, fear—which in the end should be regarded as the real “content” of his films, not the conventional mystery plots in which they were embedded. This is why Hitchcock’s black-and-white films remain the most visually intense, whereas Mr. Teachout focuses primarily on the color films.
In his intense rendering of the human spirit under duress, depicting the wry rebellion of the individual against the crushing and arbitrary forces of modern life, Hitchcock achieved a monumental art within the narrow conventions of a popular medium. He is no more a minor master than Kafka.
Michael J. Lewis
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
Terry Teachout dismisses the seriousness of Hitchcock’s films, cutting many of them down to the level of entertainment or exercises in unsavory wish-fulfillment. Permit me to offer a dissent.
The archetypical Hitchcockian situation involves an ordinary man or woman suddenly caught in an extraordinary situation. This disruption is caused by some manifestation of evil: a malevolent person, a secret organization, political agents (Nazis or Communists), a sinful past of sexual origin, or an unbridled element of nature. The plot is played out as the confrontation between these good but not flawless heroes and the forces of destruction, chaos, and disorder that are unleashed against them.
Except for a few ambiguous endings (as in Vertigo and The Birds), good triumphs over evil and the moral balance is restored—but not without the providential intervention of chance. The protagonists do not come out of these ordeals unscathed. Rather, they pay a price, either in a crushing loss of innocence (Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt), the acquisition of guilt (Blackmail, Sabotage, Lifeboat), or through contamination with evil (Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy).
The later films are studies of isolated individuals struggling with evil in the form of the absence or the slaughter of love (Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and Marnie). Unlike, say, Tolkien’s evildoers, the most effective Hitchcockian villains are invariably well-mannered gentlemen (Secret Agent, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, North by Northwest) or unexceptional husbands plotting the murder of their wives (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and Vertigo).
Always looming in the background is a belief in man’s fallen nature and in the existence of moral absolutes. We who are enthusiasts of Hitchcock’s cinema like to think that his filmmaking oeuvre captures with emotion, suspense, and depth the moral perplexities of our times.
María Elena de las Carreras
University of California
Northridge, California
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To the Editor:
Terry Teachout’s toppling of Hitchcock was certainly overdue, and perhaps overkind: Rebecca, for instance, is a film so badly acted, scripted, and shot that it deserved none of his tender mercy. Even the canonic North by Northwest is pretty silly, is it not? Hitchcock’s best film, Strangers on a Train, owes at least as much to Raymond Chandler as to its finicky director.
How singular, however, that the list of Cahiers du Cinema’s top ten films should include just one, Singin’ in the Rain, that is not ascribed to a director! It was, of course, a work of many talents (Donald O’Connor’s not least), but their energies were released (and controlled) by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen—who, I suspect, did the bulk of the work, not least because Kelly was doing his stuff in front of the camera. Is there any non-chauvinistic person who would not rate it above La Règle du jeu?
Frederic Raphael
London, England
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Terry Teachout writes:
Michael J. Lewis and María Elena de las Carreras revisit two familiar themes of contemporary Hitchcock commentary—the filmmaker as visual expressionist and as crypto-Catholic moralist. Alas, I find neither line of argument convincing, for I simply do not see in Hitchcock’s films what Mr. Lewis and Ms. de las Carreras see there, and find them (mostly) impossible to take seriously as either “monumental art” or reflections of “the moral perplexities of our times.”
On the other hand, it is certainly true that most present-day critics disagree with me, which is why I wrote my essay in the first place: I think that Hitchcock’s current stature has more to do with postmodern critical fashion than with the actual merits of his work. This is not to say that I question the sincerity of my correspondents, merely that I disagree with them so comprehensively that there seems no reason for me to repeat myself here.
Frederic Raphael, on the other hand, does Hitchcock an injustice by giving credit to Raymond Chandler for the merits of Strangers on a Train, to whose final screenplay Chandler appears by most accounts to have contributed very little. As for his claim that there is “no non-chauvinistic person” who would rank Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (“The Rules of the Game”) above Singin’ in the Rain, there are in fact countless benighted creatures, myself among them, who believe Renoir’s masterpiece to be the greatest film ever made.
