David Vining's Blog, page 180

Alfred Hitchcock: The Definitive Ranking

A top 53. Not even close to a Top 10.

Hitchcock’s career as director spanned 51 years and saw the advent of sound, the profusion of color cinematography, the adoption of widescreen aspect ratios to combat television, and the beginnings of the fall of the studio system.

He started as a contract director with British International Pictures when the medium was still in its infancy and grew to such an assured hand on his own that he was able to move to Hollywood where he became an icon. With so man...

Family Plot

Buddy Buddy.

The st...

Frenzy

After the poorly received Torn Curtain and Topaz, Hitchcock returned home to both the murder genre and to Covent Gardens in London to film Frenzy, a lurid tale of a serial killer and the man caught up as the prime suspect. The only feeling of new from the film comes from the use of nudity and a particular focus on the real killer, and yet it’s still a solidly built thriller, the sort of thing that Hitchcock could seemingly do in his sleep.

There’s a killer on the loose in London, and he has a t...

Topaz

By about the halfway point, Topaz had completely lost me and never got me back. The overstuffed and unfocused international spy story of Frederick Stafford’s Andre Devereaux, French secret agent, lurches from one storyline to another with only tangential connective tissue, creating an overlong drag of a film that feels quite unlike anything Hitchcock had ever made before. That the titular Topaz spy ring isn’t actually important until the two-thirds mark is indicative of the movie’s simple inabi...

Torn Curtain

I apparently did not like this film the first time I saw it years ago. Revisiting it now, I was a bit surprised that I liked it as much as I did. It’s a perfectly serviceable spy thriller with a good pair of performances at its center and several quality sequences. It’s a minor work, for sure, filled with nothing particularly new for the master of suspense, but it’s still an entertaining couple of hours in international espionage.

Professor Michael Armstrong is traveling to Copenhagen for a con...

Marnie

It’s a near miss, I think, a story that mostly gets it right until the end when things both go off the rails a bit and become simply too pat for comfort. Hitchcock’s long history and deep knowledge of production makes it a slick affair on par with anything he had made since the early fifties, but this is an example of where the material didn’t quite feel right for his set tendencies, reminding me a bit in effect of I Confess.

It’s about a woman, Marnie, who makes her living by ripping off her e...

The Birds

This movie has no business working as well as it does. It’s a horror movie about birds that largely stops giving its characters room to grow at the halfway point to focus on pure survival. And yet, it’s got such a good build of tension over the course of the entire film through its final moments that it overcomes the thinness of some of what came before. It should be minor Hitchcock, but by pure force of his talent, he turns a small film into a wonderful entertainment.

Much like Psycho, the mov...

Psycho

This was one of Hitchcock’s experiment films. After the lavish productions of Vertigo and North by Northwest, and while noting the financial success of smaller and cheaper B-movies, he decided that he wanted to make a movie for less than a million dollars. He hired a lot of the crew from his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and largely unknown actors like Vera Miles (who had played Henry Fonda’s wife in The Wrong Man) and Anthony Perkins. Another thing he did to minimize the cost of ...

North by Northwest

Ernest Lehman, the writer of North by Northwest, set out to write the “ultimate Alfred Hitchcock film,” and I think he succeeded. This is probably the most Hitchcockian movie Alfred Hitchcock ever lensed, the summation of a career of obsessions and ideas into one film. It’s his Fanny and Alexander except with Cary Grant, spies, and a chase over Mount Rushmore instead of a Swedish family dealing with their issues.

Roger Thornhill is an advertising executive with two ex-wives and several bartende...

Vertigo

From the opening credits, it’s easy to tell that there’s something darker and weirder about this journey into obsession and control from Hitchcock. The music from Bernard Hermann is haunting. The neon spirals spinning against a black background are a visual representation of the trippy journey to come. And then we get a prologue where we watch our main character Scottie running along rooftops until he’s clinging for his life and another policeman falls to his death trying to help him. Thinking ...