We begin with the bottom line: If someone is proposing to show you 10 Alfred Hitchcock movies and the list doesn't include "Juno and the Paycock" and "The Skin Game," it's a good offer.
Lucid and beguiling, rigorous yet playful, filled with unsettling juxtapositions and rapturously sustained camera movements, Hitchcock's work has everything to instruct the avid student (including most practicing filmmakers) and enthrall the viewer.
With only two slightly puzzling exceptions, Seattle Art Museum's winter film series running on the Thursdays between Jan. 12 and March 23, is four-star titles all the way. That means that we get only the peak achievements of Hitchcock's fascinating, pre-Hollywood, 13-year British career.
"The 39 Steps" (Jan. 12) is, if not where it all starts, then where so much that is thrilling and delightful in the films of Alfred Hitchcock starts. Although nominally adapted from the (fine) novel by John Buchan, this 1935 movie borrows only a central idea and then sets off on an itinerary all the director's own. The camera and the viewer share the point of view of a man buying a ticket for a show (!), sidling into his seat and getting swept away on an adventure he never bargained for.
Roy William Neill, who would later direct most of the beloved Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies, was originally slated to do "The Lady Vanishes" (Jan. 19), and the screenplay by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat is such a beauty that the results would almost certainly have been entertaining. Still, Hitchcock made the movie his own, creating such a delicious comedy-mystery that he ended up scoring his first Oscar nomination (1938) and ensuring his employment in Hollywood, to which he'd long aspired.
"Rebecca" (Jan. 26), the director's first American film, became the only Hitchcock movie to win a best-picture Oscar (1940). Producer David O Selznick made sure that this was one adaptation - of Daphne du Maurier's bestselling novel - that didn't stray too far from the original. The title character is already dead when the movie begins, and her successor as "the second Mrs. de Winter" is so terminally tentative that she doesn't even have a first name.
The "Foreign Correspondent" (Feb. 2), is an exhilarating fusion of the spirit of Hitchcock's man-on-the-run comedy-thrillers, Hollywood's superior technical resources and the pervasive, wraparound reality of a world war about to break out.
"Saboteur" (Feb. 9) is a bit of a weak sister in this company, chiefly because of the stellar casting of Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane. Hitchcock got out his "39 Steps," innocent-man-on-the-run-chasing-a-spy-network kit and retooled it in 1942 for a trans-American itinerary from a sabotaged airplane factory in California, through scenic Western locations, to a finale on the Statue of Liberty.
Everybody has a favorite Hitchcock movie. Mine is "Shadow of a Doubt" (Feb. 16), a beautifully textured 1943 study of a serial killer hiding out in an American small town whose denizens never dream there's a monster in their midst. Joseph Cotten is superb as Uncle Charlie, a gracious gentleman of cosmopolitan habits with a love of the vanished past and a bottomless contempt for the normalcy in which he seeks refuge.
François Truffaut deemed "Notorious" (Feb. 23) the greatest of Hitchcock's black-and-white films, and who's to argue? Cary Grant has his most complex role as a CIA type who enlists international party girl Ingrid Bergman to infiltrate a band of Nazis still doing business in postwar (1946) Rio de Janeiro. Ben Hecht wrote the script, and the dialogue is some of the sharpest, and cruelest, ever written for an American film.
"Stage Fright" (March 2), made back in England in 1950, is the other soft entry amid a gallery of masterworks. Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich vie for the affections of man-on-the-run Richard Todd, Michael Wilding is an absurdly courtly police detective, and Alastair Sim (as Wyman's dad) walks off with the movie. The finale features the most decisive separation of reality and illusion Hitchcock ever devised.
The years between "Notorious" and 1951's "Strangers on a Train" (March 9) were bereft of either critical or popular success for Hitchcock, but "Strangers" found him back on his game. The director correctly cites Robert Walker's Bruno Anthony as one of his three finest achievements in creating memorable villains (the others being Cotten's Uncle Charlie in "Shadow of a Doubt" and Rains' Alex Sebastian in "Notorious"). Bruno's the fellow whom tennis pro Guy Haines (Farley Granger) literally bumps into on the New York-to-Washington, D.C., train and who proposes a perfect crime: that they swap murders (Bruno, of Guy's nasty wife; Guy, of Bruno's father) that neither can ever be suspected of.
We end with the movie now generally reckoned to be Hitchcock's most personal and tortuously accomplished film, "Vertigo" (March 23). James Stewart stars as an ex-police detective in forced retirement after a freak experience left him with a permanent case of disabling fear of heights. An old college chum enlists his services in surveilling a wife (Kim Novak) whose strange behavior has him concerned for her safety and stability.
Series tickets go for $65 nonmembers, $58 SAM and MOHAI members; phone 654-3121. MOHAI is at 2700 24th Ave. E., and the parking situation is a lot more congenial than at the museum downtown.
Richard T. Jameson may be reached via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.[[In-content Ad]]
