ROPE (1948), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Another Hitchcock film, another nefarious act taken place in seemingly-mundane surroundings: this time, a pair of upper-crust, New York City-types murder their friend in their own apartment, hide the body in a large trunk, and in a sick twist, host a dinner afterward using the trunk as a serving table.

Why commit such an appalling deed in the first place? According to Brandon (John Dall), murder should be reserved for the intellectually and culturally-superior. Given his and fellow perpetrator Philip’s (Farley Granger) refinements – as opposed to their victim’s, who had been an underachieving heir – the act itself was justified. Meanwhile, since they are so smart themselves, they should be able to get away with the crime, even if the trunk has a broken lock making it easy to open.

“Rope” was released in 1948; I don’t know if the source material, a play by Patrick Hamilton, had been a reaction to the mass killings of Jews by the Nazis, but the movie’s message does seem like an appropriate response to the Holocaust. As Brandon and Philip’s former prep school teacher, a character played by James Stewart, asks them, “Did you think you were God?” Do mental, financial, or cultural advantages entitle anyone to deprive another of the right to live and be happy?

Along with being relevant for its time, “Rope” is worth watching just as an exercise in style, as Hitchcock manages to take a screenplay restricted to a single set and wring plenty of tension out of it. Beginning with the murder, moving forward to the dinner party, and ending with Stewart’s detective-like turn, the filmmakers forgo much editing, which makes the movie feel like it’s progressing in real time. Indeed, despite the 80-minute running time, I only counted a handful of clear cuts; otherwise, the camera tracks restlessly around and between rooms in the apartment, and between the foreground and background to keep the experience from stagnating.

By shooting in what seems more or less like real time, however, Hitchcock does the opposite of boring the audience: he raises the tension. Indeed, during the dinner party itself, the camera circulates like another guest, observing the others – a list that includes the victim’s parents, some mutual friends, and the aforementioned former school teacher, who once espoused the same theory that inspired his ex-charges to murder – as they grow increasingly agitated waiting for the heir to arrive, and at not knowing exactly what the dinner party is commemorating. The viewer spends enough time around these characters that their emotional changes feel genuine, from the deceased’s girlfriend’s growing strain at being confronted by an ex-beau, the parents’ mounting worry, Stewart’s character’s growing suspicions, and one of the murderer’s slowly cracking under the strain of guilt.

Hitchcock also throws in a few great camera flourishes, including one shot that uses both foreground and background in tandem: Mrs. Wilson, the housekeeper, walks back-and-forth between the kitchen located at the back of the frame and the serving table at the front. The viewer is invited to watch as she slowly clears away candelabras, silverware, and other items, teased by the knowledge that, once she has finished with those, she’ll put the plates in the trunk, where unbeknownst to her the body is hidden.

Another notable moment is when the camera switches from third-person to first-person, reflecting James Stewart’s perspective as he imagines what Brandon and Philip did with the corpse. In a neat twist that not enough modern directors try, he doesn’t say exactly what he is thinking, not being sure what his former students are capable of, and because he’d rather give the murderers enough of the titular item to hang themselves with. In fact, the ending reinforces the notion a guilty conscience wants to be found out, which may have nothing to do with how intellectually or culturally well-bred one is.

Overall rating: **** (out of ****)

SABOTEUR (1942), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s first movie featuring an all-American cast, “Saboteur” walks a fine line between warning audiences that their enemies are where they least expect, and reminding them the way of the United States is to show compassion and not give in to hysteria.

As in many of the director’s films, an ordinary man finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. Barry Kane (the appealing Robert Cummings) is an aircraft factory worker who witnesses the death of his best friend when a fire breaks out at their plant. It appears a fire extinguisher was sabotaged with gasoline, and Barry is implicated when the individual whom he claims gave it to him cannot be found.

Believing other lives are in danger, he evades the law and journeys from the American southwest to New York City, where one of the director’s most famous set pieces is staged on the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Along the way, Barry also makes a daring escape or two, and finds himself involved with Pat (Priscilla Lane), a woman who initially wants to turn him in.

The movie’s tone successfully alternates between drama, sly humor (during the middle third, billboard signs are used to comment on the action), and mounting dread as a plot to set off a bomb in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is uncovered. However, it is not foreign agents or spies who are the culprits, but the crème-de-la-crème of American society, led by a man named Tobin (Otto Kruger).

The screenplay repeatedly hammers home that money, big California ranches, swimming pools and membership in high society render one impervious to suspicions of terrorism. Meanwhile, average Americans are not only content shielding their social and economic superiors, they’re quick to condemn a relative nobody like Barry, whose alleged crime raises their ire. As Pat says at one point, it’s her “patriotic duty” to turn him in.

With most of mainstream America against him, the protagonist’s only hope lies with outsiders including an old man, whose blindness symbolizes that handing Barry over to the cops would not serve the cause of justice. The argument “innocent until proven guilty” is also made by the leader of a circus sideshow which votes to give our hero a lift. Only a little person ignores the voice of democracy, and he is disparagingly referred to as a “fascist.”

Given there was a war taking place abroad and the uneasy climate at home – treason, after all, became punishable by death – one can understand characters’ decisions not to get involved in Barry’s quest to prove his innocence. But is that what makes a good American, this movie seems to ask. Is it blindly doing what we’re told, going with what newspapers and government agents say unquestioningly, or is it giving someone the benefit of the doubt and not giving in to our insecurities?

Such questions came to the forefront again during the McCarthy witch hunts a decade later, and it would be interesting to see how Hitchcock addressed these issues, if he did so at all. But he deserves credit for doing so here, and for visual touches pointed out by other reviewers, such as introducing the saboteur by having their shadow appear behind a white wall upon which the opening credits are imposed.

Overall rating: *** (out of ****)

TO CATCH A THIEF (1955), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Although he’s been billed as “the Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock is equally adept at fashioning pure escapist entertainment that celebrates its stars and setting. Indeed, “To Catch a Thief,” which stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, is exactly the type of confection that charms and disarms you while you watch it, but doesn’t haunt your sleep the way “Vertigo" does.

The movie stars Grant as John Robie, a retired jewel thief content to prowl about his villa in the south of France. Nicknamed “The Cat,” he once spent time in prison, but found redemption by joining the French resistance during World War II. Although he claims to be out of the game, when a string of diamond thefts begins exciting the local populace, both cops and former comrades immediately suspect “The Cat,” prompting him to try catching the thief himself.

Robie hatches a plan with an ex-war buddy turned restaurant owner: Figure out who the next victim is likely to be, stake them out, and catch the suspect in the act. Inevitably, this brings him into the orbit of a wealthy American widow (Jessie Landis) and her very pretty daughter Frances. As played by Grace Kelly, Frances seems like exactly the kind of icy Hitchcock blonde whose romantic advances are immediately suspect, but oh-so-impossible to resist.

So Robie poses as a lumber magnate from Oregon, which is about as believable as Cary Grant playing a former French resistance fighter. As for the young socialite, she takes a fancy to him immediately, which should have sent up red flags if not for the fact she looks like Grace Kelly. There’s tangible chemistry between the two, but is it just his suave good looks, charm and money that attract her, or something else? Admittedly, it is fun watching Robie reacting to a surprisingly strong-willed woman who, as he puts it, "is used to getting what she wants," especially since in most Hitchcock movies, it's the male lead who's obsessed with the blonde female.

Is he still playing her, or is it the other way around? Such questions, however, make “To Catch a Thief” sound much more complicated and serious than it really is. Even though Hitchcock executes the plot efficiently, and there’s even a twist some viewers may not see coming, and even with his directorial trademarks like sleight of hand present and accounted for, the movie adds up to little more than a series of postcards of the south of France, some pretty costumes and witty dialogue between two Hollywood legends.

But if a lark is what you want in a movie, by all means, go for this. Please enjoy the scenery, which won Robert Burks the Best Cinematography Oscar in 1956.

Overall rating: ***

LIFEBOAT (1944), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

The best compliment that I can give “Lifeboat” is to call it utterly unpredictable. From scene to scene – within scenes, too – I never had a firm bead on where the plot was headed. Like the main characters in the titular craft, who find themselves adrift at sea after a Nazi attack, I also had to let myself be carried along by unseen forces, which in this case were Hitchcock and screenwriter Jo Swirling. There is no other option. Even if you think you know what the “master of suspense” has planned with this adaptation of a short story by John Steinbeck, he will refute your expectations repeatedly. Trust me: Just hang on for the ride.

Part of the film looks like it was shot in front of a projection screen, others on a soundstage or possibly the open water. I wasn’t always aware of the difference, which is a plus, considering that special effects scenes in old movies tend to show seams. But even during what might have been a complicated, trick-heavy sequence – for example, when the small ship gets battered about by a passing storm – “Lifeboat” never seems hokey. Some credit belongs to Hitchcock’s sound technicians, who clearly knew their way around wave crashes and wind-gust whistles. But accolades should also get passed along to the director himself, who pioneered the art of cutting the music off to build an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.

Indeed, the longer “Lifeboat” stays afloat, the more it becomes saturated with the mood of danger. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this will be a departure from standard Hitchcock fare, just because we are removed this time from symbols of civilization, e.g., the passenger car in "The Lady Vanishes." The director continues his pattern of juxtaposing the ordinary with the terrible, of invading what we perceive to be safe sanctuaries. The ocean starts off looking like a placid, thoroughly innocuous place to find oneself, but Hitchcock delves beneath the surface – or shows something emerging up from it, at least – to reveal how illusory our safety is, and how ironic the title choice really was.

Further enhancing the unpredictable nature of the movie is the casting, which is pitch-perfect in one crucial role. I speak, of course, of actor Walter Slezak, who played the Nazi captain who sank the cruise liner everyone had been traveling aboard. Should the others trust him? He claims that he attacked under orders, and has an unassuming, cherubic face to go with charm, intelligence, and nautical experience. Tallulah Bankhead is also terrific as a materialistic socialite who can go from calm to bedlam in two-seconds-flat. But Slezak is the real casting coup. He embodied a recurring Hitchcock model: guile and resourcefulness hidden beneath a gentle-looking exterior. In other words, something terrible disguised as something ordinary.

Overall rating: ***

VERTIGO (1958), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

This has been referred to as Hitchcock’s definitive movie, and having seen it, I think I can understand why. It’s a mystery, which the director was already adept at making, but also a tale of obsession, a theme that resonated throughout his career.

And above all, “Vertigo” is pure cinema, a film that glides along by the sheer power of images and sound. Hitchcock, in top form as both an artist and craftsman, paces the movie to reflect the glacial rhythm of a dream, which is fitting given the plot. Ostensibly, upper-crust wife Kim Novak has become obsessed with the life of her dead ancestor, and spends her days walking around San Francisco in a trance. As Hitchcock draws us into this unusual dilemma, via a retired policeman (Jimmy Stewart) with the titular condition, he frames Novak in establishing shots that feel spare and still to the point of eeriness.

This is a film that really must be experienced. I could describe it in further detail, but I would be required to give away either too much or too little information. I must not do that. All I will say is that “Vertigo” seems to have two halves, which are unified by a sense of romantic helplessness that is heartbreaking. Several writers reportedly worked on the script before Samuel Taylor’s version earned Hitchcock’s approval. The extra care certainly shows; there is great dialogue and a plot twist that, though unexpected, makes sense dramatically as well as thematically.

Finally, one cannot say enough about Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, who rose to the challenge of extremely versatile roles. If there are two movies in “Vertigo,” there are also two characters in the script for both leads. Novak gets to play the requisite icy blonde, but also appears as a non-blonde who may be less enigmatic, if perhaps just as mysterious as her doppelganger. Stewart, meanwhile, is a more surprising double-dip; as expected, he portrays the everyman that viewers readily identify with. Gradually, however, his Detective John “Scottie” Ferguson starts transgressing a few moral and psychological boundaries, becoming someone just as recognizably human, though audience members may choose not to admit it.

Overall rating: **** (out of ****)

THE LADY VANISHES (1938), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

…but the ‘Master of Suspense’ Makes his Presence Felt

Imagine waking up and discovering that someone you know had disappeared. Worse, imagine trying to convince other people, only to be told that the person never existed.

It sounds like the premise of the recent thriller “Flightplan,” but it actually describes a Hitchcock film made more than sixty years earlier. In “The Lady Vanishes,” written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, Margaret Lockwood plays Iris Henderson, an American travelling abroad who stumbles across a conspiracy.

The missing person is a retired governess named Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), whom Iris befriends while staying at a hotel in a small European country. The next day, Iris takes a bump on the head, and Miss Froy comes to her rescue. But shortly after their train leaves the station, the kindly old woman disappears.

Miss Henderson insists she had a companion on the train, but the others in her drawing room recall no such person. Neither can the porter, nor anybody else, from the paranoid banister (Cecil Parker) to the fellows hurrying home to see a cricket match (Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford). Only Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a cadish musician who made a terrible impression the night before, reluctantly believes Iris’ story. While he has never met Miss Froy himself, a particular clue persuades him that foul play is indeed afoot.

As for the reasons that motivated Miss Froy’s kidnapping, let’s just say there is more to her than meets the eye, even as the movie itself has less substance than we might expect. Like some of Hitchcock’s best movies—“North by Northwest” springs to mind—the plot merely serves as a delivery system for the director’s particular brand of thrilling cinema. For a man with such prodigious artistic gifts, Hitchcock certainly had a great instinct for giving the audience what they wanted. In the case of “The Lady Vanishes,” he gives them suspense, laughs, images that linger in the mind. He even throws in a charming romance between the seemingly mismatched Lockwood and Redgrave.

A brain doctor (Paul Lukas), rendezvousing with a terminal patient in Prague, tries to convince Iris that Miss Froy is really a figment of her imagination. Is it possible Iris created her, that she is the result of her bump on the head? Or perhaps, considering those upcoming nuptials with an aristocrat in England, Iris is simply preoccupied. Could she be distracting herself, the better to ignore her dread? She admits to not loving him, but her father wants to put his coat of arms next to the company name.

For a while, Hitchcock teases us with the possibility that Miss Froy is indeed a figment of Iris’ mind. During the first scene, which takes place in the hotel lobby, she enters, briefly interacts with the hotel clerk, and then exits through the front door. Hardly anybody seems to notice her. Stranger still, Hitchcock has one of his technicians—probably sound man Sydney Wiles—turn off the boom mikes so that the music and some select noises overlap any spoken dialogue.

The effect is slightly eerie; and the director, superlative craftsman that he was, orders the actors to stay relatively still until Miss Froy leaves. Ultimately, he manipulates image and sound to completely undercut Dame Whitty’s presence. But something about her lingers in the moments after she leaves, like the remnants of a faded memory. Then the rest of the actors start moving, more sounds appear on the audio track, characters recite their lines, and things pick up.

Meanwhile, any doubts we may have about the disappeared woman’s nature only persist to a certain point, then the race to find her begins. Naturally, villains toss in a few unexpected curves to throw off the amateur sleuths, such as a doppelganger for Miss Froy. While her facial features don’t bear much resemblance, she wears a similarly colored outfit, and claims to be the one who helped Iris earlier. Iris insists that this newly emerged woman is not her friend. However, the train has yet to take on new passengers, save for the doctor’s patient in a gurney, and the manifest shows the same number of people.

So if the woman isn’t Miss Froy, why does she pretend that she is? And how did she manage to board the train in the first place, without either Iris or Gilbert spotting her? This is the most satisfying mind-bender in the entire movie, but to Hitchcock’s credit, he finds a way to explain it satisfactorily.

Another thing he does well is portray Iris and Gilbert as “everyman” heroes. Regular joes can show formidable intelligence, but the brain must serve as their primary weapon. The director seems to understand this; whenever the two stars have to get physical, Hitchcock boxes out the action in a clumsy, slapsticky, but believable way. If an exception exists, it is the sequence towards the end, when Gilbert climbs out the window and makes his way along the side of the train.

The camera shoots him from outside the locomotive. As he dangles between two windows, an oncoming train nearly smashes him. While this seems a bit forced, given that Redgrave’s character is primarily funny and romantic, one cannot argue that the resulting shot is a jolter. Hitchcock, who would create some truly memorable compositions and juxtapositions in future, better movies—a few of which also involved trains—was definitely on the right track this time.

“We’re not in England now.”

Indeed, the characters in “The Lady Vanishes” have boarded a train to Hitchcock-land. Here, unspeakable acts occur in places associated with “safe” feelings by the audience. Remember “Psycho,” and the notorious scene of Janet Leigh getting stabbed in the shower? It took theater audiences completely by surprise, since no one expected such a deed to occur in a clean bathroom setting. It’s not exactly a dark alleyway, where people get killed all the time.

Throughout his career, the effectiveness of Hitchcock’s suspense movies have had to do with confounding the audience’s expectations. The same way that the virginal white porcelain of the Bates motel held a certain unspoiled purity, the passenger rail in “The Lady Vanishes” gives off a cozy, hospitable vibe. In a place such as this, travelers and business-people enjoy comforts resembling home. One can purchase a drawing room with cushioned seats, or drink hot tea in the dining car. And someone like Miss Froy, travelling across the European continent, regularly finds yourself in the company of fellow British citizens.

As viewers, we are meant to ask ourselves, How can someone disappear from a place like this? Especially considering the presence of other subjects of the crown, who are also away from the sovereign state. One would expect countrymen to look out for one another, that nothing nefarious could befall an Englishwoman in the near-constant presence of her own brethren.

But herein lies much of the “The Lady Vanishes”’ humor: How these British civilians—even when they’re no longer in England—expect a certain standard of decorum to be upheld. As a result of their stiff upper lips, Miss Froy’s disappearance doesn’t arouse any outrage. After all, why should they waste their rancor on something that simply cannot happen to an English citizen? Like twits, they assume she must not be real, otherwise she would be taking her tea in the dining car, not causing a ruckus throughout the train.

This type of naivete especially applies to the pair of cricket enthusiasts, who hide in their cabin to avoid being questioned by Iris. These two played no part in the actual scheme to disappear the lady. However, they fear any answers they give will only lead to further inquiry, which might prevent them from reaching their cricket match.

Therefore, even though they had a conversation with Miss Froy, they agree with the brain doctor and Iris’ cabin mates, who say the missing woman must be a figment of the poor girl’s imagination. As one of the gentlemen puts it, “An Englishwoman doesn’t just disappear into thin air.” Indeed, Miss Froy did not. However, these two cricket buffs have the equation all wrong: it is possible for Miss Froy to be missing, and still be an actual person; it is possible for Miss Froy to be an Englishwoman, and to have disappeared from the train. But neither gentleman believes that one or the other condition can exist independently.

*** Warning! The following contains information of a SPOILOUS nature! *** Even after the vanished lady returns, they refuse to accept what happened to her. Iris and Gilbert try to explain, and the old woman herself clearly looks worked over. But their reply is fairly dismissive. “My dear chap, you must have gotten the wrong end of the stick somewhere,” says one.

“Yes, these things just don’t happen,” says the other.

This misguided sense of immunity nearly leads to comic tragedy. Prior to the film’s climactic scene, Gilbert tries to warn everyone in the dining car that they have been detached from the rest of the train, and are now headed towards a trap. But even the most obvious evidence, such as how the car is rolling backward in the direction they just came from, fails to have an effect. “There’s nothing left of the train beyond the sleeping car,” Gilbert insists.

“There must be,” one of the cricket enthusiasts replies. “Our bags are in the first class carriage.”

Overall rating: **** (out of ****)