We’ve all been there—late at night in a crowded bar, people have had a few to many, a boast is bandied about, and before you know it, a brawl erupts over which was Hitchcock’s greatest decade, the thirties or the forties? (A minority faction fights for the fifties, and that guy dressed in black smoking Turkish cigarettes – we’ll call him Jeff – mumbles some cool confidence about the twenties in the direction of a very young woman, who seems impressed.)
If forced to choose, we give the forties the nod. Which is no knock against the thirties, a decade we’ve already showered with praise (so kindly put down that barstool). And a case can be made for the fifties: eleven films, including three out-and-out masterpieces, two ambitious experiments, and four fine entertainments. Hmmm. Having typed that out, I guess we’ll have to get to that decade at some point as well, but nevertheless—it’s not the decade we’re going to the mat for. (Our user’s guide to all of Hitchcock’s features can be reviewed here.) The forties it is, so let’s have at them. Hitchcock released a dozen features over the course of those ten years, and also made two short films in 1944 on behalf of the French Resistance.
How good were Hitchcock’s forties? Consider that Rebecca – a brilliantly made film, worthy of praise and even reverence that was nominated for thirteen academy awards, winning for best picture and best cinematography – didn’t even crack our top five. (Which it might easily have, if only for the invariably delightful presence of Mr. George Sanders.) Nor did Rope, a divisive film that we are quite fond of, or the beloved by many Suspicion, which, it must be acknowledged, never much moved us. Other noteworthy also-rans include Saboteur – an utterly engaging romp with several brilliant sequences – and The Paradine Case, which rewards close attention. (We avert our eyes from Under Capricorn, which counts among its champions some very serious critics, but so does Dylan’s dud Self-Portrait—and our take on both Capricorn and Portrait are neatly summarized by the first line of Greil Marcus’ Rolling Stone review of the latter.)
But we digress. The 1940s. Heckuva decade, in many ways (fascism was on the rise in the thirties and crushed in the forties, fingers cross on history repeating itself)—and herewith our AH Top 5:
5) Foreign Correspondent (1940): This captivating spy thriller was made at a precarious moment, with Europe at war but the reluctant Americans still on the sidelines (thus the urgent monologue that ends the film). But it’s still a great movie, with Joel McCrea leading a sharp cast (which includes another marvelous turn by George Sanders.) Foreign Correspondent also distinguished by innovative shots from back when directors were forced to think about complex challenges, not green-screen them (watch the water come through the windshield). The film was one of several forties Hitchcock films which featured particularly strong female protagonists (Laraine Day as Carol Fisher); recent accounts credit Joan Harrison, a member of Hitchcock’s inner circle and one of Correspondent’s screenwriters, with contributing to this trend.
Assassins and Umbrellas in Foreign Correspondent
4) Spellbound (1945): Pop Freudianism has become laughably discredited, but it was taken very seriously in the forties, and informed especially by the psychic traumas brought home by battle-scarred postwar veterans, as well as anxieties about the changing gender roles accelerated by the needs of the wartime economy. So hold your chuckles and enjoy Ingrid Bergman, playing what men of a certain age would have called a “woman psychologist,” who is charged with getting to the bottom of the problems suffered by Gregory Peck—a man whose dreams are so unnerving they were designed by Salvidor Dali. (A Selznick production, it was written by Ben Hecht with music by Miklós Rózsa, a reminder that even “An Alfred Hitchcock film” often garnered some of its shine from the important contributions of talented collaborators.) Spellbound was also a touchstone for the Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock pastiche High Anxiety.
3) Shadow of a Doubt (1943): Generally understood be to Hitchcock’s personal favorite, for bringing the undercurrent of darkness to white picket fence America (note the black smoke that accompanies an arriving train). Hitchcock clearly has Americana in his sights—with a screenplay by non-other than Thornton “Our Town” Wilder. Another wartime allegory (the world is more dangerous – and more proximate – than innocent, insular townsfolk understand), Shadow of a Doubt also features that classic Hitchcockian them of duality, here in the form of much beloved “Uncle Charlie” (Joseph Cotton) and his young, admiring niece “Charlie” (Teresa Wright)—the only person in sleepy Santa Rosa who slowly comes to realize that Uncle Charlie is in fact the “Merry Widow Murderer,” wanted back east for a series of unspeakable crimes. Ebert’s terrific “great movie” essy on this one is well worth reading.
Uncle Charlie looms at the top of very Hitchcockian staircase
2) Lifeboat (1944): Lifeboat fared poorly with critics and at the box-office (audiences at the time preferred their war-movies simplistic and transparently patriotic), and to this day it has a middling reparation in assessments of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. But Lifeboat, from a John Steinbeck story, is a masterpiece: a bravura exercise in limited location shooting featuring a very strong ensemble cast; a well-paced entertainment with something to say—about class, race, and American ambivalence about European power politics—and, most important, a stern (and timeless) warning that if left-leaning liberal civilizationalists don’t stop fighting among themselves, the fascists will win. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, with uncharacteristic insight, saw a “tense and vital drama . . . absorbing in its revelations of character and its brilliantly pictorialized details.” Lifeboat, he assessed, was “startling in its broad implications . . . a trenchant and blistering symbolization of the world and its woes today.” Yet like many, he found Hitchcock’s call for the squabbling democracies to unite against relentlessly purposeful fascism too critical of the “decadent democracies” and questioned whether “such a picture, with such a theme, is judicious at this time.” It was, and still is. All that, and salacious Tallulah Bankhead wardrobe stories, too. See this movie.
Walter Slezak, Hume Cronyn, and Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat
1) Notorious (1946): Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude (“Mother . . . I am married to an American agent”) Rains are nothing short of spectacular in this, one of the greatest films ever made. I don’t have a novel or heterodox take on this one, so please enjoy this discussion of one of Hitchcock’s most famous shots (anticipated by his crane shot in Young and Innocent ten years earlier), appreciations from Janet Maslin, and also Samuel Wigley for the British Film Institute, and much more here, including relevant and informative excerpts from the Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews.
Claude Rains needs some help from his mother
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman share something less than a groovy kind of love