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Alfred Hitchcock’s Top 2. Films, Ranked. Debates about Alfred Hitchcock have been raging for decades. Was he a cruel genius who treated his actors like cattle, torturing his icy blondes’ performances out of them? Selznick, who taught him a great deal, points out David Thomson in “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.” Over 5. Cary Grant, especially, excelled at playing charismatic men whose motives and true nature were open to interpretation, from “Suspicion” to “Notorious.”Hitchcock was a true artist in the sense that he often pursued his muse even when projects without obvious commercial promise were not supported by the studios.
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But he always balanced the occasional experimental flop with plenty of mainstream hits. He didn’t care that his obsession with genre elements– that are so prized as commercially “safe” today–were not approved by the Hollywood establishment, which deemed them B movies. He proved the suits wrong over and over again, because he understood better than any filmmaker perhaps until Steven Spielberg what audiences really want.
Clearly, he enjoyed shocking and frightening them. And more than most filmmakers, Hitchcock took into his control the development and production of his stories, and embraced television as a medium, which helped, along with his film cameos, to create a persona who was recognizable by the public.
One of the earliest to instinctively understand the power of branding, “Hitch” became the most famous director who ever lived. He had an instinct for self- promotion, putting himself in his own movie trailers. He created a wry comedic persona –the director who winks at the audience as he sets out to scare the bejeezus out of them.
Do we defend Hitchcock’s use of rear screen projection until the bitter end, when it was no longer in vogue? I remember laughing at the fake road curves in “Family Plot.” But all in all, that stubborn habit was a minor transgression. As a restored version of Hitchcock’s voyeuristic classic “Rear Window” returns to circulation, the TOH gang ranks the top 2. Hitchcock films. Yes, we leave out some amazing movies. Feel free to tell us where we went wrong–especially in our choice of Number One.
Do we go along with Sight and Sound’s consensus choice? Read it and weep. Moonlight”; George Clooney has “Monuments Men.” Everybody’s got something to hide and, for Hitchcock, it’s this hammily acted courtroom- drama- meets- psychological thriller starring Gregory Peck (“Spellbound”), Alida (“The Third Man”) Valli, Ann Todd, Charles Laughton and Hitchcock regular Leo G. Carroll, all directed by someone calling himself Alfred Hitchcock. In actuality, Hitchcock was at the end of his contract with David O. Selznick (who big- footed it all over the production), and really just wanted out.
As will anyone who sits down to watch the results.—John Anderson. But it’s Tallulah Bankhead as cynical reporter Connie with her marvelously deep- throated line readings (“Dying together’s even more personal than living together”) and glamorous accessories that float away one by one that keeps this dramatic rig afloat. The wartime premise allows Hitchcock to forthrightly address the issue of God’s role in humanity’s fate. Meanwhile, Connie often surprises both her boat mates and the audience with her spontaneous actions, such as when she kisses Gus before his leg must be amputated or reapplies her lipstick as a kind of cosmetic life preserver.—Susan Wloszczyna. This variation on the familiar theme of a man (then- rising- star Jon Finch) wrongly accused of a crime as a so- called “Necktie Strangler” stalks London was his first British production in ages and took advantage of the era’s loosening of graphic restraint. Overlook the stodgier aspects of the plotting and instead savor how Hitchcock portrays twisted appetites both carnal (psychopathic fruit vendor Barry Foster sexually attacks his female prey before choking them) and culinary (Alec Mc. Cowen’s police inspector is forced to dine on his wife’s horrifically inedible gourmet creations).
There are numerous brilliantly staged scenes often employing silence. But the sequence that gets me every time is when Foster realizes that the victim he stuffed into a potato sack and tossed on a truck filled with spuds is clutching his signature tie pin.
His desperate attempt to yank it from the clutches of a stiff corpse that involves breaking a finger is macabrely echoed in a parallel shot of Mc. Cowen’s wife snapping a breadstick.—Susan Wloszczyna. Hitchcock swears “every word is true.” While that may be true, the film’s bold and impressionistic style gives “The Wrong Man” the quality of a dream. Henry Fonda conveys mountains of disquiet and frustrations as a string bassist caught in a Kafkaesque legal merry- go- round whose desperate plan to borrow against his wife’s (Vera Miles) life insurance goes hideously awry and lands him in jail. Hitchcock’s prisons and courtrooms crawl with shadows and silhouettes, with composer Bernard Herrmann pulling back on his usual musical flair to create a musical score whose subtly feels subversive for a 1.
In retrospect, this was likely too grim and depressing a noir for the masses. Plot with Jon Favreau. Cummings is among the least convincing actors ever; Lloyd may have thought the condition contagious.) This is transitional Hitchcock: His first U. S. Instead of the relatively edgy Madeleine Carroll and the great Robert Donat, Hitchcock has Cummings and Priscilla Lane as well as a dramatic conflict he would revisit his entire career – that of the wrongly accused against an only vaguely defined force of evil. In “Saboteur,” it’s all a bit obvious. The foreign villains here are sadly one- note.
But the standout performance comes from an unexpected source: Musical comedy star Doris Day in a rare dramatic role. She manages to impressively break the mold of the impassive Hitchcock blonde by nakedly expressing the agony of a mother whose child has been snatched away. She is the instrument that drives the film’s terrific centerpiece where a crashing cymbal during a concert performance is the intended signal for the killer to shoot his target. And the lovely sequence where Day serenades her child as he prepares for bedtime with the Oscar- winning song “Que Sera, Sera” is bookended by a reprise of the tune that she bravely performs at an embassy to alert her hidden- away child that she is near. A tawdry thriller of adultery and blackmail, “Dial M” offers Kelly the plum role of a socialite wife whose jealous husband (Ray Milland), learning of her affair with a writer (Robert Cummings), coerces a criminal into offing her. But of course, everything goes magnificently awry. It’s pure entertainment, less freighted with the Freudian clues and codes of Hitchcock’s later films, but nonetheless hair- splittingly suspenseful.
It’s funny how the film’s star, Joel Mc. Crea, has faded from public consciousness in a way that, say, Cary Grant hasn’t: Mc. Crea had Grant- like versatility with both comedy and drama, could summon up the folksiness of a Gary Cooper and was as virile as any star in Hollywood. As Johnny Jones – redubbed “Huntley Haverstock” by a publisher (Harry Davenport) who thinks it sounds better – he suggests Tom Sawyer, Secret Agent: When a Dutch diplomat (Oscar nominee Albert Bassermann) is shot on the rainy steps of a cathedral- like conference hall in Amsterdam, it provides for one of Hitchcock’s iconic moments – a crane shot that shows, not the fleeing assassin, but the ripple he causes through a crowd of umbrellas — and sets Huntley on the trail of agents intent on setting the world aflame. Is it her fanciful imagination that runs away with her, as she uncovers his gambling and other secrets, or is her gut telling her to be afraid, very afraid? Hitchcock snakes us through the ebbs and flows of their evolving emotions, manipulating us at every hairspin turn.