Shy master of anxious moments

Press, 14 April 1979, Page 17

Shy master of anxious moments

Hitch: The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock. By John Russell Taylor. Faber and Faber. 320 pp. $17.10. (Reviewed by Stan Darling) A girl is terrified. In the dark streets of Montmartre, a hidden menace is dogging her steps. She tries to elude pursuit, or whatever lurks in the night. But she is caught, dragged down, has a choking sensation that must be death. Her dentist finally frees her from those images of terror, by taking away the laughing gas. That was an early sketch by the most visible director in the cinema’s short history, Alfred Hitchcock. He did it for the house magazine of a firm manufacturing electrical cables, where he worked as a clerk. It would be several years before he brought his visions Of crime and punishment to the silent screen, at first as the drawer of titles between the pictures. Soon, Hitchcock became “that talented boy” of early British films. At age 80 today, he is working on yet another project. Hitchcock has been stereotyped in many minds as the master of suspense, and that is partly his own doing. He has always been much more than that, introducing innovative camera and dramatic techniques in films that were copied by later directors. In the same way, the young director was influenced by the lighting and atmosphere of early German films. John Russell Taylor is a former film critic of “The Times”, of London, and this is the “authorised biography” of Hitchcock. It is not the most complete book on his methods, nor a lengthy analysis of his many films, but it is the first book that tries to show the personal life running behind those films. That was probably a difficult task for Taylor, since Hitchcock is a shy man with a public persona that differs from his self-conception. Taylor’s book is a good companion to Francois Truffaut's “Hitchcock on

Hitchcock,” the lengthy interviews of the 1960 s in which one director probed another’s style and reason for doing things. A third book in the Hitchcock studies is the critic Raymond Durgnat’s “The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock,” which contains a film-bv-film analysis of his work. All the same, Taylor’s “Hitch” is probably the most accessible introduction to a man who has provided highly entertaining, frightening and thought-provoking moments on film. For the young director, things were interesting from the start. Production of “The Pleasure Garden,” his first silent picture, sounds like a string of situation comedy scenes as the moneyshort director shepherds his crew around Europe. At one point, the central character was supposed to swim out into the sea, drown his wife, then carry her body to shore, saying he had been unable to rescue her. But the actress playing his wife could not go

swimming for anatomical reasons, and the nearest available replacement was somewhat heavier. The leading man kept dropping her body inter the Mediterranean, unable to heft it ashore, much to the delight of passersby. Because his career has spanned' so many years and so many films, Hitchcock could hardly have avoided low ebbs and critical failures. He kept coming back With the same themes and unusual story ideas, Often taking a popular novel and completely changing all but the central theme. Many of his Villians have been more likeable chaps than the heroes. There is still a question about whether that indicates moral ambiguity, or reflects “a born tease’s instinctive grasp of how to string an audience along, or the timid man’s joyful realisation that people can be manipulated to accept almost anything you want them to accept,” Taylor writes. The director wants audiences to experience emotions because of what they see on the screen, not necessarily because of the emotions shown by actors. Doris Day cried unexpectedly over the kidnapping Of her son in “The Man Who Knew Too Much” remake. Her explanation was good enough for him; he let her cry, although he preferred it otherwise. Hitchcock sometimes waited a long time to get ideas into movies. At the end of “The Secret Agent,” a black-and-white early film, he had the screen suddenly turn red as a train crashed, and showed the film actually burning as a result of the traumatic events. That bit was taken out when a preview audience was befuddled, thinking something had simply gone wrong with the projector. Years later, at the end of “Spellbound,” another black-and-white production, the evil psychiatrist turned his gun away from Ingrid Bergman and towards himself. The blast made the screen go red, and Hitchcock had finally disposed of another trick.