Let’s skip that part, he says what happens after that? He works with the mind of an intelligent child who gets angry when his adventure story bogs down midway with talk of love, duty, and other abstractions. “Two people talking in a room,” he calls them, and avoids them if he can. Scenes that consist only of conversation bore him. In his final cutting of the script of “The Lady Vanishes,” he carried his single-minded devotion to his story to the point of throwing out the one love scene it seemed to him to slow up the action. It was a lot of trouble and pretty expensive, but Hitchcock thought the story demanded it. This called for the construction of a special boom to carry the camera and the grinding of a lens that could be focussed while the camera was in action. One scene in “The Girl Was Young” was a complicated “crane shot,” in which the camera’s eye went, in a single uninterrupted motion, down the main staircase of a hotel, across the lobby, and into the dining room, finishing with a closeup of a man’s eyes. Nine times out of ten, Hitchcock says, tricky camerawork simply distracts the audience’s attention from the story the tenth time, when he considers an unusual shot to be the best means of making his point, he will demand apparent impossibilities of his technical staff. Sylvia Sidney, for example, was surprised and hurt when she found that her big scene in “The Woman Alone,” the scene in which she stabs her husband, was to consist mostly of a series of closeups showing only her hands. He has many a time had to pacify actors and actresses outraged because he kept the camera on the line of the narrative instead of upon them. This is a modest ambition, but it presents a surprising number of personal and technical problems. All Hitchcock tries to do is tell a story. They have the same simple, inexhaustible interest as the familiar stories of Defoe, Stevenson, and the elder Dumas. Hitchcock’s pictures are melodramas with painstakingly realistic backgrounds. These people count it a poor month in which New York doesn’t offer them at least one Hitchcock revival. On these shores, however, Hitchcock has become the chief support of that sizable group of defeated cinema-goers who attend a new production with the mistrust born of much disillusionment and who would far rather go to see one of their old favorites again. In England, Hitchcock’s compatriots took these films right in their stride they went to see them once, expressed a temperate admiration, and let the matter drop. His latest picture, “The Lady Vanishes,” now completed and awaiting release, seems as likely to survive as any of the rest. Other Hitchcock imports-“Secret Agent,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “The Woman Alone,” and “The Girl Was Young”-also are more or less hardy perennials. “The 39 Steps,” his best-known job of direction, has, in the past three years, been revived thirty-one times by various theatres on Manhattan Island, and is to be shown again this month. The vogue for Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema melodramas is mainly a local phenomenon. (c) Hugo Gellert Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Mary Ryan Gallery, New York. Hugo Gellert, Untitled (Alfred Hitchcock), September 10, 1938.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |