My summer with hitchcock

Relocated Winnipegger would rather watch films about depravity than appreciate time in city of joy, light

BOB KOTYK

ILLUSTRATION ALLAN LORDE

My first full summer out of Manitoba at school in Montreal resulted in a couple of life-changing developments, all of them more or less unexpected in that way that can only mean I secretly willed them into fruition. The first was that I became acquainted with a city where staying indoors for any length of time means missing out on yet another great concert, ignoring one of the ubiquitous seasonal festivals, not drinking coffee in a small, charming café, and forgoing a stroll through wonderful little neighbourhoods filled with precocious immigrant children instead of 7-Elevens and car dealerships and Montana’s franchises. The second major life-altering development, which may or may not be related, was that I sat in my apartment for several months straight and watched every available film directed by Alfred Hitchock.

Now since Hitchcock himself was most certainly a believer in the adage that the devil finds work for idle hands, and since underneath his diligently controlled exterior was a gaseous whirlpool of marinating demons, Hitchcock’s lifelong output was extraordinarily frenzied, his filmography (auteur status notwithstanding) uniquely varied. Meaning that, taken as a whole, the Hitchcock oeuvre (at 53 films over 54 years) can be not only daunting, but outright impossible to sift through for the true masterpieces among the disappointments.

As with most great artistic geniuses, though, it’s difficult to dismiss the minor works when they exhibit such tantalizing connections to the more unimpeachable classics that follow in the catalogue. At their worst, in other words, these so-called Hitchcock “failures” possess an experimental quality; they are run-throughs that gesture toward the same cluster of obsessions that make Hitchcock’s films so uncommonly personal.

The Paradine Case, for example, is a 1947 film so dry that the chief question posed to the viewer throughout its arduous 125 minutes is whether or not Gregory Peck’s wife can still love him after he’s expressed mild, easily mastered interest in another woman. (Answer: sure.) But the film’s tension (such as it is) presents a loose blueprint for what becomes, featuring a more appropriate lead (Jimmy Stewart, exhibiting his post-war depravity): Vertigo, with that film’s examination of an all-consuming obsession that reshapes and emboldens and destroys those who happen to fall under its sway.

Some of these lesser films are rescued in part by Hitchcock’s actors. Charles Laughton starred in two duds with the master of suspense, including 1939’s Jamaica Inn, Hitchcock’s last British film. In it, one of only a few period costume dramas that Hitchcock ever directed, Laughton — porcine and snarling — plays Sir Humphrey Pengallan, a conniving aristocrat and piracy conspirator operating off England’s wild western shores. Most critics mark it out as a miserable bore, but Laughton is such a scene-stealing, mammoth artist in his own right as well as such a convincing onscreen representative for Hitchcock himself (in Laughton, never was there an actor, like the director, who the camera both despised and adored in every frame), the result is there is little to dislike about the film.

And then there are all of the just- OK Hitchcock films, the ones that you would feel bad about watching with your girlfriend/boyfriend or your family, say, because you know that at the video store they wanted to cruise straight for the new release section and rent Pride and Prejudice or 36 hours of Lost to watch in succession, but that they were callously needled into lingering near that filmic ghetto called the “classics” section. And though there’s nothing especially wrong with Murder! or Saboteur or Under Capricorn, the prospect of forcing them upon someone who is just trying to relax and fall asleep comfortably mid-film won’t win you any friends.

Watching Hitchcock truly fail, however, is made even more uncomfortable by the fact that he always seems to know that he’s failing, and in a move designed to preserve his omnipresent sense of control over a picture, he can’t help himself from actually acknowledging this onscreen, subtly, within his signature cameo appearances.

In the critically panned Torn Curtain from 1966, for example, which is actually very good if not just plain odd and occasionally miscalculated (but almost always in an interesting way), Hitchcock appears seated in a hotel lobby with a baby crapping on his lap. In disgust, the assiduously tidy director pushes the infant as far away from himself as possible. (In reality, Hitchcock hated bodily fluids like vomit and feces.) The scene presents a bawdy sight gag, but one that safeguards Hitchcock’s knowingness in the face of what was then perceived to be an outright fiasco: his baby (the movie) is out of control, has become a dirty, irksome nuisance, and the result is that before the film has even started we are presented with its director pushing it away in disgust.

The act reminds me of watching my father play baseball, a sport that he knows he’s terrible at, and the amused, self-protecting glances that he would spend more time flashing to my sister and I from first base than at actually attempting to coalesce with his teammates on the field. “Ha ha!” his grins would desperately try to suggest. “A mere trifle!” Then he would drop a ball or it would whiz past him or he would strike out, and he would look at us again with the same calculated nonchalance. “No matter! Just a game, don’t you know!”

Upon moving to Quebec, my problem was that compulsive film viewing can provide an even greater capacity for insulation than anything attempted by Hitchcock or my father, simply because it involves not doing anything. There is no risk to begin with, no initial leap to make, and nothing, certainly, that requires the production of endearing little defence mechanisms mid-enterprise. Cinephilia, in my experience, can become a kind of shelter on its own, and in some ways my self-imposed hibernation in Montreal was brought about by precisely this kind of preservation instinct: in a city of intense vibrancy, part of me chose (or needed) to mark off a space that was my own, a little Manitoba to be miserable or at least safe in.

It was there, however, that I encountered a side-effect to this scheme, which was Hitchcock himself. That is, the most successful Hitchcock films are only disguised as escapist fantasies, but are really something more disturbing and thought-provoking, providing a mirror for a kind of selfexamination that often reveals (in my case) psychological blemishes. My security bubble, in other words, was rigged to backfire, and the innate perversities of films like Rear Window, Psycho, and Vertigo were all laying in wait, ready to wrench back the shower curtain and make their assault.