(2 of 4)
There are thrills, wit, cinematic legerdemain here. But anyone who expects to find a string of masterpieces will be disappointed. The Trouble with Harry is a desultory exercise in macabre whimsy and naturalistic acting at its most mannered. The Man Who Knew Too Much, a remake (of Hitchcock's 1934 British thriller) that is 45 minutes longer than the original, languishes in travelogue for its first half, then indulges in frissons that for this director are routine. The technical bravado of Rope (the entire 80-min. film comprises just twelve shots, as opposed to several hundred for the average feature) does not quite justify the homoerotic hamminess of John Dall and Farley Granger as the two college psychopaths. That leaves Rear Window, a delicious entertainment mixing romance, voyeurism, homicide and humor with the purring sensuousness and perfect waxed beauty of the young Grace Kelly, and Vertigo, a gorgeously illustrated text-book of Hitchcock's themes that meets just about every criterion for movie greatness.
It can be risky for a viewer to sweep too many thematic generalizations into this dusty pile of celluloid. Indeed, a cynic would declare that the only thing this quintet has in common is Hitchcock's greed. The film maker always had an acute eye for commerce. He worked in an economically reliable genre with the industry's biggest stars. He would agree to dump a longtime collaborator like Composer Bernard Herrmann (who worked on eight Hitchcock films from 1955 to 1964) if the studio applied pressure. And when asked why he withheld these five films from theaters and TV, he replied, "We wanted more money." It was only after his death that his estate struck a deal with Universal Classics to release them to film fans and scholars.
There is no contradiction between Hitchcock' canny conservatism and his directorial eminence profit and honor went hand in glove. Even his brief cameo appearances (silhouetted in the neon skyline of Rope, for example) are a playful cue to the viewer to watch every frame for tricks and revelations. The qualities that made him the world's best-known moviemaker were precisely the ones that made him one of the best film artists.
Working within the narrow format of the suspense picture, he could experiment with technical effects and psychological extremes. Knowing that his audience was with him, he could take them to disturbing new places. Arguing that "it's only a movie," he could fulfill his ambition to create "pure cinema": the manipulation of universal emotions by camera placement, shot duration, the dramatic use of color, sound and editing. As two future film makers, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, wrote of the director in 1957, "In Hitchcock's work, form does not embellish content, it creates it." Hitchcock, less interested in universal theories than in the international box office, put his artistic aims more matter of factly: "The Japanese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience."