Cinema: The Master Who Knew Too Much

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In the five re-released films, screams are at a minimum. Most of the mayhem—the stabbing in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the strangling in Vertigo, the dismembering in Rear Window, the death in The Trouble with Harry—takes place offscreen. Only the gruesome garroting in Rope is shown to the viewer, and that at the film's beginning. But if the viewer's desire for crime is not satisfied, the character's compulsion for punishment is. In Rope, two bright young men kill a classmate, hide his body in a living-room chest, then throw a party as a way of daring or pleading to be found out. In The Trouble with Harry a corpse, lying in supine complacence on a New England hillside, is discovered by four different people, all convinced they are either murderers or accessories. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, a bickering pair of tourists (James Stewart and Doris Day) allow their son to wander off into a kidnaper's clutches, as a dying man's guilty secret sticks to Stewart ike the swarthy makeup that comes off in lis hands.

Where there is an exhibitionist there must also be a voyeur; in Hitchcock's world they make a perfect sadomasochistic pair. In Rear Window it is a salesman-killer (Raymond Burr) and a photographer with a broken leg (Stewart) who ives across the courtyard. This roving lensman may be immobile for the moment, but he knows how to extract meaning from pictures—and there is something wrong with this one. He turns amateur detective and puts his "leg man" (Kelly) at risk digging holes in a mysterious garden, clambering into second-story windows, even confronting Mr. Bad. Early in the film, the exhibitionist is discovered; at the end, Stewart the voyeur is. And every Peeping Tom in the audience must feel a naked identification with a hero who is terrified and unable to flee

Vertigo takes this Hitchcockian transference of guilt—from criminal to innocent onlooker to movie watcher—one disturbing step further. Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) is another immobilized hero; the former detective's fear of heights had resulted in the death of a policeman. Now an old college chum has put Scottie on the trail of his disturbed wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who believes herself possessed by the spirit of her suicidal great-great-grandmother. Scottie follows Madeleine up and down the hills of San Francisco, a vertiginous setting where even the streets have lost their balance. At first he is the detective tracking his suspect; then he is an infatuated schoolboy duped by glamour; he could also be the moviegoer transfixed by the light on the screen, or a director turning an actress into a fantasy figure or a psychoanalyst falling in love with his patient—falling, always falling, into and out of a dream that keeps slipping beyond his reach. Then, abruptly, Madeleine dies, and Scottie finds himself still in love, in a necrophilic passion for what was or may never have been.

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