Few things must have bothered Alfred Hitchcock more (besides the studio heads and bluenoses telling him what was allowed on screen) than being put in a box. Many great mainstream directors face the same fate. Steven Spielberg? Total square, a kiddie popcorn guy (never mind Munich, The Post, and so on). Martin Scorsese? Gangster moviemaker (disregarding Kundun, Silence, Hugo, and more). Unlike those directors, Hitchcock presented too much of a moving target. Even the laziest montage of his greatest hits would cover a wide enough range that the only real common denominator would be style, suspense, and surprise.
Far from lazy, Alfred Hitchcock: The Iconic Film Collection delivers a delectable sampling of the director in the late bloom of his career. These six films—Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963)—provide everything from spiffy and urbane romantic crime melodramas to a road-trip espionage thriller, an eerie take on the apocalypse, a chilly study in obsession, and a proto-slasher film. It’s a staggering collection. No other mainstream director ever took on so many genres so successfully and in such a short time.
Alfred Hitchcock’s career spanned roughly 50 years, starting with his silent film apprenticeship in the 1920s and ending with the dark farce The Family Plot (1976). After hitting his stride with wiry thrillers like the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), he stayed in the top rank of popular filmmakers for three decades. During that time, he knocked out a film or so every year. Unlike most Hollywood auteurs the French fanboys at Cahiers du Cinéma (nicknamed the “Hitchcocko-Hawksiens”) celebrated for their ability to marry commerce and creativity, until the mid-1960s, Hitchcock never had a fallow period or spent time in movie jail for delivering a bomb. (The near-obsessive adulation of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd is well-captured in Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut, a treat of a documentary included on the Psycho disc.)
Alfred Hitchcock managed that feat because, as The Iconic Film Collection shows, he could spot material that was right for his talents and how to create a hook to sell each film. The M. Night Shyamalan of his day, he was a committed showman who wanted the audience to think, “What’s he got up his sleeve this time?” (Look at the trailer for Psycho, where Hitchcock tours the audience around the Bates Motel set and starts describing what happens in the film only to keep stopping himself with a mock squeamishness designed to ignite curiosity about the imagined gruesome details.)
Though his career dated to when German Expressionists were cutting edge, he was determined to keep up with current trends, being inspired in the 1960s by directors like Antonioni. That curiosity and dexterity kept Hitchcock in play for decades, working through the sound transition and shifting from black-and-white to color.
These six films show Alfred Hitchcock at the peak of his skill. They also show an artist changing with the times. From 1954 to 1963, he shifted from the gleaming star vehicles that defined the high Hollywood style in the postwar era to nervier works that used the machinery of image-making to disrupt and confound. Themes repeat—rooftop chases, domineering mothers, a punishing sense of guilt, hypnotic blondes, scrappy and danger-prone romances—though always in fresh configurations. Violent death is present in each film. Getting from Anna Thorwald’s off-screen killing in Rear Window to Psycho’s Marion Crane being slashed to ribbons in a shower as composer Bernard Hermann’s violins screech and trill is like graduating from an Agatha Christie mystery to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The transition in Hitchcock’s oeuvre is fascinating to witness. The earliest films, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, are star-driven blockbusters of the highest caliber. However, unlike many such projects of the time, they were not complacent. This is particularly true of Rear Window, which may be the decade’s greatest American film.
Tightly scripted with clockwork precision and garlanded with bon mots (“She’s too perfect, she’s too talented, she’s too beautiful, she’s too sophisticated, she’s too everything but what I want”), it sticks the star (James Stewart) in a wheelchair and he never leaves his apartment. Alfred Hitchcock’s gamble was that filmgoers are, by definition, voyeurs, and so would be as fascinated as Stewart’s photographer character L.B. Jeffries was by the window-framed dramas in the apartments facing his across a Greenwich Village courtyard. (Rear Window was a very of-the-moment film; even a year later, it might have seemed less realistic because everybody would have been watching television instead of the neighbors.)
To keep things percolating, L.B.’s fashion editor girlfriend (Grace Kelly) swans in like a plucky Park Avenue pixie wearing grand Edith Head dresses and bringing takeout from 21 Club so she and L.B. can dish about how the hulking salesman across the way murdered his wife. The mix of formal inventiveness forced by self-imposed spatial restrictions—a game Hitchcock liked to play, as with the far darker apartment-bound Rope (1948)—and the cozy mystery playfulness he used in Dial M for Murder (1954) remains addictive.
Kelly is also a key ingredient in To Catch a Thief. Again playing a high-society beauty with several trunks’ worth of eye-popping gowns by Head, this time she’s given more space to maneuver, outrunning the flics by whipping her ice-blue roadster around hairpin turns high above the French Riviera and making her companion, ex-jewel thief John “The Cat” Robie (Cary Grant), squirm. To Catch a Thief is the most conventional film in the set and the only one that could potentially have been directed by somebody else. While the plotting—suspected of a rash of robberies, Robie tries to clear his name by catching the real thief, who is using his old tactics—is a bit stodgy, the slyly flirtatious Kelly-Grant patter and gorgeous Vistavision travelogue scenery go a long way.
Viewed by many at the time as a departure for Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo can be seen as a return to form. Instead of another high-gloss thriller or murder mystery, the film is redolent of his spookier works like Rebecca (1940) or Spellbound (1945), with a psychoanalytic frame instead of gothic romanticism.
As Scottie Ferguson, Stewart plays the frozen, traumatized opposite of his scampish Rear Window character. A policeman-turned-P.I. crippled by guilt and vertigo after the death of another officer during a rooftop chase, Ferguson falls into obsession after being hired to follow an enigmatically haunted and haunting blonde Madeline (Kim Novak).
Vertigo is a static but still modern-feeling film, rendering San Francisco gorgeously ghostly, a lost-in-the-fog city perfect for Scottie and Madeline’s somnambulist wanderings. Both Cool and Camp, the film is a coiled ouroboros of manias in which the protagonist is less a hero than a penitent trapped by a desire to replicate something that never was. The plot’s twists are not cliffhangers but tweaks in the porous reality of Scottie’s perceptions. A hypnotizing experience that is transcendent or sleep-inducing depending on the viewer, Vertigo also amplifies some of the filmmaker’s tropes to nearly self-satirizing heights (at one point, Scottie’s bespectacled, ever-pining Gal Friday tells him not to worry, “Mother’s here”).
Returning to a style Alfred Hitchcock could deliver with ease, North by Northwest riffs on two of his 1956 films—the location-hopping espionage thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much and mistaken identity noir The Wrong Man—while also pulling heavily from an earlier hit, The 39 Steps (1935). This one starts with New York ad exec Roger Thornhill (Grant) getting mistakenly kidnapped at gunpoint from the Plaza’s Oak Room bar and later racing across the country to stop villain James Mason in a showdown atop the presidential monument at Mount Rushmore.
The set pieces remain standouts, including the legendary crop-duster assassination scene (a spectacular construction of tension and landscape with an almost Eisenstein-ian rigor). Also, Mason’s lackadaisical iniquity feels like a template for so many imitators who followed. Yet North by Northwest is almost more enjoyable for the snappy Ernest Lehman dialogue, particularly when given to Grant: “I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives, and several bartenders that depend on me, and I don’t intend to disappoint them all by getting myself ‘slightly’ killed.”
Ending with a literal cliffhanger (itself a joke of sorts), North by Northwest was the last time Alfred Hitchcock delivered a big success of a film with stars on the marquee and an A-lister behind the typewriter. His major works that followed either featured lesser-known leads or stars ill-suited to the material (see Sean Connery in 1964’s Vertigo-ish misfire Marnie). Psycho and The Birds might have been big releases with full studio backing, but they were in many ways B pictures in which the screenplays often played a secondary role to spectacle, editing, mood, and the visual storytelling tropes that harkened back to Hitchcock’s silent film training.
Psycho announced itself with unsettling modernism via the jagged hacking lines of Saul Bass’ credit sequence layered with Hermann’s slashing and juddering score. Starting as a procedural (location and time stamped on screen, clipped Jim Thompson-like dialogue) where secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals $40k from her office to run off with her lover, it radically shifts gears into psychosexual gothic serial killer territory with the introduction of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).
While Alfred Hitchcock’s thematic stamp is all over Psycho, especially his Freudian obsessions with guilt and shame, the verbal wit of his earlier work is downplayed in favor of a more chilling worldview. Murder might have been rife in his earlier work, but the gutting sense of random mortality in Psycho is as far as one can get from the semi-jocular bloodless deaths of Strangers on a Train (1951) and The Trouble with Harry (1955).
Still, while Psycho has the largest extant cultural footprint of any film in this set, its horrors can pale when put next to Hitchcock’s follow-up, The Birds. Since this is the least beloved item in The Iconic Film Collection, it is also the one most deserving of a second look. It’s a curious concoction.
Adapted roughly by Evan Hunter from a Daphne Du Maurier story, The Birds invests a lot of effort in a sublimely uninteresting romance between wayward heiress Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and jousting lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). Showing the limitations of what Alfred Hitchcock can do with wooden leads, Hedren and Taylor (we’re a long way from Kelly and Grant) limply bat lines at each other while the heavily torqued screenplay works hard to shift the two from San Francisco to a small seaside town where the action can finally take place. It’s a frustratingly slow build that could provide grist for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.
However, once Hitchcock shows his hand, The Birds turns into maybe the most terrifying entry in his filmography. The relentlessness and inexplicability of the massed avian assaults take the film away from the creature features with which it shares some DNA and into a different realm. Hitchcock’s quick-cut montages of birds ripping at children’s faces, smashing into windows, and zooming toward Melanie’s bloodied face remain jarring and unnerving. Hitchcock’s choice not to use a score—an especially daring choice for a director who had made music carry so much dramatic weight in Psycho and Vertigo—only boosts the effect of the elemental eeriness.
Even while working to keep up with the new filmmakers (everyone from the New Wavers who idolized him to Stanley Kubrick and the nascent “movie brat” generation), Alfred Hitchcock could not quite manage the jump from the studio system to the independent era. Ironically, even though he kept pushing the limits of what censors would let him show, his career finally started to flag in the mid-to-late 1960s when Hollywood started dropping its self-imposed restrictions.
In 1967, the same year Hitchcock failed to secure backing for Kaleidoscope, his serial killer film, which was deemed too explicit, films like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde reshaped the industry by breaking taboos. In a curious twist, when Hitchcock released the controversial Psycho just as he wanted it (the “uncut” version on the Iconic disc shows his preferred cut seen in theaters, mostly a few extended shots of Crane undressing and Bates’ bloodied hands which were later snipped out), in 1960, that same year Michael Powell’s career was essentially ended by horrified reactions to his very Hitchcockian voyeurist serial killer film, Peeping Tom.
It is also possible that Alfred Hitchcock’s challenges in getting new films made just as the entire Hollywood system was rupturing around him could be due to his being out of step with the new breed, not stylistically but temperamentally. While working with dark material throughout his career, Hitchcock was never a pessimist. The cynicism that pulsed so self-importantly through other films of the late 1960s and early ‘70s was nowhere to be found in his work. Despite the profound seriousness with which he took his craft, Hitchcock retained a wry and particularly British lightness of touch, which helped him dance between formats.
Alfred Hitchcock was an artist who knew how to terrify, delight, and transport audiences. He could deliver romance, thrills, nightmares, daymares, and cutting psychological insight because he didn’t place one above the other. The filmmaker who stunned audiences with the shrieking violins of Psycho also inspired them to dream of vacationing on the French Riviera.
Terror, voyeurism, or escapism – it was all cinema to Hitchcock.