Farran Smith Nehme, aka the Self-Styled Siren and one of the co-sponsors of the annual For the Love of Film film-preservation blogathon, in which this blog participates (most recently last May), announced today that we can now all enjoy the object of this year's fundraising effort. The surviving three reels of the six-reel silent The White Shadow (1924) will be streaming online for free for the next two months. The film, directed by Graham Cutts, is especially significant as it is the first surviving film on which Alfred Hitchcock is credited (he worked as assistant director, art director, editor, and writer on the movie).
Thanks to our readers who donated to this effort during this blog's participation in For the Love of Film III last May. And thanks, too, to those among my fellow bloggers who took part. It's a fun event and it's great to see such a concrete outcome!
Some more information on the film itself and the preservation project from the National Film Preservation Foundation's Annette Melville (via the Self-Styled Siren) can be found below the fold:
The opening three reels of the six-reel feature were uncovered in 2011 during research by the NFPF to identify American silent-era titles held by the New Zealand Film Archive...The film was preserved at Park Road Post Production in New Zealand under the supervision of the NZFA and the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The White Shadow will be presented for free streaming, with the following extras: · Program notes about the film by David Sterritt · Newly recorded musical score created by Michael M. Mortilla who, with Nicole Garcia, reprises the performance from the gala premiere at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2011 · A short bio of the New Zealand projectionist, Jack Murtagh, who salvaged the film · Slide shows about the film’s discovery, the New Zealand Film Archive, and the Academy Film Archive
The 43-minute presentation, which will run two months, is made possible by contributors from around the world. “Not everyone has the ability to attend the special screenings of The White Shadow in Los Angeles, Washington, or New York,” said Jonathan Marlow, co-founder of Fandor, the curated on-demand movie service that is donating webhosting for the event. “We’re thrilled to play our part in making this fascinating discovery available everywhere.” Fandor’s gift matches cash donations raised through the Internet fundraising drive organized by the 2012 “For the Love of Film” Blogathon, spearheaded by Marilyn Ferdinand, Roderick Heath, and Farran Smith Nehme. The campaign mobilized support from more than 100 film fans across five continent
Almost everybody loves Hitchcock movies. We went one better. We helped get one back in front of thousands of viewers for the first time in decades. No modesty here: This film is online because we worked our tails off to help get it there.
Once again, I'm so glad that the USIH Blog could play a small part in getting this to happen!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Note: This is the third USIH post in relation to "For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III." Please see the introduction to Ben Alpers' 2012 USIH blogathaon entry for more information. Click HERE to make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation.] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My love and admiration for Hitchcock began with fuzzy UHF television reruns of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents (or "Hour," if you prefer). As a kid, watching the Hitchcock Hour at my grandparents' house, I admired the mystery and suspense of Hitchcock, as well as shows like The Twilight Zone. Each helped feed the impoverished imagination of a kid growing up in small-town, rural western Missouri. Later, during my adolescent and teenage years, I left Hitchcock behind for girls, science fiction, fantasy, and school concerns.
Courtesy of cable television (i.e. AMC) and the need for breaks from reading and drinking during graduate school, I rediscovered Hitchcock. This time I experienced his work in film. So, in between readings of Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, Peter Novick, and other graduate school standards, I worked my way through the Hitchcock film bibliography. Despite my graduate thinking about canons (via the great books idea), I wasn't concerned about screening only Hitchcock's "greatest hits" from the Fifties and Sixties---Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, North by Northwest, etc. I also watched his lesser known and less acclaimed films from the Seventies, Forties, and Thirties. I never made it to the early Thirties or his silent films from the Twenties. But I did screen Sabotage, Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Suspicion, and Saboteur, among others. I recorded many of those AMC showings on VHS, and kept a log (yes, I'm a nerd like that) of my viewings in a copy of Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius (Little, Brown, 1983; Da Capo, 1999). Indeed, it was probably the 1999 Hitchcock centennial that prompted AMC to review so many of his films precisely when I was grad student (1998-2006---with breaks). In any case, it worked out for me. Apart from mystery and suspense, this time around my interest in Hitchcock was maintained by an appreciation of his eye for set details, lighting, costumes, and varied locations, as well as his differing story lines, attention to camera angles, ear for music, and choices of actors---particularly his eye for the opposite sex. I also hadn't lost my adolescent delight in Hitch's sense of the macabre (e.g. his fascination with strangulation, corpses, etc.).[1] What's interesting to me now is how I thought about and watched his films on his terms alone. I had apparently made a silent choice, this being a grad school hobby, to avoid thinking about Hitchcock contextually, in relation to the time of conception and production of his films. Given that, I never worked to understand how Hitchcock's artistic choices and story ideas maintained relevance through screening. Production being what it is, both a linear and non-linear process, it is impossible to know what will be a "hit" with audiences upon release---to know what themes will remain relevant over the course of one, two, or three years. Then again, when you look closely at the production times between films, Hitchcock produced roughly one per year between 1925 and 1962. Amazing. When you're that fast, you can replicate your audiences' weltanshauungen.
Today I want meditate on a Hitchcock classic---one of the top 50 all-time films (#48) according the American Film Institute: Rear Window. Produced in 1953 and released in 1954, Rear Window traced the homebound activities of a convalescent-but-formerly-world-traveling photo-journalist, L.B. Jefferies, smartly played by James Stewart, and his gorgeous, camera-friendly Manhattan socialite girlfriend, Lisa Carol Freemont (Grace kelly). Confined to apparently sedate voyeuristic activities via his rear window, Jefferies comes to believe that a neighbor, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has murdered his wife. At that point Jefferies convalescence becomes a detective activity, drawing in his caretaker, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and his old friend, the detective Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey). As Jefferies winds his way toward solving the mystery, trying to avoid attracting Thorwald's attention to his snooping, Hitchcock introduces a memorable cast of side characters: the sad sack Miss Lonely Hearts (Judith Evelyn); the athletic, sexy ballet dancer, Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy); the friendly but disaffected "Composer" (Ross Bagdasarian); the unhappy newlyweds; and a spinster cat lady.[2] The film was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich. The plot and more details are available at AMC's Filmsite. It's trivia, but it may be interesting to know that Grace kelly turned down the role of Eva Marie Saint in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront to work with Hitchock instead.[3]
Rear Window premiered in August 4, 1954 at New York's Rivoli Theater. Proceeds benefitted the American-Korean Foundation, which had been "formed to provide emotional and material relief" after the war. Apparently the film generated a "mob scene" at the Rivoli. Rear Window eventually garnered Hitchcock a best director nomination (one of five total in his career). Rear Window also grossed 10 million dollars by the end of 1956 (anywhere from $66.1-345 million in 2012 dollars). The film only cost about 2 million to produce. As an aside, just one year after taking up U.S. citizenship in 1955, Hitchcock earned 4 million dollars but, due to tax shelters, avoiding paying even "a cent of tax."[4] This correlates with Alpers relaying that Hitchcock, while he tried to preserve his artistic integrity, thoroughly engaged the Hollywood scene. He was fine with manipulating capitalism to his own ends, when he could.
Spoto argued that Rear Window, along with To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, represents a "warm and comic" period---facilitated by screenwriter John Michael Hayes---in relation to Hitchcock's general "emotional interest and aesthetic concern." That period contrasted with "the obsessive fear of lost identity" in films like The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Spoto characterizes the latter concern as a "resumption of his basic gravity" and a return to Hitchcock's "profoundest concerns." Still, in Rear Window, Hitchcock is merely a "chair-bound voyeur." Stewart via Jefferies is Hitchcock's "alter ego," according to Spoto. And we, with Hitchcock, are "gazers" at the larger world---at murder, sex, loneliness---at modernity.[5]
And, during the Cold War in the Fifties, Americans were expected to merely gaze. They were to leave involvement and engagement to the politicians, the Brain Trust (i.e. the Eggheads), and the military. Americans were contained; they were "homeward bound" like Jefferies, though uninjured physically. The mere voyeurism was, oddly, vital to the national interest. Americans were to inform on the suspicious activities of others. Oddities were to be shunned, but were nevertheless the objects of our collective gaze. Since we could only police the common square (and not too vigorously debate in it), the terrified voyeurism of Americans was confined to their rear windows. As Lary May noted in the "Introduction" to his edited collection, Recasting America, Hitchcock "evoke[d] the [seeming?] harmony of the affluent world"---of the middle-class---and "then slowly reveal[ed] the irrational terror beneath the placid surface."[6]
One of the things I like about Rear Window is its use of framing. The various window frames outlining Miss Lonely Hearts, Miss Torso, The Composer, and the newlyweds speak to our limited understanding of the other. Those frames are a metaphor for our inability to understand the fuzzy edges, and beyond, of what's outlined. Even when we're looking out of harmless rear windows, we can't understand the total context of what's in our supposedly safe suburban backyards and tidy urban courtyards. We're always missing some key part of the story. Jefferies spends all of his energy in the film trying to understand what he couldn't see. He is symbolic of the heroic efforts we should all make to properly frame the truth. Of course he was driven by intuition, but he never stopped trying to verify his sense of the world, of right and wrong. Jefferies tried to understand, to rationalize, the world beyond his frame of reference.[7]
This is what Hitchcock saw in 1950s America---lonely Americans desperate to understand each other. Though this point was subsumed in a popular murder-suspense story, he nevertheless captured our containment on screen. Americans were alone together (with apologies to Sherry Turkle), watching each other through frames of fear---wondering what evils lurked out of view.
As an aside, despite my admiration for Jefferies' tenacity in trying to discover the truth, one of things I disliked about Rear Window was how quickly Jefferies came to believe that Lars Thorwald killed his wife. And why did Hitchcock let it be the husband? Was it a kind of suburban containment fantasy---"spousicide"? Or was it because Thorwald looked like a killer?
Returning to my experiences watching Hitchcock while also a graduate student, and trying to connect my viewings with that graduate training, in retrospect I am surprised at how little his films were discussed in the cultural histories I read on the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. In reviewing my notes from a few of those books, only Lary May's The Big Tomrrow dealt with Hitchcock. May noted that Hitchcock dealt with "alienated, deranged characters," and "hidden enemies," but ultimately "assured viewers [in his films] that an orderly universe prevailed."[8] Other than May, perhaps I simply did not read enough on film (e.g. in constructing my reading lists). But even the passing references to Hitchcock in other works are scarce. As demonstrated above, it is not difficult to read Rear Window as a product and reflection of the Cold War. Perhaps it's too obvious. If my impression of Hitchcock citations in relation to the Cold War is off, I would greatly appreciate correction in the comments to this piece.
If you have not seen Rear Window, rent it or add it to your Netflix queue. After your screening, let me know if you too see it as a metaphor for the containment, suspicion, and voyeurism of the Cold War. I would be surprised if you don't.
[1] Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1999), 331, 354.
[2] Spoto, 575; Gerald Mast and Bruce F. Kawin, A Short History of the Movies, sixth edition (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 326-327.
[3] Spoto, 345.
[4] Spoto, 353, 360, 380, 499.
[5] Spoto, 346, 368-369, 408, 425.
[6] Lary May, "Introduction," in Recasting America: Culture and POlitics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 7. See also Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1999). I have not read John Fawell's Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), but it apparently covers voyeurism as the central theme of the film. Fawell is a humanities professor at Boston University, and was trained in comparative literature at the University of Chicago.
[7] Mast and Kawin refer to "window frames as movie frames" in their discussion of Rear Window (p.328).
[8] Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicagao: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 222.
[This is the second post in the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. See Ben's fantastic first contribution here. This year's blogathon, which runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock. Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online. Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin. For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]
What do horror films do? What makes them persistently popular? I came of age in the 80s with Freddy Krueger, the undead, knives-as-finger-nails antagonist in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. These films pivoted from the tried-and-true horror flick formula. Teenagers who behaved badly, those who imbibed in drugs and sex, died the first horrific deaths at the "hands" of Freddy, who worked as a sort of demonic guarantor of a traditional symbolic order--an order that was dying an equally horrific death. But even more, Freddy was the return of the repressed for the parents, who had long ago violated Biblical commandments in their futile efforts to protect the old order. So Freddy is a ghoulish representation of the corruption of both old and new orders. There's no going back to the old, which was sustained by an undercurrent of repression. But the new, the libertine, the transgressive, the antinomian, is nothing to celebrate. Freddy as such is the quintessential postmodern specter.
But even if A Nightmare on Elm Street and other horror films of the 80s nicely illustrate the conundrum of post-sixties culture, they cannot compare to the understated brilliance of the Hitchcock horror film. I also, in a way, came of age with Hitchcock. My father loved Hitchcock and introduced me to all of his films on VHS in the 80s. I was so taken with these movies, for reasons I only faintly grasped at the time. Hitchcock uses horror as a backdrop for the human struggle to come to terms with the symbolic order. Horror goes where we consciously cannot go. At least, this is Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds--elaborated in Zizek's lovely little film, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Here's a clip where Zizek explains his interpretation of Hitchcock:
In deconstructing the famous blue pill/red pill scene from The Matrix, a take, of course, on Plato's Cave, Zizek argues that the choice offered Neo between fiction and reality is a false one. The two are mutually reinforcing."Fictions structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself." Zizek wants a "third pill," one that allows us to see the reality in fiction, or to see how fiction makes reality more real. This is how he wants us to interpret Hitchcock. Zizek claims that the key to understanding horror films is to imagine the same story without the elements of horror.
There are non-horror elements that disturb reality in The Birds, such as the intrusion of a strange, seductive woman into the Oedipal relationship between Mitch and the mother he lives with. But these intrusions can be digested or incorporated into the symbolic order. The birds, then, represent an intrusion into the reality that disintegrates it, that upends the symbolic order, that lays bare a more primal human condition. The Birds do what Mitch's mother wishes she could but cannot due to the symbolic order that structures her reality. Horror does what our unconscious wishes we could do but cannot.
Given that I'm more an expert on Zizek and contemporary critical theory than I am on Hitchcock and film history, I will conclude with a question for our readers, many of whom might be cinephiles, newly drawn to the USIH blog this week thanks to the For the Love of Film blogathon. Is Zizek's a standard interpretation of Hitchcock? Or is it new to you?
Alfred Hitchcock's Self-Portrait (from the opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents)
[This post kicks off the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. This year's blogathon, which began yesterday, May 13, and runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock. Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online. Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin. For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]
I
In his two-volume autobiography, the magnificent A Life in Movies(1986) and the messier but still fascinating Million-Dollar Movie (1992), Michael Powell writes extensively about his fellow English-born director, Alfred Hitchcock. Seven years his junior, Powell evinces great admiration for Hitchcock, calling him, along with Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin, one of "three great artists [who] have saved the film business from going completely off the rails in my time" (ALIM, 183). But despite his repeated praise for Hitchcock, Powell's feelings about him appear to be more complicated than he is willing to explicitly admit.
In ALIM, Powell reports a story from the time in the late 1920s when he was working as the head of the stills department of British International Pictures, where Hitchcock had established himself as a director. Hitchcock took a shine to Powell and insisted that he personally take stills for his movies. According to Powell, while completing The Manxman (1929), Hitchcock asked him to help improve the final act of the screenplay for Blackmail (1929), which would become Hitchcock's first sound movie:
When we came to the chase through the streets, I broached an idea that I had been maturing for a while.
"Hitch! Don't let's do an ordinary chase through the streets like you did in The Lodger. Let's take it into some bizarre location that is entertaining in itself."
"What do you mean? What do you think Michael means, Alma?" Alma [Hitchcock's wife and screenwriting collaborator] looked encouragingly at me.
I had been thinking of my visits to the British Museum Reading Room to see my grandfather, and the impression that had been made upon me by his bent figure, at his desk, dwarfed by the height of the shelves and topped by the glass dome over the whole vast room, and I went on: "Let's have him slip into the British Museum at night and get chased through rooms full of Egyptian mummies and Elgin Marbles, and climb higher to escape, and be cornered and then fall through the glass dome of the Reading Room and break his neck."
Hitch, being a Londoner, had never been near the British Museum Reading Room, but he saw the possibilities of the idea, and so I think I can make a modest claim to being the inventor of the Hitchcock Climax, unveiled to the world through the chase in Blackmail, and which led us all on many a delightful dance from Tower Bridge to Mount Rushmore, from the Statue of Liberty to you name it. (ALIM, 193)
Powell says no more about this and immediately moves on to other matters (he would, in a sense, try his own hand at a Hitchcock Climax in his second collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, Contraband(1940)). But this little anecdote is, I think, very telling.
Not only does Powell claim to have invented the Hitchcock Climax (apparently after much careful thought), but, at least initially, Hitchcock doesn't even understand the idea before Powell spells it out to him in great detail. And Powell at least implicitly relates Hitchcock's lack of understanding to the defective nature of the latter's Englishness. Powell writes, just before relating the above anecdote about Blackmail, that Hitchcock, as a Cockney from the East End, had a great way with lower-middle class characters and actors, and possessed a "knowledge of London [that] was peculiar and delightful, east of Temple Bar." But his knowledge of the West End, according to Powell, was limited and entirely conventional. And "beyond city streets," "Hitch was not enthralled by local colour" (ALIM 193, 191).
Contrast this with Powell, the self-described "Man of Kent," who opens A Life in Movies with a long and poetic invocation of the Kentish countryside in which he grew up, and whose films, more often than not, are positively obsessed with local color, from Canada to Uruguay, Monte Carlo to London, Scotland to Shropshire, the Himalayas to the Netherlands, Heaven itself to Kent. Powell, it should be added, never draws this contrast with Hitchcock explicitly. But it is as clear as day to any reader of his autobiography.
Instead, Powell largely discusses Hitchcock as a parallel figure to himself. And the most significant parallel he draws, by the time we get to volume two of the autobiography, Million-Dollar Movie, involves one of the great themes of Powell's books: the quest for artistic independence within a motion-picture industry that seems structurally designed to destroy it. Powell correctly sees Hitchcock, like himself, as a seeker of such independence. The one great difference between the two directors' quests--and here Powell is explicit in drawing the contrast--is that Powell and his partner in movie-making Emeric Pressburger sought their independence by keeping their distance from Hollywood while, fairly early in his career, Hitchcock moved to California and tried to find independence in the belly of the beast.
This, in turn, becomes the theme of another Powell anecdote about Hitchcock, this one appearing in Million-Dollar Movie. In March, 1952, Powell travelled to the U.S. in a small plane largely, he reports, for the experience of flying over the Greenland icecap. But once in the U.S., Powell meets in New York with a wide array of past and potential artistic collaborators and financiers, including his old friend Raymond Massey, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Arthur Loew, and David O. Selznick. All want to work with Powell and are willing to shower him with money. But Powell, untempted, dislikes and rejects the proposals and repeatedly insists on his artistic independence. (MDM, 182-194)
Flying on to Hollywood, Powell arranges meetings with a number of figures who have maintained their artistic integrity: tea with Igor Stravinsky and dinner with Alma and Alfred Hitchcock. Hollywood, Powell judges, had been very hard on Hitchcock, precisely because he had successfully asserted his artistic independence:
Hitch was off-balance--neuritis. He'd had it for nearly half a year, and it was souring his life. He had won too much independence for himself, too much responsibility for his choice of paths through the Hollywood jungle. They were narrow and dangerous trails, and one never knew where they led; sometimes nowhere, sometimes to the open country, where he was a master among masters, and all the time invisible. But near, he could hear the crashing of great beasts, their sudden roar as they charged, and their snarls as they fought and tore over the quivering flesh of their victim.
For make no mistake, these Hollywood monsters didn't want Hitch to succeed. They don't want any artist to succeed on his own. They fear the creative talent. Possessing none, they claim the power of money. Possessing the money, they claim the credit, too. It was in this twilight world that Hitch was preparing and making his films. He had thought he could play the Hollywood game as well as these beasts. Later he would put stars like Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren under contract to him personally, and this would make his enemies fear him, and envy him, even more. Mostly they tried to seduce him and buy him back by offering enormous sums of money at a time when he was struggling to finance his own productions and knew only too well how underfinanced he was. It was a heroic struggle, conducted mostly in secrecy except to his agent, and it went on for years.
The strain on Hitch was enormous. Only Alma, and a few devoted friends, knew how great it was. I think that I love Hitchcock more than all his films, for the struggle that he put up to keep the independence of the filmmaker in Hollywood. And in the end, it was a true Hitchcock picture, Psycho--no stars, just know-how--that saved him from going to the wall . . . (MDM, 198)
With the major difference of Hitchcock's decision to pursue his career in Hollywood, Powell emphasizes the similarities between his career aspirations and Hitchcock's and his great admiration for his fellow director. And he returns to these similarities--and their mutual admiration--as he summarizes his long relationship with Hitchcock and concludes his discussion of his 1952 dinner with Alma and Alfred...though he concludes with an ambiguous contrast:
I had known and loved Hitch, as a friend and fellow craftsman, for forty years. At first glance, each recognized in the other the same confidence, the same mastery of the medium. For a year or more Hitch held out his hand to me in what had become for me a strange land, England. Abroad, in Europe [at the beginning of their careers], Hitch with UFA and I with MGM and Rex Ingram in France had once and for all caught a glimpse of the grail. That glimpse was enough for us for the rest of our lives and careers. Hitch's way was to impose himself upon the world, to exploit that marvelous personality and quick wit; mine--well, we shall see what mine was, when we come to the end of this very long book. (MDM, 199-200)
But Powell fails to mention another significant similarity between himself and Hitchcock. And he declines to discuss, at least directly, what appears to me (and I suspect to Powell as well) to be the most significant difference between their careers.
II
Both Powell and Hitchcock were unusual not only in their quests for artistic independence but in their desire to create a kind of cinematic brand identity for themselves. And both, for a time, succeeded magnificently.
Like few other directors of his generation, Hitchcock put his mark on his films. Hitchcock movies practically became a genre unto themselves. His famous cameos ensured that the public recognized not only Hitchcock movies, but Hitchcock himself...indeed part of the fun of going to a Hitchcock film was finding how the director would manage to get himself on screen. By the early 1940s, Hitchcock's name was appearing prominently above the title on publicity materials for his films (see this site for a great survey of Hitchcock posters from around the world).
The great success of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series, which began in 1955, expanded to become the Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, and finally went off the air in 1965, helped cement Hitchcock's brand identity. To this day, what's best remembered about the long-running series is its iconic opening, which featured a nine-line self-portrait, the director himself in silhouette, and a mordantly witty introduction by Hitchcock:
By the time Psycho came out in 1960, Hitchcock was front-and-center in much of the publicity around his film:
Powell's branding of his films was more collaborative, but just as distinct. Starting with One of our Aircraft if Missing (1942), their fourth film together, Powell shared with his screenwriter and producing partner Emeric Pressburger the unusual title card: "Written, Produced, and Directed by..."And the two became collectively "The Archers," a name that was soon accompanied by a distinctive image at the start of their films:
During the time of their greatest fame--and among cinephiles to this day--that arrow hitting the bullseye held as much promise as Hitchcock's name above the title. Martin Scorsese, who fell in love with Powell's films as a child and became very close to Powell late in his life, has said that "every time I saw The Archers logo, I knew I was in for something special."
But even as both Powell and Hitchcock began to reach the greatest heights of their fame, and had carved out a good measure of artistic independence for themselves, in the late 1940s, when Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) became a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic and Hitchcock was in the midst of a long series of cinematic masterpieces including Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), Notorious! (1946), and Rope (1948), their careers were in certain ways beginning to diverge.
Hitchcock's great popular success and critical reputation would only grow through the '50s and into the '60s.
In contrast, in the 1950s, Powells career stumbled and his collaboration with Pressburger came to an end. Their final three movies together--Oh....Rosalinda! (1955), The Battle of the River Plate (1956), and Ill Met By Moonlight (1957)--were not up to the standard of most of their earlier work (though The Battle of the River Plate was a big box-office hit, at least in the UK). And while Hitchcock's critical reputation continued to soar, the Archers' reputation, always mixed, fell, as even their greatest films often came to be regarded as over-the-top fantasies, especially as British filmmakers began to produce the grittier, kitchen sink movies of the late 1950s and 1960s.
But the body-blow to Powell's career came with the release of his second film after the break-up of his collaboration with Pressburger, Peeping Tom (1960). Extravagantly denounced by British film critics ("it's a long time since a film disgusted me as much"--Caroline Lejeune, The Observer; "the sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing"-- Isobel Quigley, The Spectator; "alternately dull and repellent"--Derek Hill, Tribune; "I was shocked to the core to find a director of his standing befouling the screen with such perverted nonsense"--Nina Hibbin, The Daily Worker; an "exercise in the lower reaches of the psychopathic"--Dilys Powell, Sunday Times), the film effectively ended Powell's career as a director in his home country; during the final three decades of his life, he would direct a few films in Australia as well as a British television production. His independence and his brand were in tatters.
In Million-Dollar Movie, Powell describes Peeping Tom's reception in some detail (those quoted reviews are taken form pp. 293-295). But in his discussion of what was in many ways the greatest disaster of his career, Powell doesn't draw attention to an oft-noted contrast: the very different reception that Hitchcock's similarly boundary-crossing Psycho received that very same year. This is the unstated poignancy of Powell's comment, nearly a hundred pages earlier in his autobiography, about the positive role that Psycho played in Hitchcock's career: "And in the end, it was a true Hitchcock picture, Psycho--no stars, just know-how--that saved him from going to the wall." Psycho saved Hitchcock; Peeping Tom doomed Powell.
III
We are now in the fourth decade of an ongoing Michael Powell revival. Long esteemed by the generation of American filmmakers who created the "New Hollywood" of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Powell spent much of the final decade of his life hanging out with Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. In the early 1980s, he was Senior Director in Residence at Coppola's short-lived Zoetrope Studios. In 1984, he married Scorsese's long-time editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. By the late 1970s, critics and cinephiles on both sides of the Atlantic began to return to the great films of the Archers...and to Powell's once despised Peeping Tom. Powell, who passed away in 1990, lived to see the full recovery of his critical reputation; Million Dollar Movie's discussion of Peeping Tom is framed by the fact that Powell's movie had already been vindicated in the eyes of critics. The critical reverence for Powell has only grown since his death. Most of the Archers' films, as well as The Edge of the World (1937), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and Peeping Tom, are widely available on DVD and BluRay. Many of these films have been lavishly restored.
But the great acclaim that Powell has received since the late 1970s does not hold a candle to Hitchcock's reputation among the general public. Perhaps it never can. Hitchcock is today one of the few filmmakers of his generation who remains a household name. Even those who've never seen any of his films associate him with suspense and have some sense of the basis of his fame. The opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents remains one of the most parodied thirty-seconds of television.
In comparison, Michael Powell, at least in this country, is a relatively obscure figure. Cinephiles know him well; everyone else draws a blank when you mention his name.
All of which brings us back to Powell's "modest claim" that he invented the Hitchcock Climax. Though the story is told almost as a throw-away in the midst of one of Powell's many discussions of Hitchcock as a fellow craftsman with whom he shared deep mutual respect, I can't help but think that there's a significant amount of pain lurking in the background of this tale. I have no reason to doubt that, as Powell reports, he and Hitchcock saw each other as fellow artistic geniuses. But among all but the most cinematically knowledgable, Hitchcock's fame is far, far greater. And Powell knew this well.
Elisabeth is an old friend of S-USIH (to the extent that scholarly societies less than a year old can have old friends). She participated as a panel commentator at our 2009 Conference. At the 2010 Conference, she was part of a plenary panel entitled "Intellectual History For What?" And at last year's S-USIH Conference, she presented a brown-bag talk on the state of intellectual history. It was my honor and pleasure to be at the last two of these presentations and was struck, on both occasions, by Elisabeth's commitment to both intellectual seriousness and intellectual community, challenging us to be better scholars and better friends. I like to think that these are values that we strive for at this blog. I know that Elisabeth will help us achieve both.
More USIH Blog announcements after the fold...
Some perceptive readers may have noticed that a disclaimer recently showed up in our right margin:
The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization that has applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status. The opinions expressed on the blog are strictly those of the individual writers and do not represent those of the Society or of the writers' employers.
As a new professional association, S-USIH is applying for 501(c)(3) non-profit status. And one of the restrictions placed on 501(c)(3)s is that they are "absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office." Since this blog is affiliated with S-USIH, we need to be sure to steer clear of violating this regulation. This disclaimer is part of that effort: it reiterates that none of the bloggers at USIH speak for the Society. Additionally, each of our regular bloggers have made a commitment to refrain from intervening in favor or against any current candidate for elective public office in their future posts on this blog.
Our right margin features another new gadget: once again, this blog will be participating in the For the Love of Film film preservation blogathon. This year's blogathon will take place from May 13 to 18 and will focus on Alfred Hitchcock. Funds raised by donations during the blogathon will benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation's goal of recording a score to Alfred Hitchcock's silent The White Shadow (1923) and streaming the restored film on their website. This year's blogathon will be co-hosted by Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films, and This Island Rod.
