Since my post of yesterday, I've had occasion to write the following about Hitchcock's work in America. It may interest some SCREEN-L readers. I quote Father Copleston on Schopenhauer at one point. By the way, an excellent essay on Hitchcock's MARNIE (1964) and Kant's and Burke's notions of the Sublime appeared in the 'Hitchcock Annual', 1999-2000 edition. (But in my recent essay on THE BIRDS I preferred to make use of Schopenhauer's own version of that concept - Schopenhauer is often salutary in situations like this [another is when he uses his own notion of the Uncanny], if only because he serves to remind us that these nebulous concepts are not written in stone by Kant, Freud, et al.; and as I've implied Hitchcock's art often seems closer to the Schopenhaurean understanding anyway.) - Ken Mogg (author of the uncut UK edition of 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' - I disown the cut and 'simplified' US version). http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin ------ When Hitchcock arrived in America in 1939, a change came over his work (though the seeds had been planted long before, in a film like The Lodger [1926]). I'll characterise it today as the depiction of extreme situations with deliberate understatement, and use of the 'slow burn' principle whereby the inherent shockingness of the situation is only gradually revealed and finally demonstrated. Almost invariably, the climax is explosive, if not literally (e.g., the razing of 'Manderley' in Rebecca [1940]) then figuratively (e.g., the opening of the chest containing the body of a murdered youth, in Rope [1948]). Of course, some or all of the films have their set pieces along the way, which serve to disguise the underlying 'slow burn'. But it is there nonetheless. Now, consider what I mean by 'extreme situations'. In Rebecca, just to speak of Maxim, he has inherited a magnificent estate and the patriarchal line of his illustrious, rich forebears; and he has married a wife with 'beauty, brains, and breeding'. He should by rights be one of the happiest of men. Instead, we learn that his wife died in an 'accident' (and we've only Maxim's word that he didn't kill her, which is what he did do in Daphne du Maurier's novel). By the end of the film he has lost nearly everything, certainly all of his 'great expectations', and exists in a childless marriage to a rather plain second wife (who, a suppressed postscript of the novel reveals, still hasn't borne him children, heirs, years later; the couple are now living in a succession of second-rate Mediterranean hotels, a far cry in every sense from their days at 'Manderley', which had stood so proudly above the open Atlantic). In short, Maxim has been reduced to near-total abjection. Now consider Frenzy (1972). Nothing has changed. Critic Tania Modleski, who has written some mean analysis of Hitchcock's attitudes in his films to women, avers that the films are ambivalent towards women (and the media have been happy to endorse such an opinion). But Modleski's thesis won't do. Hitchcock's ambivalence is towards people. Hitchcock is like that most objective of philosophers, Schopenhauer, who saw in the sheer will-to-live, manifesting itself in egoism, self-assertion, hatred and conflict (which men are particularly good at) the source of evil. Schopenhauer wrote: 'There really resides in the heart of each of us a wild beast which only waits the opportunity to rage and rave and injure others, and which, if they do not prevent it, would like to destroy them.' (Quoted by Frederic Copleston S.J., 'A History of Philosophy', Vol. VII, Chapter XIV) There is something of that in the ill-tempered and murderous Maxim in Rebecca, and again something of it in ex-squadron leader Blaney (Jon Finch), another ill-tempered man, in Frenzy. But such is Hitchcock's sleight-of-hand that the film's nominal villains (Rebecca herself, Mrs Danvers, Favell; Rusk) take most of the rap, as far as the films' audiences are concerned. But here's my main point. Tania Modleski says that there are two images of women in Hitchcock: victimised and abject, and autonomous and independent. But that is exactly the same of the men. Just to cite the case of Blaney, another abject figure: he is a forgotten war hero whose mate from wartime days is 'Dicko' (shades of Jeff and Doyle in Rear Window [1954]), now coping as best he can with a hand-to-mouth existence, and down on his luck - something whose apotheosis is his loss by violent murder of the two women in his life, then his being suspected of killing them. An 'extreme situation' indeed! ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]