The Paramount years: Rear Window to North by Northwest

Moving to Paramount, Hitchcock entered his third phase of sustained brilliance—one with a maturity of theme and a mastery of technique that make even the great periods of 1934–38 and 1940–46 almost pale in comparison. In Rear Window (1954) Jeff, a wheelchair-bound press photographer (Stewart), spends his invalid days peering into the windows of the many apartments across the courtyard from him. He and his girlfriend Lisa (Kelly) suspect that in one of those apartments a man has murdered his wife. Rear Window, like Rope and Lifeboat, was another technical challenge for Hitchcock. Although Jeff and the camera never leave his apartment, the story required the construction of a gigantic courtyard set. The subtext about invading the privacy of others implicates moviegoers as a band of easily seduced voyeurs. Hitchcock was again Oscar-nominated for best director.

Kelly also appeared in To Catch a Thief (1955), a romantic thriller shot on the French Riviera, in which she was paired with the debonair Cary Grant, who played a former jewel thief who may have returned to his old ways. Hitchcock came to regret this production, since it was on location that Kelly met Monaco’s Prince Rainier, who would take her away from the movies, and him, forever.

If Thief was lightweight, The Trouble with Harry (1955) was downright irreverent. A black comedy about a Vermont town’s problems with a corpse that just will not stay buried, it had the virtues of amusing performances by Edmund Gwenn and (in her screen debut) Shirley MacLaine, but the film attracted little box-office business.

Hitchcock was lured into television with the promise of a much wider audience. His droll introductions for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62; later The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1962–65) gradually but inexorably converted him into America’s—perhaps even the world’s—best-known director. He still concentrated on motion pictures but approved which scripts and directors would be used; he also directed 20 episodes.

Hitchcock returned to serious work with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), a big-budget remake of his humble 1934 thriller. It starred Stewart and Doris Day as the parents whose son is kidnapped when the father accidentally acquires information about an assassination. The film advanced Day’s career as a singer, incidentally, with the song “Que Sera, Sera,” which climbed high on the pop charts.

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The bleak The Wrong Man (1956) was based on the Kafkaesque but true (and nationally publicized) story of Queens musician Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), who was wrongfully arrested in 1953 for robbing an insurance company and had great difficulty proving his innocence. Shot in many of the New York City locales where the case unfolded, the film has verisimilitude to spare with its respectful, quasidocumentary approach.

Considered by many to be his masterpiece and by some to be the greatest of all films, Vertigo (1958) was a challenging, sometimes obscure, and painful exploration of identity, fantasy, and compulsion. Stewart starred as Scottie, a former San Francisco policeman who has taken early retirement because of his fear of heights. A rich friend asks him to shadow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who has been prone to taking mysterious leaves of absence. But Scottie’s detecting soon metamorphoses into a kind of voyeurism, as his observation of Madeleine turns into love, then obsession, and finally agony. Vertigo is a brave dramatization of the themes closest to Hitchcock. It failed to attract contemporary audiences and was almost entirely overlooked in the Academy Award nominations; even Bernard Herrmann’s chilling score was passed by.

Hitchcock retreated from the naked trauma of Vertigo to make the entertaining North by Northwest (1959), a romantic thriller reminiscent of The 39 Steps and Saboteur. Grant is the consummate Hitchcock protagonist, New York ad man Roger Thornhill, who is mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent who has become the target of a very persistent group of international spies. But Thornhill/Kaplan proves to be quite resourceful himself, even with the serious disadvantage of never remotely knowing what is going on.

Psycho and the 1960s

After the commercial success of North by Northwest, Hitchcock made his most shocking movie, Psycho (1960). Critics were uncertain what to make of it; moviegoers, on the other hand, were immediately adored it. In the beginning it seems that the beautiful Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is the protagonist, but Hitchcock resolves her peril halfway through the picture by killing her off in the famous shower scene, leaving the audience alone with the lunacy of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). The long-term effects of Psycho on both the grammar of the cinema and the implicit trust between an audience and a director—which Hitchcock had now forevermore compromised with this shocking plotline—were enormous. So were the picture’s box-office receipts: the controversy helped it become the year’s second highest grosser. Hitchcock received his final Academy Award nomination for best director for Psycho.

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By the time Hitchcock made The Birds (1963) for Universal (which would release his last six films), the media had been trained to respond to his every signal. There were cover stories in national magazines and countless features extolling Hitchcock’s latest blond discovery, model Tippi Hedren. The story itself—millions of birds settle in and finally attack the residents of a small town in coastal California—was based on a novelette by Daphne du Maurier; screenwriter Evan Hunter expanded it considerably to incorporate all sorts of Freudian byplay among social butterfly Melanie Daniels (Hedren); lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), her romantic interest; schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), his former romantic interest; and icy Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy), Mitch’s possessive mother. The Birds unfolds with a dream logic in which the birds are a punishment for Daniels.

When Grace Kelly refused to come out of retirement to take the part, Hedren starred in Marnie (1964) as a compulsive liar suffering from kleptomania. Her handsome employer (Sean Connery) is attracted to her and wants to help her discover the roots of her emotional difficulties—including fear of sex, thunderstorms, and the colour red—and so marries her, little realizing just how severely she has been traumatized. Marnie proved to be a divisive film, with some seeing it as an astonishing distillation of Hitchcock’s obsessions but others regarding it as a mere fetishistic catalogue of those obsessions that is unsupported by an interesting story.

Hitchcock’s next two films, the Cold War thrillers Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969), were neither commercially nor critically successful.

Final productions

It appeared that Hitchcock’s powers had waned, but they returned in Frenzy (1972), the first movie he made in England since Stage Fright. Jon Finch played the hallowed role of the man wrongly accused of murder, and Barry Foster played the sadistic “sex killer” who revels in his freedom while the wrong man is being hunted by Scotland Yard. Frenzy was Hitchcock shorn of the big budgets, stars, and media attention that had combined, in the opinion of some, to make him lazy and smug.

Hitchcock made Family Plot (1976) as his swan song. Scripted by Ernest Lehman in the comic vein of The Trouble with Harry, Family Plot followed a colourful, rather endearing collection of psychic frauds, scalawags, and jewel thieves.

Reputation and general themes

Hitchcock has been called by some the greatest of all directors, the most adroit, and the most admired, and the case has been made that he was all of these. His many classics are widely acknowledged—including The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds—and in these films Hitchcock’s genius as both filmmaker and storyteller is abundantly evident.

Hitchcock’s films usually center on either murder or espionage, with deception, mistaken identities, and chase sequences complicating and enlivening the plots. Wry touches of humor and occasional intrusions of the macabre complete this mixture of cinematic elements. Three main themes predominate in Hitchcock’s films. The most common is that of the innocent man who is mistakenly suspected or accused of a crime and who must then track down the real perpetrator in order to clear himself (e.g., The Lodger and North by Northwest). The second theme is that of the guilty woman who enmeshes a male protagonist and ends up either destroying him or being saved by him (e.g., Vertigo and Marnie). The third theme is that of the (frequently psychopathic) murderer whose identity is established during the working out of the plot (e.g., Shadow of a Doubt and Psycho).

Hitchcock’s greatest gift was his mastery of the technical means to build and maintain suspense. To this end he used innovative camera viewpoints and movements, elaborate editing techniques, and effective soundtrack music, often supplied in his best films by Bernard Herrmann. He had a sound grasp of human psychology, as manifested both in his credible treatment of everyday life and in the tense and nightmarish situations encountered in his more-chilling films. His ability to convincingly evoke human menace, subterfuge, and fear gave his psychological thrillers great impact while maintaining their subtlety and believability. He was also a master of something he called the “MacGuffin”—that is, the use of an object or person who, for storytelling purposes, keeps the plot moving along even though that thing or person is not really central to the story. (Examples include the titular steps in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps and the microfilm in North by Northwest.)

Among the honors Hitchcock received are the Irving G. Thalberg Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1968) and the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute (1979). Hitchcock was knighted in 1980.