Considered in his time a popular film maker - ie not an indie, artsy, you-need-to-prepare-your-Oscar-speech type - Alf's films have aged to be considered the greatest ever made. Psycho (1960) is his most famous, scandalous piece, probably something do with that dischordant string motif which sounds like you've walked in on a junior school violin concert; or the poor sod that gets stabbed to death in the shower (no way is this a spoiler, everyone knows about that scene); or that lovely young man Norman and his controlling but well-meaning mother. But his lesser known, more critically acclaimed films include Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963).
Hitchcock didn't want a shot to just be a shot, he wanted it to be creative, expressive and entertaining. For example, the opening of Psycho starts like an ordinary film. You have your establishing shot of the city, then we focus in on the first two characters in a hotel room. But instead of cutting between these two scenes, Hitchcock integrates them by taking a fantastic sweeping long shot of the Phoenix skyline, before gradually zooming in to a particular window and continuing this impossible zoom through the window and into the room, simultaneously establishing the location and two main characters in a single exquisite take.
Moreover Hitchcock was one of the most effective filmmakers to use cinematography to infer meaning. If Psycho is a film about male sexuality, the camera frequently implies this through, for example, shooting Marion languishing on a bed while her lover stands over her, with only his bottom half in the shot.
A boundary-pusher, the shower scene of the same film induced a frenzy of outrage against Hitchcock because viewers were sure it contained nudity. Furthermore, although the scene shows little physical violence, the expertise displayed in its use of intercutting and rapid editing (the short scene apparently two an entire week to film), including the final fatalistic shot of the blood swirling down the drain, create a strong impression that we as viewers have witnessed a horrifically violent act -disturbing now, and groundbreaking at the time. The film was also the first to ever show a toilet being flushed on screen (shock horror). All of this contributed to Hitchcock's status as the Master of Suspense and the further attribution of the adjective Hitchcockian to any modern filmmaker who attempts similiar terror-inducing techniques.
And it is evidently Psycho which the new semi-biographical flick Hitchcock (set for release in the UK early 2013) has centred its plot around. Anthony Hopkins, accompanied by an assortment of prosthetics and possibly a fatsuit (unless he actually has put on weight, which would be awkward), plays the man himself, accompanied by Helen Mirren as the sidelined wife and Scarlett Johansson as muse Janet Leigh.
I've got mixed feelings about the premise of this new film. I thought the trailer was cheesy, and the narrative spiel seems to want to focus on the 'cutesy' romance between Hitchcock and Alma Reville when word is old Alf was a bit of a ladies man. If by ladies man you mean someone who, in order to encourage a greater peformance from his actresses, allegedly terrorized them on set. One example of this being his ordering a live bird to be tied to Tippi Hedren in the filming of The Birds and obliterating her career when she (shockingly!) refused his advances.
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| Suddenly the birds in her hair seem less symbolic... |
So, what do you think? The sneak-peeks certainly look promising - there's a definite sense of deserved praise to be awarded to the makeup team, but I'm not going to go Pscyho to get a ticket.
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