In Vertigo the end title hits the screen before Kim Novak's body hits the ground.

[quote]In Vertigo the end title hits the screen before Kim Novak's body hits the ground.[/quote]

Not with the tagged on scene, as I mentioned earlier...

Nick

Please explain the tagged-on ending to Vertigo, then. I didn't quite understand the "Easter Egg" reference--is that a euphemism or something? :?

No, an easter egg is a hidden feature on a DVD. I don't know if I saw the one Nick is referring to, but I remember hearing or reading that the censors in Europe wouldn't accept the film as it was, so an ending was added to clarify the suicide/accidental fall angle or something like that.

[quote]Please explain the tagged-on ending to Vertigo, then. I didn't quite understand the "Easter Egg" reference--is that a euphemism or something? :?[/quote]

I have the laserdisc, not the DVD, but I'm pretty sure the scene referred to is the European ending of Vertigo, in which Scottie and Midge find out the fate of Gavin Elster.

It's a terrible, tacked-on scene, IMHO, added for all the wrong reasons (see below). The ending everyone is familiar with is a knockout.

Here's IMDB's description of why the scene was added to the European version:

An addition to the ending was made for some European coutries due to certain laws prohibiting a film from letting a "bad guy" get away at the end of a film. In the new ending, after Scottie looks down from the belltower (the original ending) there is a shot of Midge sitting next to a radio listening to reports of police tracking down Gavin Elster. As Midge turns off the radio the news flash also reports that 3 Berkeley students got caught bringing a cow up the stairs of a campus building. Scottie enters the room, looks at Midge plainly, and then looks out a window. Midge makes two drinks and gives one to Scottie. It ends with both of them looking out the window. This ending can be found on the restoration laserdisc.

[quote]Please explain the tagged-on ending to Vertigo, then. I didn't quite understand the "Easter Egg" reference--is that a euphemism or something? :?[/quote]

An Easter Egg in DVDspeak is a hidden feature.

On the DVD for Vertigo, the hidden feature is at the end of the documentary. You can go to the chapter selection, go to the last chapter, and you'll see it there.

It was a scene that the foreign press pushed Hitchcock to add, bc the film ended too abruptly for their tastes.

****************SPOILERS***********************






The tagged on scene is in Midge's apartment. The radio is on, broadcasting the news of the day, namely Madeliene/Judy's suicide. While the radio is broadcasting the news, Scottie walks in. He grabs a drink. Long pause. End.



**********************END SPOILER**********************

Methinks the foreign distributors wanted to find a way to tie up Midge's loose ends. Mefurtherthinks, this scene hints that Scottie would either start warming up to Midge, or that Scottie is forever doomed to not be open to romance with anybody, esp. Midge. Ambiguity. Gotta love it.

Nick

hmmm curious,


The Vertigo ending I've seen is not quite any of those described above. Whilst its certainly not got a tacked on ending and ends in the bell tower, I'm fairly sure we don't get the end credits until after Novak's body hits the ground.

The Psycho ending is terribly overdone (although the actual last bit is fantastic), but I'm not sure how much sense it would make otherwise. Perhpas a much shorter penultimate scene. Besides how insesnitive is that. "we know your sister has just been murdered by this Madman, but how's about you hang around whilst we drag in the psychologist to tell why he was such a twisted freak?". But then I also heard it was meant to be overlong for some reason or another (spoof or something)

As for The Birds - it was the first Hitchcock fil I saw, and I couldn't believe that was the ending. I was waiting for someone to save the day or for it all to be sorted out. The ending is genius & makes the film loads more scary than otherwise.

Rear Window I felt got it about right, althugh if it were re-made today the confrontation at the end scene would be far more protracted (I can picture it - horrific - the Jimmy Stewart character hopping down fire escapes, police cars getting stuck in traffic, Hitch spinning in his grave so quick tht if you hooked him up to a dynamo he'd power half of New York)

Matt

First, a link to the new Psycho thread.

Second, I caught Vertigo for the second time last night -- it was on a double-bill with Breakfast at Tiffany's, oddly enough (perhaps because both films feature women from the central region of the country who move to a big city on the coast and are taught to act classier than their origins? perhaps because both films feature scenes in which a guy shadows someone?) -- and I have to say it still doesn't do much for me. It's intelligent and brilliant and it makes surreal use of animation and other techniques, bla bla bla, but I just didn't care, for the most part. The only character who engaged me at all, simply as a human being, was Midge, though I liked Judy too; but I just didn't buy Scotty's obsessiveness. I found myself thinking of Marnie, of all things, perhaps because of the manipulative psychology (which treats characters as mechanisms to be pushed here and there and not as living breathing PEOPLE) or perhaps because of the flashing colour filters. That Bernard Hermann music, though -- wow!

MattPage,

I see from your film journal you finally saw Torn Curtain. How was it?

QUOTE

I see from your film journal you finally saw Torn Curtain. How was it?

Yes, I'd be curious to know. I'm working on an article about Brian Moore's film work (one-time Catholic, one-time Canadian, Booker nominee). Mostly, it's novels of his that were adapted to the screen, but TORN CURTAIN is a Moore screenplay without a novel behind it. I've not seen it yet, but will.

QUOTE

: . . . \"I Confess!\" (the Catholic in me) . . . I, of course, had to see this one because it's the only film Hitchcock made in Canada, and in 1995 or thereabouts, Robert LePage ... made his directorial debut with Le Confessional, a movie that takes place partly in Quebec City while Hitchcock happens to be making his movie there.

I watched the two as a very satisfying double-bill last fall, Hitch first and glue-boy second. Here are my write-ups;

LE CONFESSIONNAL (1995, Canada)
It's men who find it hard to forgive. God forgives everything, for God is all-merciful. Don't be afraid.

Robert Lepage is Canada's most celebrated and innovative stage director, and if this film doesn't have the breathtaking audacity of his theatre work, it is still a rich and sophisticated piece of work. When his father's death prompts Pierre to seek out his adopted brother Marc, the two of them strive to come to terms with events of their childhood that reverberate in the present – events that were interwoven with the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's I CONFESS in their city.

Lepage pays frequent homage to Hitchcock, brilliantly interweaving the two films and referencing films like VERTIGO and PSYCHO. He rarely resorts to mere cleverness, and when he does, he is very clever indeed. In one sequence, Hitchcock auditions French girls for the role of two school children who witness the murderer leaving the scene of the crime: the audition serves the contemporary story by developing character and interweaving past and present, but the sequence also gives a subtle nod to Hitchcock's cameo in the original film that almost seems to acknowledge his own "there but for the grace of God" culpability – "Was he fat or thin? Did you notice anything special about him? But you're absolutely sure he was a priest?" – before concluding in a double-take of a segue that links the city's cinematic past to its media present in the person of TV newscaster Renee Hudon.

The Lepage film is far edgier than its predecessor, and it is more interested in psychological and relational questions than in religious ones. Even so, themes of the holy confidentiality of the confessional, as well as the integrity and humanity of the priesthood, carry through from Hitchcock's film into this. Set in a secular, sexualized Quebec that contrasts sharply with the pervasive Catholic milieu of its predecessor, the contemporary film is about faith and vocation, but even more it is concerned with their loss.

This is a densely layered film, with a visual power and complexity that dazzles: his startling use of colour, endlessly inventive segues from scene to scene, past to present, and startling compositions add layer after layer of significance to an already powerful story of fallenness and reconciliation that's unsentimental to the point of bleakness, but ultimately neither cynical nor hopeless. There is an almost sacramental attention to the physical, sensual world: imagery of paint, blood and blindness invoke themes of guilt and innocence, truth and deception, concealment and reclamation, inheritance and sins of fathers. Complex visual references ironically link the confessional to gay saunas, strip clubs, elevators and Japanese hotels: the contrasts are sometimes cuttingly ironic, sometimes nearly tragic as they evoke what has been lost in Quebec culture, and in the lives of these two lost and fatherless young men.

Lepage's film lacks some of the transcendence implied by Hitchcock's, while the older film lacks the emotional power and complexity of the contemporary one. But what a great double feature! Taken together, they are both artistically stimulating and spiritually gratifying – true Soul Food.

See also MORTAL SINS, THE ROSARY MURDERS

*

I CONFESS (1953, USA)
Hasn't God forgiven me, thanks to you? The police never would.

Alfred Hitchcock was raised a Catholic, and if this isn't his best – or best-known – film, it's certainly his most explicitly spiritual. In the 1930s, Hitch saw a stage production of Paul Anthelme's turn of the century drama Nos deux consciences, and its story about an innocent priest accused of murder haunted him for years. This "transference of guilt" theme shows up in any number of his films: here, the Master Of Suspense tells the story with images that connect Father Logan with Christ, suffering for sins he didn't commit and refusing to answer his accusers. The ending Hitchcock intended to shoot underlined the symbolic connection with Jesus as sacrificial victim, but the one he actually shot is more satisfying at a human level.

It really is a compelling premise: the seal of the confessional forbids Logan from identifying the real murderer, a frightened parishioner who ends up turning suspicion in the priest's direction. I'm not convinced this film does all it could with the material: though French critics and Canadian movie buffs make much of the flick, I'm not sure it's more than a workmanlike rendering of a potentially powerful examination of conscience and moral paradox, rendered a bit flat by Monty Clift's limited range in the central role. Still, it has its strengths, and makes a doozy of a double feature with Robert Lepage's LE CONFESSIONNAL, which centres its events around the filming of Hitchcock's film in picturesque Quebec City.

See also MORTAL SINS, THE ROSARY MURDERS

*

And a bit of a footnote on the Hitchcock;

I CONFESS
Lloyd C. Baugh's definitive Imaging The Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film has some good specifics on this film. The Senses Of Cinema website places the film and its theme in the context of Hitchcock's other work. Richard Aloysius Blake's Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers (2000) further explores the impact of the director's religious background on his filmmaking (and also covers Scorsese, Capra, Ford, Coppola and De Palma).

*

Revisiting this thread, I'm intrigued by the stuff Alvy has posted, and note that I CONFESS is a great fit with

1. THE STORY ABOUT THE FALSELY ACCUSED MAN. The Lodger; The 39 Steps, Young and Innocent; Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, Frenzy.

It's probably not on there because it's such a minor entry in the Hitchcock opus. (An hors d'ouevre in the ouevre?) But the Senses Of Cinema article I mention above seems to suggest that it's maybe the seminal picture in this regard - or at least that the play on which it's based was seminal. The article begins

"The release of I Confess in 1953 must have seemed to the Cahiers du cinéma critics who had championed Hitchcock to be a confirmation of all their theories, because it is THE textbook example of the famous 'transference of guilt' motif, enacted within the archetypal context of the Roman Catholic confessional."

: MattPage I see from your film journal you finally saw Torn Curtain. How was it?

Hmm interesting timing cos I also saw N by NW on Friday as well.


I gues my overall reflection is that I like Hitchcock's weird stuff (for want of a better word!) more than I like his one man on the run stuff. Torn Curtain isn't strictly about "the man falsely accused", but it pretty much fits into that category, in that I suppose Newman's character is falsely suspected by his girlfriend. I think my favourite films with HItch are the ones where I don't know what's going to happen. So you pretty much know in Torn Curtain, 39 Steps and N by NW that the hero is going to escape. I much preferred the sense of not knowing what's going to happen in The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo and to a lesser extent Rear Window. (Rear Window stands out tho cos of its technical brilliance)

So from that you've probably sussed that I didn't enjoy either film as much as I'd expected to, and as a result came away a bit disappointed tha my high expectations weren't met. That said here's hat I thought of the films

Torn Curtain Being a big fan of Newman and Hitchcock I probably had inflated expectations of this one. On the other hand I've heard it given such bad press so often that I was also surprised how much I enjoyed it. I liked the "chase" through the museum, and the realism of Newman's murder of his trailer. I also liked the scene on the plane where Newman realises Andrews has followed him. The Bus scene brought a good sense of tension, but also a sense of comedy which I'm not so used to in Hitchcock films, but I liked. There was, as always, a couple of interesting moments of camerawork, such as the murder scene, but nothing matching Rear Window or Psycho There were tho' a few implausibilities in the plot, such as :spoilers: where he shouts Fire in a crowd of East Germans and they react exactly as a crowd of British / Americans would and panic rather than saying "Fire? Was ist das?", and also the escape at the end was a bit sudden. , but all in all I just found that the film lacked things rather than did things badly. In my favourite Hitchcocks I feel a tension that was missing here, its just a bit predictable, even tho' on a scene by scene basis it isn't always so. I also felt it lacked a bit of heart, perhaps thats because the lead character isn't meant to be particularly sympathetic, and I'm so used to a film's hero being just that (and I do admire it when a film does go against that trend). Defintinely worth watching, and I'm keen to see it again

North by North West
I could pretty much write the same review. Partway through the film :spoilers:once the cat was out of the bag about the non-existence of Grant's pseudonym the main point of interest was resolved. I loved the zoom effect used at the start where Grant is in the bar and it zooms to the two men standing nearby, and in fact I thought the first part of the film was really good, but it lost interest for me once Eva Marie Saint got involved. That said I like the cut between the last two scenes.

So there you go. Put another way I've watched 2 other feature length movies so far this month The Godfather part III, and Unbreakable, and I preferred both of them to these two (see the Shaylaman thread I'm starting).

Matt[/i]

Sheesh. Now I feel an almost religious duty to convert you over to North by Northwest, Matt.

I shall have to revisit Torn Curtain.

If you are familiar with the music of Hitchcock's films, consider that Torn Curtain was originally scored by Bernard Herrmann before he and Hitchcock had a bust-up and he was replaced by John Adinsell. Adinsell's was fairly accessible compared to Herrmann's murky, dark original. I wonder how different a film it might have been had Hitch kept Herrmann on board?

Alvy, I loooove being converted to films I didn't think were amazing. Prosletise away!

Matt

Wha?

Actually, I just created this poll...and voted.

But voting in a poll does bump it up, right?

yes

FWIW, link to the thread in which I rattle off which Hitchcock films have been re-made (or have been re-makes themselves) and which have not.

Vertigo and Notorious may be the most emotionally deep and complex of all his works, but The Wrong Man is right behind them and should be of special importance to people here with its themes of guilt and its transference and spiritual absolution. It's a fascinating and compelling work, filmed in a pseudo-documentary mode, stripped down to it bare dramatic essentials in a way that's closer to Bresson than what we typically expect from Hitchcock. It's a criminally overlooked film.

I wrote a paper on that film back in college, and I remember liking the film quite a bit. I haven't watched it since. Thanks for that reminder, Doug.

FWIW, Mark Steyn has an essay on Hitchcock and "the expressionless gaze" up on his website now.

i almost voted and then I kept scrolling down and I realized I had no idea how MANY films he's made. But I will not be voting until I see at least 1/3 of the films.

Yeah, the guy was making movies in the silent era. Apart from his well-known classics in the late-'50s, I'd definitely recommend:

* The Wrong Man (1957)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Trouble With Harry
To Catch a Thief (1955)
* Strangers on a Train (1951)
* Rope (1948)
* Notorious (1946)
Spellbound (1945)
Lifeboat (1944)
* Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Suspicion (1941)
Foreign Correspondent (1940)
* Rebecca (1940)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Sabotage (1936)
* The 39 Steps (1935)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
The Lodger (1927)

(Starred titles are particularly emphasized.)

Are they all silent? I've heard a lot of good things about Rope and Rebecca.

No no, sound began to be implemented in commercial films in 1927, so the only one on my list that's silent is The Lodger.

Actually, it was Hitch himself who brought Britain into the sound era with Blackmail (1929).

I caught Notorious yesterday which I really enjoyed. I've got I confess still to come. Really not sure about putting them in order. The only ones I've seen more than once are Rear Window and Vertigo, so I've tried to do it on the basis of a first viewing, but For what its worth here are they in order of my personal preference.

1. Psycho
2. The Birds
3. Vertigo
4. Notorious
5. Rear Window
6. Torn Curtain
7. 39 Steps
8. North by Northwest

Will update after I Confess

Matt

I have to rank Psycho as number 1, because Hitchcock's malevolent camera work was revolutionary and still terrifying 40 years later.

Vertigo is #2, although after first viewing I wasn't sure what all the fuss was about, either. It takes a few viewings to appreciate the technique, I think ... how does Hitchcock manage to put the viewer in such deep sympathy with the Jimmy Stewart character for the first half, then once the big reveal comes, to make us feel he's a psychopath?

3. Strangers on a Train. Bizarre and engrossing.

4. The Man Who Knew Too Much. A bit cheesy, but how can you resist Doris Day as a tightly wound American mom singing "Que Sera, Sera" to save her son?

5. Spellbound. Alfred Hitchcock plus Salvadore Dali -- could there BE a better suited duo?

6. Rear Window. The murder mystery is secondary to Hitchcock's gift for mini character studies. Miss Lonely Hearts still haunts me.

HI Mark,

Welcome to the boards!. I think what I most liked about Psycho was the camera work as well, although the tension Hitch builds is superb as well.

Matt

Hi Matt, thanks for the welcome.

A few years ago I watched Psycho again with my teen-age niece and nephew. Every time I looked over at them their eyes looked about ready to pop. By the end they were terrified, and wouldn't go down to the basement bedroom by themselves, even though my sister and brother-in-law were sleeping there. For a 40-year-old movie to have that kind of effect on worldly, 21st-century teens, Hitch must have had some gift for tension-building!

Im a sucker for visuals, style, and camera technique even if there is a detachment about it as someone alluded to before. Because of this Im a huge Hitchcock fan as well as a fan of Depalma, Tarantino, and Kubrick.

Ive seen quite a few of Hitchcock's films and my favorites were:

Vertigo
Strangers On A Train
Shadow of a Doubt(good call on this underrated one)
Rear Window
Notorious
Rebecca

Interesting piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education:

Musical Redemption in Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'
By JACK SULLIVAN

"Where is that wonderful music coming from?" -- Lisa in Rear Window

Rear Window, which has its 50th anniversary this August, is Alfred Hitchcock's most daring experiment in popular music. Its pop-song surrealism is the forerunner of American Graffiti (1973), Mona Lisa (1986), After Hours (1985), and many other films, but the way tunes and street sounds drift through the soundtrack, in and out of windows and the protagonist's dreams, is unique.

Indeed, Rear Window feels like such a radical experiment, unlike anything in a movie before, that we need to remind ourselves that its swingy ambience harks back to British Hitchcock -- Waltzes From Vienna (1933), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Those films pushed vernacular source music to the limit before powerful Hollywood scores à la Miklós Rózsa and Dimitri Tiomkin buried their delicate zing under what Hitchcock called those "terrible strings."

Rear Window's cue sheet reveals an astonishing diversity and richness, listing 39 songs, ballets, "improvisations," boogies, and "jukeboxes" by a dizzying variety of composers. The official composer is Franz Waxman, in his fourth Hitchcock film; but we also hear Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, Jay Livingston, Johnny Burke, Walter Gross, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. The fusion of songs with action is graphed from a meticulously detailed "description of the manner in which the music is used," indicating precisely what tunes are playing, often many simultaneously, as Jeff, Hitchcock's voyeuristic hero -- a photojournalist wheelchair-bound with a broken leg -- spies on his apartment-courtyard neighbors.

The first item, "Rear Window Prelude and Radio," shows that we are to read Waxman's jazzy main title as source music: "Camera pans from window to courtyard buildings. Cut to James Stewart (Jeff) at window and thermometer ... cut to composer shaving, as composer changes station on radio." The "Prelude" thus comes from a real source, the composer's radio, and concludes when he switches stations. What plays on the radio next are the sexy trumpets and thumping basses of Waxman's "Rhumba" for Miss Torso's "ballet exercises" so admired by Jeff. So it goes throughout the movie. In Rope (1948), Hitchcock experimented with minimizing the symphonic underscore; here he eliminates it altogether.

Hitchcock employed more musical styles than any director in history, from Cole Porter sung by Marlene Dietrich in Stage Fright (1950) to the revolutionary electronic soundtrack of The Birds (1963). (John Williams, Hitchcock's final composer, told me the director had an especially detailed knowledge of William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams.) Rear Window is Hitchcock's ultimate paean to popular music, so much so that he really had nowhere to go with the genre afterward. In North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and Marnie (1964), he used progressively less pop material, until it practically vanished in Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976). In Vertigo (1958), he went so far as to spurn suggestions in the script for popular source music, giving Bernard Herrmann's exquisitely complex score full reign. After Rear Window only The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) remake with Doris Day would make significant use of a popular tune.

In Rear Window, the songs are active and liberating, an antidote to Jeff's stubbornly rationalized refusal to connect with society-model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly). Lisa embraces the power of song while Jeff sarcastically dismisses it. The dismissal is a symptom of his emotional uptightness, though as compensation he gets some of the funniest lines. "Where do you think he gets his inspiration?" Lisa wonders aloud about the songwriter. "From the landlady, once a month," Jeff retorts. When Lisa rhapsodically comments that the "utterly beautiful" song drifting in their window seems "written especially for us," Jeff dryly comments, "No wonder he's having so much trouble with it."

Rear Window's music provides the revelation of a complex process, something that always interested Hitchcock. "I wanted to show," he told François Truffaut, "how a popular song is composed by gradually developing it throughout the film until, in the final scene, it is played on a recording with a full orchestral accompaniment. Well, it didn't work out the way I wanted it to." John Waxman, the composer's son, recalls amiable meetings between his father and Hitchcock, but also bitter disputes: "Hitchcock knew what he wanted -- he always did -- and he wasn't getting it from my father. He wanted a hit song, and my father was after something else."

Under increasing pressure from Hollywood studios to produce a hit song, Hitchcock frequently fought with his greatest composers, including Herrmann and Henry Mancini, both of whom he fired. "Lisa" does precisely what Hitchcock wanted, going through full metamorphosis in the film, from tentative piano noodlings through gradual instrumentation and voice-piano tryouts and "improvisations," a drama of creation that occurs independently of the action even as it profoundly influences it, until the finished, recorded product sails into the concluding image of Lisa reposing in serene control as her musical ID concludes the film. But it never became a hit song. Paradoxically, that makes it all the more effective because it's part of the film's aural fabric instead of an import from commercial radio.

The way a song reaches out to save a lonely woman from despair and death constitutes the film's most moving musical drama, a powerful counter to the charge that Hitchcock was cold and unfeeling. Throughout Rear Window, Jeff watches the desperate creature he has dubbed Miss Lonelyheart struggling with anxiety and isolation, drinking alone, finally deciding to kill herself -- until "Lisa" drifts in her window from above, making the world seem, for that crucial moment, a benevolent place. Suddenly she stands in rapture facing her window, much as Lisa does when she hears the tune, both of them dressed in Edith Head's resplendent outfits. Captured in a long shot, tastefully avoiding sentimentality, this is Hitchcock's most beautifully realized musical epiphany.

As with Poe, Hitchcock's literary muse, beauty and truth are usually separate. In Notorious (1946), vicious terrorists have impeccable musical taste; in both the 1934 and 1956 versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much an exuberant cantata is the vehicle for an assassination. But in Rear Window, a Shakespearean comedy disguised as a suspense thriller, beauty and truth come together; the "utterly beautiful" saves a life. The final communion of the composer and Miss Lonelyheart has a poignant symmetry: The songwriter struggles with his song in lonely, frustrated, drunken isolation not unlike that of Miss Lonelyheart, as shown when Jeff observes him careening wasted through his apartment, hurling his score about the room. The songwriter needs Miss Lonelyheart, his best audience, as much as she needs him.

Gathering with his noisy friends (including Hitchcock, in his wittiest cameo), the composer invokes an era when people informally sang and played instruments, a period that, with the coming of television, was nearing its end. Hitchcock would contribute to the new passivity himself a year later with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, making introductory jokes about being trapped in a television box.

"Lisa" is only one of dozens of songs gliding through Jeff's window in a haunting Ivesian mosaic linked with his fears and fantasies. Sometimes the songs correspond with what is on the screen, as when Miss Lonelyheart puts Johnny Burke's "To See You Is to Love You" on the phonograph, constructing a dinner date with a fantasy partner. At other times, the tunes go against the action, as in the upbeat clarinet jazz during Lisa's letter delivery to the villainous Thorwald's apartment and the fizzy violin (Waxman's "Jukebox No. 6") during Thorwald's hasty exit after Jeff's threatening phone call. Everywhere, the soundtrack upsets conventions. Lisa's floating entrance into the movie and into Jeff's dreams -- one of the most ravishing shots in all Hitchcock -- is announced not by a lush nocturne but by a faraway singer warming up on the piano, blending with the cries of children playing in the last glow of sunset, a touch of "realism" that imparts sublime poetry.

Hitchcock was a grudging Romantic with the methods of a painstaking classicist. The ambivalence is dramatized in the conflict between the two main characters, one denouncing "intuition," especially women's, the other affirming it at every point, along with music, imagination, and enchantment. Lisa's intuition about jewelry, makeup, and travel bags, and her willingness to take risks and improvise, even daring to burglarize Thorwald's apartment, solve the crime. Jeff's "intelligent, mature" way of approaching life and love -- a stance ridiculed by Jeff's nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter) as the world's greatest cause of "trouble" -- is as inadequate for romance as it is for catching the bad guy.

Musically, Rear Window marks a return to the modernity Hitchcock pioneered in Rich and Strange 22 years earlier. Later movies like The Big Chill (1983) and Avalon (1990) would use hit songs from the past for instant nostalgia. But the songs in Rear Window have a freshness, a sense of being in the moment, especially when they sound together in rowdy dissonance. As we see in the good-old-days soliloquies of Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), a serial killer whose thematic label is a 19th-century waltz, and in the denunciation of modern jazz by the assassin Drayton in the 1956 Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock distrusted nostalgia. Those who can't bury the past, from Stewart's Detective Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo to Norman Bates in Psycho, are either bad guys or good ones headed for tragedy.

At the end, popular song affirms Rear Window's comic vision. The loose ends are tied together, the correct couples coupled. Miss Lonelyheart is united with her lifesaving composer. "Love Is Just Around the Corner," gruesomely ironic when she threw out her drunken pickup and prepared her suicide pills, is now revealed as prophetic. Lisa has mastered her romance with Jeff, her theme song overpowering the "Rear Window Finale." It plays triumphantly through the courtyard and in all the windows, a coda for the various reunions and romances.

Music can provide a closure even more concise than the camera's. Rear Window ends resolutely and happily in the home key, as does all comedy. "It's great to be home," says Miss Torso's returning boyfriend in the final line, just before Waxman strikes the major chord in the swift, perky final cadence. For once, the music does not seem to have a source -- the first and only instance of an "invisible" score. Following scene after scene of "real" music, the omniscient symphonic composer has the last word, proving that Rear Window is, as Hitchcock would say, only a movie after all.

Jack Sullivan is a professor of English and chairman of the American-studies department at Rider University. This essay is adapted from his book, Hitchcock's Music, forthcoming from Yale University Press.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 39, Page B18

Wonderful essay -- thanks, Mark!

ditto - makes me like Rear Window a whole lot more!

Matt

Just announced:

Anyone read (or seen) the original stage play by Patrick Hamilton? Very, very creaky, excruciatingly old-fashioned and overblown. Transferring to the contemporary American setting (from the original 1920s England) makes for a much more credible, sophisticated film.

1. North by Northwest - The best setpieces, right from the extraordinary opening sequence. And the best music. Also the extraordinary suaveness contest between Cary Grant and James Mason. Probably the most purely entertaining movie ever made.
2. The 39 Steps - An example of a movie with nothing wrong with it, the cut from the screaming woman to the train whistle, the pathos of the woman married to the gloomy crofter and the political speech where he spellbinds the crowd with platitudes.
3. Notorious - Grant's best performance, you get the sinister edge beneath all that suaveness and somehow Claude Rains almost seems a nicer character than the putative hero. And all that business with the wine in the cellar is done brilliantly.
4. Vertigo - The dark twin of North by Northwest. There's more going on in the title sequence than there is in any films. I'm not sure if you could call it a great acting performance by Kim Novak but she's spellbinding.
5. Strangers on a Train - For Robert Walker and the terror of the fairground scenes.
I like Rear Window but I admire it more than love it. Has anyone read the story by Cornell Woolrich on which it's based, it's brilliant.
Looking through the list, it's hard to think of any other director who was so consistently good for so long. He only really lost it right at the end, Frenzy is horrible in many ways and also risible, like a slasher Carry On movie. I enjoy all the commentaries which make me think I should have another look at Rope. Shadow of a Doubt it's good to see getting a mention as well though the film kind of tails off. Joseph Cotten was an incredible actor though and the scene where he sits in a seedy bar with his niece and inveighs against the world is one of the best Hitch things.

As much as I wanted to throw some love to "Strangers on a Train", I had to vote for "North by Northwest". "Psycho" and "Rear Window" are both favorites deserving of their reputations, and "Vertigo" is brilliant even if I don't call it a favorite, but w/o "North by Northwest", we probably wouldn't have the modern action film. (Okay, maybe that's not such a lofty praise. But I'm sticking with my choice!) Just as without "Psycho" the slasher sub-genre may've never gone mainstream, or without "The Birds" the "nature-gone-mad" sub-genre. Say what you will about the general failings of those sub-genres, but when done properly (as Hitch did), they can transcend the level of guilty pleasure.

JiM T

I just had the great experience of seeing The Lodger, which now is one of my favorite Hitchcock films. I did miss his cameo in this one though, hopefully I will catch it next time around. This on is worth watching because you can see a lot of the classic Hitch edits happening in a really rough form, the entire story is told through the phrasing of gesture and response through the camera.

There is a lot of shot-reverse-shot kind of storytelling going on, but there are some remarkable transitions that make use of printed material, double exposures, and interesting technological montages. I did get a kick out of the Arthur Dove-like embellishments of the intertitle screens, this must have been totally hip when it first screened.

FWIW, as a part of their 75 Year Anniversary Party, Blackmail (1929) is playing at Chicago's Music Box Theater on Thursday September 9.

-s.

Saw Dial M for Murder last night. So changed my rankings accordingly

1. Psycho
2. The Birds
3. Vertigo
4. Dial M for Murder
5. Notorious
6. Rear Window
7. Torn Curtain
8. 39 Steps
9. North by Northwest

Was pleased to suss (work) out how they'd catch him a while before the end, but felt thw thing was really well paced. Particularly liked the really long scene setting up the murder at the start (made me think of the monologues conversation - which of course it isn't, but a very long scene). I also liked the "montage" where we just see Grace Kelly's face as she moves from being arrested to being sentenced. It had a very hitch feel to it - not sure why.

I also found it interesting that this film (which is shot almost entirely in one flat) was made the same year as Rear Window (which was also shot almost entirely from one flat).

Matt

Hitch experimented a lot with single sets: Lifeboat, Rope, Rear Window and Dial M for Murder were all filmed on single sets.

Can't picture the montage you mention -- it is an entertaining film, but not one I have seen more than two or three times (which is not much for a Hitchcock, considering I have seen my favourites at least half a dozen times).

: Hitch experimented a lot with single sets: Lifeboat, Rope, Rear Window and Dial M for Murder
:were all filmed on single sets.

Isn't there the scene at the Stag party which is shot somewhere else?


: Can't picture the montage you mention -- it is an entertaining film, but not one I
: have seen more than two or three times (which is not much for a Hitchcock,
: considering I have seen my favourites at least half a dozen times).

Well I actuall y mentioned a "montage" - the inverted commas were there to indicate that it isn't technically a montage as its all one smooth shot - or at least appears to be - but as montage is usually used to depict the passing of time, and the voice overs and responses in this shot indicate that this is happening then its kind of a "montage" even if that bastardises the word slightly as the editing is a sound thing rather than a vision thing. (There's basically a head shot of Kelly against a red background whilst she moves from being charged to the start of her case to her sentencing)

Matt

Oh, okay. I can picture the "montage" vaguely, now you describe it in more detail.

You're right, there are a few shots outside the apartment, though for the most part Hitchcock confines the action to a single set.

He had similar ideas for Rear Window: The telephone conversation between Jeffries and his detective friend, Lt Doyle, was meant to have cutaway shots to Doyle's office; in the end he wisely decided to keep the action in the apartment and courtyard.

Saw Psycho for the first time in a theatre in West LA back in 1999. Off the chain! Saw Vertigo in it's mid 1990's 70MM restored print in Westwood. Glad I went.

I've only seen 4 Hitchcock flicks from start to finish...here are my favorites of the 4:

1. Psycho
2. North By Northwest (some movies just remind you why you love movies. This is one of them!)
3. The Birds (every year the local TV station in St. Louis -- where I grew up-- would show this on a Sunday afternoon with no commercial interruptions. I stayed glued to the screen. To this day, my heart skips a beat whenever I see a bunch of them sitting around in a pack!)
4. Vertigo