Being Alfred Hitchcock: A Legend On And Off The Screen

Though few realise it, Hitchcock depicted homosexuality, cross-dressing and necrophilia on the big screen.

Calling Alfred Hitchcock the master of suspense is limiting the brilliance of a filmmaker, who subverted, manipulated and entertained so many different audiences for so long. We celebrate Hitchcock on his birth anniversary as one of the greatest artists of the last century, who will live as long as we experience primal emotions like fear and guilt.

It took François Truffaut an entire book to describe his greatness, but we don’t have that liberty here. In five points, here’s a feeble attempt on our part to illustrate why the inventive master was perhaps the coolest man to grace cinema history.

First Celebrity Director

The portly, rotund man was the first director to become a nationwide celebrity. With his non-speaking fleeting cameos, he walked past an actor or boarded a vehicle on screen, and in turn, extended his presence into the audience’s consciousness. He gave sardonic interviews with quotable quotes and the media lapped it up. Even the promotions of some of his films had him as the USP. He also hosted a television series, and later, Hitchcock anthologies became a popular staple for the reading public. He knew how to market himself, and he did it with great success by being a highly visible public figure. Now, we see a few curved lines in a caricature, we know it’s him.

Dealt with Taboo Subjects

Hitch was a fearless man in the arena of commercial cinema. What he really enjoyed was making his audience uncomfortable by presenting unmentionable subjects in a frenzied fashion. For instance, when homosexuality in Strangers On A Train and Rope, necrophilia in Vertigo, cross-dressing in Psycho appear, audiences are more bothered with unravelling the suspense, rather than delving deep into the themes. While his viewers were concerned about the plot, he slyly pushed nudity, repressed sexuality, stalking and even toilet scenes in his films, thus proving the dark genius of his.

Never Took Himself Seriously

Hitchcock once summed up his approach to moviemaking in these words: “Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake.” He was happy making films on crime and the wrong man, using big stars and cheeky camera work, and never took himself seriously. Instead of eulogising philosophical climb, he carefully explained how he achieved certain deceptions in his films. Most of his life, he shied away from critical evaluation of his work, thus forming an initial impression that he was nothing more than a cinematic trickster. But it took years for everyone to understand the ironic overtones in his filmography, how he explained those tricks to his audience, and prepared them to distrust their own impulses. In his most populist excursions, our culture has discovered newer philosophical and profound depths.

Ducked Censorship

When the production code forbade a kiss lasting longer than three seconds, he made Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant kiss, talk, kiss, and repeat it till it clocked more than two-and-a-half-minutes, thus creating an elegant and foolproof romance in Notorious. In North By Northwest, during a romantic scene, he uses phallic symbolism, showing the train speeding into a tunnel. In Psycho, he went full throttle, by showing a flushing toilet, unmarried couple on bed, and the infamous shower scene which cleverly juxtaposes nudity and violence with shock. Hitchcock, for his entire career, withstood the stupidity the puritanical censorship with terrific cleverness, by serving disquiet that his audience relished, and challenges that the production code hated.

MacGuffin

What’s a MacGuffin? Let Hitchcock explain it for you.

“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.”

Isn’t it a cool concept? His thrillers, driven by different MacGuffins made the audience exercise the suspension of disbelief, and made their understanding of the plot a bit easier. A key device in his films, it brought hurried tension with a sense of ambiguity. No wonder, he has so many fanboys.

(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. Follow him on Twitter: @RanjibMazumder)

(This story is from The Quint’s archives and was first published on 13 August 2015, to mark Alfred Hitchcock’s birth anniversary.)