The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years Of His Motion Pictures – Donald Spoto, 1992 ★★

Sometimes a Bird Is Just a Bird

In the world of film criticism, few directors present target-rich environments like Alfred Hitchcock. You can delve into the stories behind his movies; the often-disturbing if genial persona he crafted both in front of and behind the lens; the evolution of his craft; the signature devices that established a film as distinctly his own.

Or you can do what Donald Spoto does here and point out all the symbolism until you’ve turned some of cinema’s greatest touchstones into amoebas in a microscope.

The result is illuminating, sure, but it felt too much like homework to this Hitchcock fan. Put it this way; I can easily see this book being put to heavy use in some college film class, and gathering dust anywhere else.

It’s a bad sign for me to read Spoto’s take on one of my favorite Hitchcocks, 1943’s Shadow Of A Doubt, a film Spoto clearly enjoys, and quickly become bored. Something to do with the duality of man as presented by Joseph Cotton’s Uncle Charlie and his niece Charlotte (Teresa Wright), but man does Spoto go on:

Alfred Hitchcock announces not only the structure of the entire film, but also its ethic, for Shadow Of A Doubt explores the moral links between a psychopathic killer and the innocent niece who is named for him. More important, by extension he offers what amounts to a tract on the very nature of moral ambiguity…He will “shake them all up” by indicating precisely the nature of a part of his life that has been ignored: the impulses to decadence that lurk within even the prettiest lives.

Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten share a table and some early uneasiness in a scene from Shadow Of A Doubt. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_a_Doubt

Spoto also details “the long series of doubles” appearing on screen, two of this and that, until you are ready to double over from exhaustion.

The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock is smart and sensitive, yes and a useful tome for Hitchcock fans; but it should come with a pretentiousness warning on the cover.

It is an oddly structured book, beginning with a brief overview of Hitchcock’s silent films that consigns a thriller as exceptional as The Lodger (1927) to the same brusque treatment Spoto doles out to his forgotten 1928 comedies The Farmer’s Wife and Champagne. “I regard the production of The 39 Steps, in 1935, as the great leap in Hitchcock’s art,” is how Spoto explains his approach.

A scene from The Lodger, featuring Hitchcock's back in the foreground in the first of his cameo appearances. Image from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/9456884/Hitchcocks-cameo-appearances-in-pictures.html.

Spoto spends most of his time here categorizing themes Hitchcock would make use of later, and otherwise ignoring the silents. He winds up lavishing praise on The Manxman (1929), a deadly dull affair but one very much concerned with the tragic nature of love and the long grasp of the past, so it serves a purpose as thematic calling card.

It’s a shame, because as a keen analyst of Hitchcock, Spoto has much to say when he doesn’t let his hobby horses get in the way. Take his look at Hitchcock’s first film as a director, The Pleasure Garden (1925), where he lights on an opening montage of women dancing on stage:

In fact these opening images announce a great deal that will be mainstream Hitchcock for the next half century: the theatrical setting where players become protagonists in bizarre real-life dramas, the camera observing an observer, the rapid cuts from the watcher to the watched, the dizzy circular staircase – and the puckish humor.

A scene from the opening montage in The Pleasure Garden (1925). Spoto points out how the use of a winding staircase here is a harbinger of famous Hitchcock moments to come, such as in Vertigo and Psycho.

Little of that humor spills out over the pages of this book. This is a deep analysis of Hitchcock, but under glass, pristine, with any faults ascribed as much to audience and critics as to Hitch himself.

An annoying problem with Spoto, a high-toned writer of celebrity biography, is the way he crosses the line from critic to courtier. When he wrote his first edition to this book, Hitchcock was not only still alive but making what was his last movie, a rather terrific and underappreciated one called Family Plot.

Having impressed the Master, Spoto was invited on set. He makes little of that rare opportunity here, collecting unctuous quotes from the cast about what a treasure Hitchcock is to work with while cramming pages with storyboards from the movie. Hitchcock is quoted several times, but never at any length, and only to buttress a point Spoto wants to make.

An early scene from The Trouble With Harry (1955), a rare dud from Hitchcock in the eyes of many but, to Spoto, alive with "emotional resonances of our Gnostic-Puritan heritage," whatever that means. Image from https://talkfilmsociety.com/columns/beginners-guide-to-alfred-hitchcock-the-trouble-with-harry-1955.

There is a line in a great movie, not Hitchcock’s though it could have been, Sunset Boulevard, where William Holden’s struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis speaks for legions of forlorn scribes:

“Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.”

Spoto has a different problem: As an adherent of the auteur theory of filmmaking, he thinks it all springs from the director’s chair.

And so, when explaining the charm of 1938’s The Lady Vanishes, Spoto offers this clunker of a capper: “With Hitchcock up front stoking the cinematic engines, this charmer continues to chug merrily along its irresistible route.”

It’s a great film, yes, but credit for it is due also to Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, the writers who came up with its dizzy plot and whip-smart dialogue.

Nothing is what it seems in The Lady Vanishes, Spoto points out, including a body in bandages and a nun wearing high heels. Image from https://en.mementomundi.com/margaret-lockwood-and-michael-redgrave-in-the-lady-vanishes/travel-memories/.

So much of Spoto’s commentary focuses on visual symbols that it is no wonder plot and dialogue are left in the caboose. In Foreign Correspondent (1940) it’s hats; in Spellbound (1945) it’s parallel lines; in I Confess (1953) it’s couples; in Marnie (1964), water.

So numb did I become at all this symbol-stalking that I almost missed the times Spoto extracts something valuable from his meta-gaze. His defense of the oft-neglected Stage Fright (1950) centers on how it cleverly points up the very nature of acting as central to the business of life – and in this case, of solving a crime.

He calls attention to a romantic clinch at the end of the picture, where a pair of lovers coo meaningless inanities to each other, as showing Hitchcock’s (and his writers’) command of the theatricality of the situation by playing to the audience:

Hitchcock is, at this point, one up on the sophisticates, for this is the gentlest puncture of the romantic fallacy. It’s the director’s quiet, compassionate little joke, a grace note to the richness of this undeservedly neglected comic masterpiece.

Michael Wilding and Jane Wyman in Stage Fright. One problem viewers have with the film, Spoto notes, is the way it misleads audiences in the beginning. But Spoto points out this is part of the film's playfulness regarding misleading first impressions. Image from https://silverscenesblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/hitchcocks-stage-fright-1950.html.

Spoto is less on-point about other problem films. He praises The Paradine Case (1947) to the skies despite the fact the film is an obvious mess, with a typical stiff-as-a-board Gregrory Peck in the lead role. But as it centers on “man’s destructive romantic fantasies,” it offers fodder for later Spoto rumination on better fare:

The Paradine Case has never had an enthusiastic following. But it may be one of the director’s films most in need of reassessment and fresh appreciation, and if we take The Paradine Case on its own terms it rewards richly.

Well, maybe for him...

When even a good Hitchcock film doesn’t offer enough of these thematic markers, Spoto doesn’t exactly dismiss it, but damns it with faint praise. Thus his shrugging treatment of Dial M For Murder (1954) or particularly The Birds (1963), which Spoto allows is alive with symbols (those birds!) but is “perhaps Hitchcock’s least accessible motion picture” because it demands too much from a viewer.

Symbols with attitude: A classic pre-attack moment from The Birds, a film Spoto says is "emblematic of original sin, the basic selfishness and weakness to which everyone is susceptible." Oh, and faulty vision, too. Image from https://scroll.in/reel/894544/now-where-have-we-seen-birds-on-the-rampage-before-in-alfred-hitchcocks-film-thats-where.

As culture pundit Paul McCartney might have put it: “It’s great, it sold, it’s the bloody Hitchcock Birds! Shut up!”

One Hitchcock film draws by far the most attention from Spoto, for obvious reasons: Vertigo (1959) touches all the points Spoto wants to make, wrapped around a story of a brutally torn-up man with rich visual symbolism abounding. It’s a perfect film, especially if you are Donald Spoto, and he does fine work dissecting its many riches.

In the process of doing so, Spoto asks a very good question, when a key plot twist about the identity of a major character is revealed to us when the film still has a ways to go:

Why reveal the surprise ending now? Why not wait until the end (as in the novel, as in most such stories)? But Hitchcock chose to sacrifice surprise in order to gain suspense: from this point we not only look with Scottie, we look at Scottie, observing his reactions, wondering how he will respond to Judy.

Spoto is free with spoilers, so beware: If you don't know already that Vertigo features James Stewart in the role of a mother-obsessed transvestite who murders whenever he hears the song "Que Sera, Sera," don't read his book. https://www.indiewire.com/2017/06/alfred-hitchcock-films-posters-1201840931/

That’s at the heart of what makes Hitchcock Hitchcock. He was so focused on the experience of watching a film that he knew how to work his audience simultaneous with fulfilling the demand of telling a story.

Spoto does engage this point several times, sometimes lightly, sometimes dragging it out. It’s a trade-off I became less happy with the longer the book went on. And does it go on.

For a book with a title like The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock, there is a lot Spoto leaves out, not just a deeper dive into the early movies, but his television series work (he directed some episodes of the 1962-65 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and appears in all of them), short movies he made for the Allies in World War II, technical assists on other films, and even aborted projects which fascinate many to this day for their unrealized potential.

Unrealized potential is something you don’t think about a lot when it comes to Alfred Hitchcock. Yet that feeling was hard to shake reading this book.