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Hitchcock Quickies

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At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty (give or take) of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. Because the uptown Prytania in New Orleans programs a great deal of classic Hitchcock, Brandon had already seen and reviewed many of them, but I still needed to watch (or re-watch) all of them in order to complete my “best Hitchcocks” list, which sometimes left me without an outlet to talk much about them, and we didn’t always agree. So, I’ve collected my thoughts on the Hitchcock films already covered by Swampflix below.

Suspicion (1941)

When compiling the document for us to keep track of what had and hadn’t already been covered, Suspicion was a film that I noted I hadn’t seen, because once you get into that period of Hitchcock’s work where he had a high density of films beginning with S— (Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Stage Fright), they tend to blur together somewhat. To my surprise, when I went to my notes in the margins of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, I discovered that I had given this one a rating that was quite high, with no date associated. As I watched the film, I slowly began to recall the general outline of the plot, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how a younger, even less patient version of myself was able to get through this film in a single sitting, let alone enjoy it so much. In general, I find Hitchcock’s domestic dramas less interesting than his espionage plots. For every exhilarating Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a plodding I Confess. Suspicion is a film that I felt had a lot in common with Hitchcock’s very early work Number Seventeen, in that it’s repetitive and tiresome for most of its runtime, until it suddenly whips into gear in its final fifteen minutes. No wonder I forgot that I had already seen it; I can now vaguely recall a TCM screening that was so unmemorable that I had long ago assumed that images from it were things that I had dismissed as incorrect recollections of Notorious, most notably the scenes of Cary Grant in a poorly driven car.

Most viewers’ issues with Suspicion stem from what many considered to be a rushed, cop-out ending. Supposedly, the film was intended to end more like the book on which it was based, with Lina (Joan Fontaine)’s suspicions about her husband Johnnie (Grant)’s plans to murder being revealed to be well-founded. Apocryphally, Hitchcock lost a fight with the studio about this ending, as there were concerns that Grant’s performance as a murderous cad would tarnish his marketability as a leading man. I can say with certainty that this is not my issue with the film because the last-minute revelation that Johnnie is innocent in the deaths of his friend Beaky and was only picking the brain of a local Agatha Christie-esque mystery author to find a way to commit suicide is, in my interpretation, an utter fabrication. He was very clearly going to murder Lina, and his sudden apology for his behavior after all of his sinister machinations is yet another in a long line of Johnnie’s fibs that Lina naively falls for. After several rinse-and-repeat scenes of Johnnie being caught in a lie and then having to backtrack out of it, the audience has the understanding that no matter how many times Lina finds one of her family heirlooms at the antique store or someone stops her on the street to “Oh, honey,” her about the fact that her loser husband is not at work as he claims but is instead a frequent fixture at the race track, she’s just going to fall for it again. I don’t understand how the film’s final scene could be read any other way. She’s just getting back on the carousel again, and the next time Johnnie takes her on a dangerously fast coastal drive, he’s going to successfully push her out of the vehicle because she’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. This is not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s almost enough to save it, but not quite. The image of an enshadowed Grant summiting the stairs while carrying a possibly poisoned glass of milk is striking, but it comes far too late in a meandering plot to make much of a difference.

Saboteur (1942)

When we talked about The 39 Steps, one of the things that I mentioned was that ingesting so many Hitchcock films in rapid succession highlighted the fact that North by Northwest was assembled from various ideas, images, frameworks, iconography, and archetypes that he had been sharpening and honing for decades at that point in his career. Specifically, I cited that North by Northwest was all but a remake of 39 Steps in structure and character, with the Hitch staple of an innocent man on the run featuring a similar romantic entanglement and similar climactic finale taking place in a landmark location (although the director was using the last of these tropes as early as 1929’s Blackmail). As it turns out, there was (at least) one link in the chain of Hitchcock’s evolution of this concept that I hadn’t seen at that time, 1942’s Saboteur. In the midst of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, a domestic terrorist sabotages a California aircraft manufacturing facility, and blame falls on factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who goes looking for the real culprit based on a piece of mail that he saw the saboteur carrying. Just as in The 39 Steps, this results in our reluctant hero falling into the hands of a fascist-supporting man who takes advantage of his status as a well-respected member of the community, being forced to take a hostile woman hostage, escaping from police custody on a bridge, and even being forced into turning himself over to the antagonists when his love interest is threatened just when he has the opportunity to expose their nefarious deeds to a large audience. Presaging his eventual use of Six Grandfathers Mountain in North by Northwest, the film’s nail-biting climax takes place at the top of the Statue of Liberty.

What sets this one apart is both how jingoistic it is about America while remaining frank about and critical of its institutions. As always, Hitchcock’s police officer characters are inept, corrupt, and easily-duped, but the series of characters that Kane meets along the way who aren’t surreptitiously fascists are a broad spectrum of kindly strangers who help him evade detection and stay one step ahead of the police. Blind pianists, bearded ladies, long-haul truckers: they are all united in their belief in Kane’s innocence, and each independently contributes more to the successful capture of the titular saboteur than the combined efforts of the systems in place. The system itself is the enemy of the people, whether embodied in the wealthy—composed of coastal urban socialites and wealthy rural land men alike—or in the passive collaboration of a law enforcement which does the bidding of the wealthy and ignores the innocence of the common man. It’s interesting subtext, and although a lot of critics found the performance of Cummings as Kane underwhelming, I found myself rather taken with him in this film. Not as well remembered as either of the films that it serves as the link between, but an exceptional picture nonetheless.

Stage Fright (1950)

One of the many unintended tragic consequences of the “improvement” of search engines over time is that the recommendations for related searches can sometimes pop up and spoil something for you before you get the chance to get to what you were trying to find. This film is not often in discussion as a major work in Hitchcock’s canon, despite the fact that it’s quite good, and is instead only remembered as one of the films that featured an element that Hitchcock regretted. I won’t get into what or why (I’m kinder to you that the Google landing page in that way), but I will say that, just as the director was strongarmed into feigning apologizing for the shocking act of violence that is (for many) the most memorable thing about Sabotage, the public “I’m sorry” that Hitchcock made in later years for breaking the audience’s trust by subverting a narrative convention here should never have come to be. It’s an artist’s job to challenge the observer, and although the outcry from the masses in response to one of this film’s twists must have weighed heavily on his mind for many years, Hitchcock didn’t owe us an apology. Even as early as 1950, the audience presumed that they came to a Hitchcock picture with the expectation that they would be shocked, surprised, and entertained, and they got what they paid for. When I hear about the people who whined about Hitchcock “breaking their trust,” they all look like Annie Wilkes in my mind’s eye.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

This is an oddity in the Hitchcock film canon for a few reasons. Firstly, a lot of the man’s films are either sprawling odysseys that take a character from London to the Highlands or from Madison Avenue to Six Grandfathers Mountain, while he drew attention to his “limited setting” pictures (namely Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window) by confining their location. Dial M for Murder is often left out of discussions of the latter, largely because it isn’t confined to precisely one location, but it is noteworthy in that it’s limited to no more than three sets and some rear-projected street scenes. Despite this, it doesn’t do any of the fancy camera work that Rear Window did (that same year, no less). Even when a character is facing trial for a murder, instead of the standard courtroom scene, we get a more expressionistic image of said character standing before a colorful void that reflects their inner turmoil while the charges are read and the sentence is pronounced, all in barely a minute of screentime. It further differentiates itself from the larger repertoire in that, when Hitchcock followed a traditional mystery structure, he usually stuck to the age-old whodunit scaffolding. Dial M for Murder is a howcatchem (like Columbo or Poker Face) feature and it was released theatrically (in 3D!), it more neatly intersects with the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The anthology series began airing the year after this film was released and continued for a total of ten seasons (with the last three featuring episodes of an hour in length rather than the thirty minutes they had spanned in previous years, much to the detriment of the renamed Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitch didn’t direct every episode himself, of course (in total, he directed 18 of 361), but the series did have a symbiotic relationship with his film career. The most obvious impact came with Psycho, which Hitchcock shot quickly between seasons of the show and using the show’s crew, which is why it was his first film since Strangers on a Train to be shot in black and white instead of color (other than The Wrong Man, where the monochrome nature is deliberate due to the movie’s docudrama nature). When he did direct episodes of the show, Hitchcock would use the show’s resources to work on proofs of concept for his features, essentially treating the series as an incubator for test runs of certain techniques. The season-two episode “One More Mile to Go” is perhaps the most apparent in this respect, as one can draw a direct visual line from that episode’s use of a dashboard point of view of a traffic stop and the sequence in Psycho where Marion Crane is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. This film also features an appearance from John Williams, who appeared in eight separate Hitchcock Presents narratives (one of which was a three-parter, so he technically was in ten episodes), many of them Hitchcock-directed installments, which goes to show how much the two got along.

This is a lot of information about the technical elements of the movie and where it fits into the oeuvre, which overlooks that, on the whole, this is a delightful little reverse mystery. Ray Milland, the man with the x-ray eyes himself, discovers that his wife (Grace Kelly) has been having an affair with a handsome young tennis star (Robert Cummings) and sets out to have her murdered, but when she manages to kill her would-be-killer in self-defense, he allows her to go to trial for murder, hoping that the justice system will solve all his problems. Small scale and domestic, but still quite good.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Retired catburglar and jewel thief John Robie (Cary Grant), alias “The Cat,” lives a life of quiet leisure in a French villa, having been paroled for his work in the French Resistance during WWII. When a string of high profile jewelry burglaries is reported along the French Riviera, Robie knows that he’ll be questioned, and fears the loss of his reputation as a reformed man. When investigators do come for him, Robie escapes and makes his way to the restaurant of his friend Bertani, whose staff consists almost entirely of the old gang of thieves, all making an attempt at an honest life. Bertani directs the daughter of the restaurant’s wine steward to take Robie by boat and drop him off at a nearby beach club. Unbeknownst to him, it’s here that he’s first noticed by Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), an American traveling with her nouveau riche mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis). Robie also encounters a man named Hughson (John Williams again), an insurance specialist with Lloyd’s of London, who is in the area due to many of the recent thefts having been insured by his employer. Reluctantly, he agrees to help Robie try to find the copycat “Cat” by providing information about another set of insured clients in the area, which just so happens to include Mrs. Stevens and her daughter.

I watched this one shortly after seeing both the striking The Lady Vanishes and the non-Hitchcock noir classic Dark Passage, and it couldn’t help but feel a little lackluster in comparison. Reportedly, Hitchcock decided to direct this picture because he wanted to take a vacation in France, and if that’s true, I’d have to admit that it shows. There are glorious, lovely sweeping vistas throughout, but there’s nothing in the film with the inspiration of, say, the zoom in from across a great chessboard-tiled entry hall to a tiny key in someone’s hand in Notorious. When Hitchcock pulls out one of his trademarks, like a climactic rooftop scene at the end, it feels less like he’s playing the hits and more like he’s spinning his wheels. Kelly is magnetic as always, but Grant fails to inspire.

Psycho (1960)

What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? My most recent rewatch (of many) was at a repertory screening at my local megaplex, accompanied by a younger friend who had no concept of what the movie was beyond obliquely recognizing the title, but he had some sense of what was going to happen because of his familiarity with the AMC prequel series Bates Motel; there’s something about horseshoe theory and pop cultural penetration to be mined from that, I’m sure. Sixty-six years later, the score is still so iconic that it was used in Primetime. It’s Psycho. You already know everything there is to know about it.

The Birds (1963)

The Birds is my mom’s favorite Hitchcock, but I still never managed to see it until I was an adult. It’s hard to describe the film without sounding like you’re talking about a B-grade schlocky horror, because in many ways, it is one, but like Psycho before it, it was also a genre definer. Tippi Hedren is a socialite who has risen to notoriety after a practical joke got out of hand and resulted in a widely publicized court appearance. She has a meet-cute with a handsome lawyer who is trying to buy a couple of lovebirds for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren, believing that she’s in a romcom, buys the birds and tracks him down to Bodega Bay, where she learns that her new love interest has an overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy) who ruins all of her son’s potential relationships. Were it not for the ominous lack of sound (other than cawing corvids) that played over the film’s opening credits, one could mistake this for any other period romantic comedy, right down to Hedren’s character being a comically bad “woman driver” and her getting a mild injury (via divebombing seagull) that her love interest can tenderly tend. Other than a typically an offhand mention of the lawyer’s mother’s chickens refusing to eat, nothing seems truly amiss until the birds turn on mankind in full force, and we’re suddenly in a very different kind of movie.

(Tippi Hedren is iconic in this part. I remember commercial parodies of her taking refuge in a phone booth airing well into early aughts, and we probably only stopped seeing them because those are a thing that don’t exist anymore; and that didn’t stop a bird figurine based on her from selling out just two years ago.)

The Birds is not as shocking a swerve as the mid-film shake-up of Psycho, but the shot of one of the residents of the small town being discovered with his eyes completely pecked out is a major departure from an otherwise charming story so far, and things only get more exciting from there. There’s a scene in the diner in town that feels like it became a direct inspiration for so many similar tableaux in a great many of Stephen King’s works, where the residents of a coastal village argue and turn on one another when faced with some external evil force. All hell breaks loose moments later when a man gassing up his car is attacked by the birds, causing him to spill a trail of gasoline that ignites and sets off chaos. The final twenty minutes feature an all-out attack on the farmhouse by screeching fowl, and it’s terrifying. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.

Frenzy (1972)

Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty (although it certainly is all of those things), Frenzy is a film that I can’t help but detest for the shadow that it casts over the rest of Hitchcock’s career. Gone are the subtleties and nuances with regards to sex and violence. Instead of the provocative image of stockings being dried near a fireplace in The 39 Steps or fireworks going off over the water outside of a hotel window when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly kiss in To Catch a Thief, we get a graphic rape sequence. In place of the implication of violence in Psycho, where we never actually see a knife penetrating flesh, but the sequence tricks you into thinking you have, we witness stomach-churning violence. When the ending of North by Northwest was considered too risqué for its implication that Grant and Eva Marie Saint are about to consummate their marriage, Hitchcock cheekily thumbed his nose at the censor board by ending the film on the metaphorically graphic image of a train entering a tunnel. Frenzy shows the director in a different moral era, one in which he can get away with more salacious and explicit images and content, and he goes full bore into it at the end of his career.

Frenzy raises the question of whether or not all of the sly playfulness and clever directorial handiwork in Hitchcock’s oeuvre would have existed if he hadn’t had to outwit and circumnavigate contemporary censorship, ratings boards, and public sentiment. We remember Hitchcock as a master of the discipline because of the subtleties of his work, his deft hand at misleading you via cinematic trickery into thinking you’ve seen something that you didn’t, his impudent impishness at pushing the envelope. Even at the height of his career and amidst nigh-universal acclaim for his work during his golden era, Hitchcock had to be cleverer than the people who could (and would) try to stop his vision, and that made him sharper as a filmmaker. Frenzy’s very existence implies that, with those strictures loosened, an unbridled Hitchcock is craven, schlocky, and base. This is the film that fans the flames of those who argue Hitch was a misogynistic asshole. If there was nothing else left of his body of work but Frenzy, there could be no counterclaim.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rear Window (1954)

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When we discussed the two Men Who Knew Too Much, Brandon and I commiserated that the updated 1950s version starring James Stewart could not hold a candle to the original Peter Lorre-centered film, but he posited that one could list off Alfred Hitchcock’s three other collaborations with Stewart—Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo—and confidently call them the director’s masterworks without that being much of a hot take. Rear Window was the first Hitchcock film I ever saw, and I immediately fell in love with it. Through viewings of several others, it remained at the top of that list, until sometime in my late teens I fell head over heels for Notorious. I hadn’t revisited it in a very long time, possibly because I became too familiar with it, but after returning to the well after such a long absence, the water is even sweeter than I remembered.

L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Stewart) is a WWII vet and photographer who is in the sixth of seven weeks of recuperation after a daring shot at a racetrack that resulted in a broken leg. He is attended every day by wisecracking insurance nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), who encourages him to settle down with his fashionista girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) before she finds someone better than him. Accustomed to a faster pace of living, Jeff fears that Lisa would be ill-equipped for a life of adventure with him in the often dangerous places that he finds himself on assignment, while Lisa hopes that, as he’s getting older, he’ll be willing to take a more stationary position with his magazine in New York, where they can be together. His only entertainment during his medical imprisonment is voyeuristically observing the neighbors whose windows face the same courtyard as his: Miss Hearing Aid, a sculptor; Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to find a good man; Miss Torso, a dancer; the songwriter, who can’t seem to get his latest composition just right; and two married couples, one with a little dog that they let down into the courtyard with a basket and the other composed of a supposedly invalid wife and the salesman husband (Raymond Burr) who supports her. When he believes that he has witnessed a murder in one of the apartments, Lisa and Stella become his sidekicks in determining if one of his neighbors is a murderer, or if his mind has gotten so bored in his semi-isolation that it’s begun to play tricks on him.

This is an all-time classic for a reason. Although he struggled with the contradictions of his character in Rope, Stewart shines in this performance, as Jeff is a character who’s rough around the edges and a bit of a jerk, but with whom we remain nonetheless empathetic and sympathetic. At this point in his relationship with Lisa, they are explicitly chaste, as Jeff’s cast has immobilized him in more ways than one, and one gets the feeling that without being able to be intimate with one another and mistake passion for love, he’s come to realize that he doesn’t feel like he and Lisa are actually all that compatible. Unconsciously, he’s pushing her away and making up excuses for why, drawing barriers between them in the form of their class differences (she “belongs to the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue” while he lives in Greenwich Village with the other poor, starving artists) and trying to warn her away from joining him in his life of wandering by making it seem unsuitable to her. It isn’t until he sees that she gets the same thrills that he does when they leave a note for the possible murderer to see their reaction that he actually sees her and realizes that they could have a potential future together. Since he only comes to this realization when he sees how she could fit into his life, combined with the fact that he doesn’t cry out for help or try to distract the killer when Lisa falls into their clutches, one could find him difficult to like, and it only really works with Stewart in the role. What I see in that scene is that his realization of his helplessness paralyzes him far more than being injured did, and for the first time he has some concept that a life of adventure could actually be dangerous to her, in reality and not just as a fiction to keep them apart, and understands that he’d rather be with her than not.

More academic critics than I have spilled a great deal of ink over the film’s use of Jeff as the audience surrogate, as his viewpoints into his neighbors’ lives are metaphorically like us watching the movie. There’s also been a great deal of writing about the film’s sexual connotations, especially with regards to the prurience of voyeurism and the phallic nature of Jeff’s telescopic lens. One thing that I haven’t seen discussed is the way that each of the vignettes that Jeff observes has only a partial, fragmented view of the participants, to which he ascribes narratives that he has essentially made up, without realizing that they are all reflective of him. Miss Hearing Aid is nosey, just as he is, as demonstrated when she gets into Mr. Thorwald’s business about how much he’s watering his plants, and when she is frustrated by Miss Torso’s loud music and footfalls, she turns her hearing aid down, just as Jeff tunes out what he doesn’t want to hear. The songwriter is a frustrated artist who is blocked creatively while Jeff is a photographer temporarily caged, and Miss Lonelyhearts is a reflection of what Lisa could become if Jeff continues to waste her youth without commitment; Lonelyhearts changes her mind about overdosing when the songwriter finishes his piece and the two of them listen to it together, in perfect time for Jeff and Lisa to (maybe) commit to one another fully. Miss Torso’s similarities to Lisa are textual, as there is a conversation between Lisa and Jeff one night when she has a few men in her apartment and Jeff compares the two directly, only for Lisa to declare that the woman across the way is “juggling wolves” and that she doesn’t love any of her suitors. When Jeff asks her how she knows, she says “You said it’s just like my apartment, didn’t you?” This proves true in the end, when the dancer’s beloved, a short nerd named Stanley, returns from the war and she takes him passionately into her arms, just as Lisa, who could do a lot better than grumpy old Jeff, really does love her flawed man. It also leaves the open question of which of the couples the two will end up like: the happy newlyweds (whose cracks start to appear in the end), the unhappy Thornwalds (with their one bedbound party), or the dog-owning couple, who only seem to need one another. That’s left for the viewer to ponder.

Every performance here is delightful. Thelma Ritter really shines as the take-no-guff nurse with sharp instincts. One of my favorite jokes in the picture is when she’s trying to advise Jeff, who still sees himself as the young flyboy in a photo taken while he was in the service, that he needs to marry the glamorous, youthful Lisa before it’s too late. She does so in the middle of massaging the gray-haired forty-six year old and calling him “young” also, presumably facetiously. Grace Kelly (25 at the time) looks just about as beautiful as a human being possibly can as she lounges around in gorgeous fashions and gets excited about breaking and entering, and she’s a delight. The limited setting for this one also means a limited main cast, as only five characters ever pass through Jeff’s apartment, where all of the film takes place, although the extended cast does a lot with the little pieces of their lives that we get to see, and the fact that this whole thing was done on a soundstage is also unbelievable. The complexity of it all looks so simple, and it’s pure movie magic. Rear Window is a top-tier Hitchcock and a classic picture in its own right.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dial M for Murder (1954)

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In narrative terms, the 1954 crime thriller Dial M for Murder isn’t much of an outlier in director Alfred Hitchcock’s career. If anything, it’s a useful timesaver for anyone looking for an overview crash course in Classic Hitchcock storytelling, as it effectively plays like what would happen if Strangers on a Train was retold within the stage-play limitations of Rope. Both of those preceding Hitch classics are hypothetical plottings of The Perfect Murder, which inevitably go awry in execution, leading to the murderer’s demise. The premeditated killer in this case (Ray “X-Ray Eyes” Milland) blackmails an old college classmate into killing his adulterous wife (Grace “Princess of Monaco” Kelly) as a lucrative act of marital revenge. The story is mostly contained in a single living room set and is rigidly sectioned into three dramatic acts: the opening act in which the killer explains the scheme to his accomplice, one in which the accomplice fails in his mission mid-strangling, and a final act of Columbo-style “howcatchem” investigation that puts the pieces of the puzzle back together through the nosy inquiries of an unassuming detective (John “Comic Relief” Williams). It’s all very tidy & succinct, possibly owing to the fact that Hitchcock was planning the much more elaborate production of Rear Window while going through the motions of adapting this morbid little stage play.

The surprising thing about Dial M for Murder is that its stage-bound telling doesn’t convey Hitchcock’s visual artistry, which is usually foregrounded as a knack for special effects dazzlement. At least, that’s what I thought when I first left the theater. At the start of the local screening of Dial M in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series, I was disappointed in the quality of the film scan, which appeared to be a fuzzy SD transfer from an ancient DVD print. Then, when Grace Kelly appears onscreen in the first interior scene, her gorgeous face & gowns were suddenly in sharp focus, as if someone had flipped on the HD-quality light switch. The initial fuzziness then periodically returned in a few exterior shots, which appeared to be partially composited or greenscreened for no practical, discernible reason. It turns out, of course, that this alternating visual quality was a result of the film being shot for 3D processing, then later retrofitted into a 2D print. It was produced in the brief early-50s window when the classic red-and-blue 3D glasses presentation was a popular fad, but the novelty of the effect had worn off by the time Dial M hit theaters, and the prints were descaled to a measly two dimensions halfway into its run. As Hitchcock bitterly acknowledged, 3D was “a nine-day wonder, and [he] came in on the ninth day,” making for one of the rare times when he was a latecomer instead of an innovator in visual effects.

The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies slot is a reliably wonderful way to catch up on any Old Hollywood mainstays that might be personal blindspots, and Hitchcock’s catalog has long been the backbone of that program. Since the single-screen theater is over a century old, it feels like time-traveling back to the classic films’ initial release, when they likely screened in that very theater. That effect was especially potent for their most recent screening of Dial M for Murder, which was preceded by a classic Looney Tunes short instead of trailers for upcoming attractions (the Hitchcock-spoofing Tweety Bird short “The Last Hungry Cat,” for anyone curious). Part of me wishes that they could have presented the film in its original 3D format, glasses and all, for maximum time-travel novelty. The truth is, though, that Dial M‘s 3D format was very quickly rejected by contemporary audiences, so that most people did see it screened in its confused & compromised 2D form, making my experience with the film authentic to its initial run. To the theater’s credit, they will also be screening William Castle’s 13 Ghosts in its original “Illusion-O” presentation this October, which was Castle’s personally branded 3D gimmick. There’s something beautiful about the fact that Castle’s own special-effects artistry is still chasing after its classier Hitchcock equivalents all these decades later, sometimes in the exact venues where they started their one-sided feud.

While learning about Dial M for Murder‘s retracted 3D tech after leaving the theater did help make sense of why its exterior & effects shots looked so bizarrely hazy, I still can’t figure out why Hitchcock would choose to give such a stage-bound story that treatment in the first place. The beauty of Dial M is in its narrative simplicity. By the final act, the nosy detective’s post-murder puzzle solving mostly comes down to three isolated pieces of evidence: a key, a letter, and a silk stocking. Those three pieces are moved around the puzzle board through verbal speculation, with most of the visual spectacle resulting from Grace Kelly’s elegant beauty and Ray Milland’s dastardly performance as a smug drip who hates his elegantly beautiful wife. Even so, Hitchcock finds small moments for visual extravagance, such as the husband’s explanation of how the murder should go down being framed in a high-angle shot from the ceiling’s POV, as if he and the killer were pieces on a board game. The only moments I can recall that may have benefited from the original 3D effect are the isolated shot of the contract killer reaching his hands out to strangle Kelly as she answers a phone call and the surreal shot of Kelly later answering to a judicial panel as if she were being tried for murder in the courts of Hell. Those few seconds of screentime are not worth filtering the rest of the picture through the 3D process, especially since it mostly consists of lengthy conversations in a single parlor.

It’s a testament to the strength of the stage-play source material and Hitchcock’s ability to wind up tension in his audience that Dial M is still solidly entertaining despite all of the needless distractions of its 3D processing. The Prytania’s Classic Movies crowd was an especially robust turnout that Sunday morning, likely owing to the director’s name recognition. Hitchcock always delivers, apparently even when working on autopilot.

-Brandon Ledet

To Catch a Thief (1955)

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I recently caught To Catch a Thief at The Prytania, New Orleans’s oldest operating cinema. It was an early morning matinee where the theater’s ancient, adorable operator introduced the Hitchcock thriller with half-remembered stories about cameos & eggs and promises of complimentary coffee & cake after the screening. I knew nothing of the picture before I arrived to the theater except its stars, Cary Grant & Grace Kelly, as advertised on the poster. Before Rene Brunet’s introductory story about Hitchcock’s hatred of eggs, I didn’t even know who directed it. What followed was a Technicolor dream of gorgeous visual indulgences in simple pleasures like flowers & fireworks, beautiful people exploring even more beautiful locales, and a nonstop assault of witty, but juvenile sex jokes. I’ve certainly been more impressed with Hitchcock as a visual craftsman & a generator of suspense in more prestigious pictures like Psycho or Rear Window, but I’ve had never had more fun watching one of his films as an all-around entertainment experience. It was the exact exhilarating feeling of seeing high art visual craft married with the genre film pleasures of a trashy heist plot people have been gushing over Baby Driver for (even though I didn’t quite enjoy that Edgar Wright work myself). That’s why it deeply saddened me after the screening to learn that To Catch a Thief is widely considered to be a “lesser Hitchcock” and a dismissible, frivolous picture.

Cary Grant starts as a retired jewel thief known in the papers as The Cat, thanks to the gymnastic stealth needed to pull off his heists. Hanging up his cat burglar’s costume in the years since World War II, The Cat is attempting to live a quiet life outside of crime. He’s not quite a Robin Hood figure; he kept all the money he stole before the war. He did make a point only to steal from “those who wouldn’t go hungry,” though, which does have a sort of nobility to it. His peaceful retirement is interrupted when a copycat thief begins to stage crimes that fit his exact M.O., raising police suspicion that The Cat is back on the prowl. Grant’s handsome, ex-criminal protagonist decides to catch the new burglar himself (recalling OJ Simpson’s mission to “find the real killer”) with the help of an insurance agent who might be able to predict the next victim based on his clients’ claimed jewelry. This leads him to a Cannes Beach Club where he’s shamelessly flirted with by a young debutante played by Grace Kelly, whose mother’s jewels are in imminent danger of being stolen. The mystery of who the copycat jewel thief is doesn’t feel as complex or as suspenseful as the central mystery of most Hitchcock films, as the answer is fairly obvious earlier than it likely should be. This doesn’t matter in the slightest. The lush colors, playful mood, and overly stylized production value of To Catch a Thief make for a film so fun it feels like an outright comedy while still holding claim to some of the most striking imagery Hitchcock ever produced.

To Catch a Thief plays with the same lush production design & Technicolor lighting that made Douglas Sirk’s 1950s “women’s pictures” like All That Heaven Allows feel like high art despite their shameless indulgence in melodrama. A foot chase through a flower market, a swim on a French beach, or a picnic on the edge of a cliff, all in proudly-boasted “VistaVision”: you can tell this was an expensive production, made with Major Studio pride. What makes it such a delight, however, is that Hitchcock perverted those Sirk sensibilities with the tawdry jokes about boobs & Grace Kelly’s virginity. This clash is most glorious in a hotel room scene where Kelly’s young flirt is seducing Grant’s retired criminal, only for their attraction to be consummated with a Technicolor fireworks display. It’s scene that encapsulates everything To Catch a Thief is in its best moments: funny, sexy, gorgeous, and crude. A more sophisticated palette might better appreciate the tightly controlled tension of a Rear Window, but give my raccoonish taste buds the pretty colors and cheeky sex jokes of To Catch a Thief any day. Hitchcock’s perverted humor usually lurks in the corners of his best respected thrillers, but here it runs wild, swimming in its skivvies on gorgeous French beaches and sneaking across rooftops looking for hearts & jewels to steal through bedroom windows. It breaks my heart to hear that kind of immediate pleasure isn’t better respected.

I don’t mean to imply that there’s no tact or taste to To Catch a Thief’s humor. An early montage of a black cat sneaking across roofs to steal jewels, a literal cat burglar, feels a lot like the director’s peak form as a humorous craftsman. There’s also an early chase scene involving several fake-outs that’s almost Friedkin-esque in its clear staging of cat & mouse police pressure. Going in expecting the typical meticulous hand the director brings to his work might be a mistake, however. To Catch a Thief seems to be entirely a result of Hitchcock letting loose, having fun with the romantic & mysterious set-ups of his easygoing narrative. Even the double meaning of the film’s title (as both Kelly & Grant are attempting to catch a thief of their own) suggests that the whole thing is a kind of off-hand joke. Watching a world-class craftsman afford that joke the visual care & lusty passion that should likely be reserved for a more refined work makes it feel like jokey genre fodder elevated to the heights of fine art. If the world has room in its heart to praise the much lesser Baby Driver for achieving that exact kind of heist film elevation, I’d hope there’d also be room for an undervalued Hitchcock title to retroactively receive that same treatment.

-Brandon Ledet

Mark Waters, Rear Window (1954), and the Delicate Slyness of Hitchcock Humor

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Mark Waters is a wonderfully talented (if occasionally inconsistent) comedic director, but something I would never accuse his best-known works like Mean Girls & House of Yes of being is subtle or delicate. Waters works in broad strokes. His jokes can be pointedly satirical & smartly written, but they’re delivered in the loud, brash cadence of a mainstream comedy, not the hushed tones of dry wit. That’s why it seemed jarring that Waters would build a flighty modern romcom starring Monica Potter & Freddie Prinze Jr. around something as tightly controlled and quietly sophisticated as a Hitchcock thriller. Waters didn’t seek to upend just any old Hitchcock thriller, either. He built his delirious romcom around the basic concept of Rear Window, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. It might be tempting to think of that romcom, Head Over Heels, as an act of cinematic blasphemy, a disrespectful transgression that drags down one of the Hollywood greats to the level of a Zoolander-style fashion world satire that indulges in such less-refined pleasures as shit jokes and oggling Freddie Prinze Jr.’s rock hard abs. The truth is, though, that Waters was not at all perverting a refined work of stone-faced seriousness, but rather exposing the Hitchcock classic for what it truly is: a stealth comedy in a thriller’s disguise.

Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation as a filmmaker is difficult for me to contextualize. It took a long while for the director to be recognized as the master that he is, since he often chose to work in the trashy trenches of genre cinema, mainly with thrillers. I grew up in a world where Hitchcock was already a respected name, so it’s difficult to conceive that high art thriller works Psycho & The Birds were initially considered by some critics to be tawdry, gimmick-heavy works of populism. Rear Window is a great, distilled example of the meticulous visual mastery that eventually earned Hitchcock his deserved respect. It finds him working with big Hollywood budgets & stars (you don’t get much more Hollywood than James Stewart & Grace Kelly), delivering a beautiful, Technicolor-rich mystery thriller where every image feels tightly controlled & meticulously planned. The sets of Rear Window have a proto-Wes Anderson dollhouse quality to them. The lavishness of the costume design tops even Douglas Sirk productions like All That Heaven Allows. Not a single hair feels out of place and each mechanical piece of the plot moves along like clockwork, even though the film’s star, Stewart, is supposed to convey a pathetic, disheveled state with his broken leg & unwashed body. With all of the film’s intricate visual design, complex plotting, and trick photography innovation at the inevitable climax, it’s easy to see Rear Window only as a gorgeous middle ground between a populist thriller & a high brow art film. The truth is, though, that the movie also slyly functions as a morose comedy. It never approaches the broadness if its 00s romcom counterpart, but it can still be openly silly all the same.

Rear Window is an intense thriller about a disabled man who can only watch in horror as he pieces together the murder of a neighbor by her traveling salesman husband. It’s immediately jarring, then, that the movie opens with the most upbeat jazz music imaginable, almost as if its credits were leading into a 1950s sitcom. It’s not a direct, 1:1 comparison, but the upbeat club music that deliriously pulsates throughout Head Over Heels seems to echo that exact tonal clash. The Mark Waters romcom also echoes the way Rear Window builds comedy around friction between the sexes. Monica Potter’s openly spying on her hunky (and possibly murderous) neighbor and her various musings on how she can only find the worst men in NYC are basically just a gender-flipped version of James Stewart’s idle banter about how women are weak-willed nags & his casual gawking of a young ballerina who practices her routines in her skivvies across the courtyard. Hitchcock pokes subtle fun at his debilitated protagonist for being something of a pervert & a misogynist by making him physically impotent while two strong women (a nurse & a girlfriend) run circles around him, acting on suspicions he can only voice. The stakes of the central murder mystery are severe, much more severe than they are in the convoluted diamond heist plot of Head Over Heels, but Rear Window‘s tension is constantly eroded with dry, verbal wit and the occasional visual gag to the point where the whole movie almost feels like a subtle comedy that just happens to revolve around a murder mystery. It even concludes on a comedic gag, a whomp-whomp reveal of James Stewart’s second broken leg (and just when the first one was almost healed!).

Head Over Heels is certainly much broader in its humor than Rear Window and doesn’t even attempt to match its inspiration’s attention to visual craft, but I don’t think its reduction of the Hitchcock classic to the level of trope-laden romcom is at all blasphemous. Head Over Heels borrows the basic voyeuristically-witnessed murdered aspect of Rear Window‘s thriller plot as a launching point, but deviates from Hitchcock’s tightly-controlled tension-builder, contained entirely in a single apartment, by branching out all over NYC into various genres & tones. Although it’s a much more restrained, subtly humorous work, Hitchcock’s classic is a sort of tonal mashup in its own right, refusing to take its morbid subject matter entirely seriously, even when life & love are dangling on the line. I can’t speculate that the director would’ve enjoyed watching what Mark Waters did to one of his most revered works, but as he was no stranger to populist cinema & tonally inappropriate humor himself, Head Over Heels feels oddly at home with his prankster spirit, especially for a by the books romcom.

For more on April’s Movie of the Month, the Mark Waters fashion world romcom Head Over Heels, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s comparison of its dark humor to that of fellow 2001 fashion world parody Zoolander.

-Brandon Ledet