Hitchcock: Master of imperfection

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Master of imperfection By Steve Burgess.

Not long ago on PBS's "Charlie Rose" show, there was a roundtable discussion on the Master of Suspense. Participants included director Peter Bogdanovich and Hitchcock's daughter Pat. A clip was played, evidently selected to illustrate the Master's genius. As I recognized the scene in question -- the rip-roaring climax of the 1951 film that revived Hitchcock's Hollywood fortunes, "Strangers on a Train" -- I spoiled the reverent mood (in my own living room, at least) with a loud guffaw. That particular classic happens to feature the goofiest ending this side of "Robot Monster."

Here's the scenario: Two plainclothes cops tail a suspect (Robert Walker) in an amusement park. Suddenly the varmint makes a break for it. His choice of getaway vehicle? A merry-go-round. The cops panic -- the suspect is, well, sort of escaping! At the very least he's bound to out-duel those little b*****ds for the brass ring. So, there in the crowd of kiddies and teenage dates, the cops do the only sensible thing -- they pull out their big irons and start blasting. First to get it is the carousel operator, whose carcass lands on the big lever and apparently pushes it to the rarely used "turbo" setting. (Like the safety improvements prompted by the Titanic disaster, this incident must surely have had a silver lining -- today, merry-go-round manufacturers no longer build their machines with a spin cycle.) Any faster and kids will be flying in all directions like spray off a wet dog. A brave feller crawls beneath the crazed machine to reach the lever, which he then unfortunately seems to pull back to the "explode" setting (another design flaw). The ride blows up. The varmint dies. The End. Another Hitchcock masterpiece!

I first saw "Strangers on a Train" after spotting it on a late-night TV schedule, marked by those four glittering stars reserved only for filmdom's most sacred works. A similar recommendation, plus a genuine fondness for Hitchcock, drew me to "Shadow of a Doubt," identified by Pat Hitchcock as her father's favorite among all his films. It stars Joseph Cotten as a malevolently charming murderer who hides out with unsuspecting relatives in a California town, and Teresa Wright as his naive and adoring niece. Like so many Hitchcock movies, "Shadow of a Doubt" is a pleasure to watch almost all the way through, a movie to sink into as you would a warm bath. And like so many Hitchcock movies, it ends in the kind of crushingly lame climax better suited to a Quinn Martin production.

We're on a train again, watching Cotten struggle with the significantly smaller Wright, aiming to throw his niece out the door and into the path of yet another onrushing locomotive (it was 1943 -- family counseling was still in its infancy). Sadly for Cotten, he fails to reckon with the invisible magnets in his ass, which suddenly cause him to fly violently out the door and become one with the cowcatcher of old No. 409. Why was the petite Wright able to accomplish this? Probably for the same reason Tippi Hedren went into the attic in "The Birds." When, during the Northern California location shoot for that 1963 movie, Hedren had the temerity to ask just why her character would want to go upstairs, Hitchcock is said to have replied: "Because I told you to." (The final split for Hitchcock and Hedren came after a spat on the set of "Marnie" when, as Hitchcock later explained, "She did what no one is permitted to do - she referred to my weight.")

Certainly, Alfred Hitchcock created some of the most engrossing movies ever filmed. But as his legend has grown, there has been a rush to canonize all his works and a tendency to overlook their considerable flaws. Other directors have been similarly deified, although usually it's individual movies that are transformed over time into undeserving hall-of-fame candidates. Did anyone else notice that Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" (1987), one of the most praised movies of the past 15 years, made a lot more sense without the subtitles? Pauline Kael apparently did. She wrote that the film "has a visual fascination, but no animating force -- that's part of why it's being acclaimed as art." But was I the only one sucked in by Kael's description of "Night of the Hunter" as "one of the most frightening movies ever made," only to discover a ham-fisted and occasionally risible bit of hokum?

What's particularly annoying about Hitchcock's shortcomings is that they so often turn up as the dead cockroach at the bottom of a near-perfect cinematic sundae. His endings are chronically weak, tacked-on affairs that give the impression the portly director was late for supper. Even after a legitimate gem like "Vertigo," it's quite possible to leave the theater wondering, why exactly did Kim Novak topple so readily off that tower? Perhaps she borrowed some pants from Joseph Cotten?

If Hitchcock has been turned into a plaster saint, it was not always so. Kael once called him "lazy," and complaints about lame contrivances in his films were sufficiently common to inspire a defensive retort from the director. "A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow," Hitchcock sniffed. In the sympathetic biography "Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock" (Pantheon), John Russell Taylor wrote: "He never cared too much ... about giving more than a formal nod towards what he considered technical inessentials." Perhaps that explains scenes like the plane crash in "Foreign Correspondent": We are inside the cabin as the doomed aircraft screams toward the sea. Then, impact -- and a serious mussing of hair, along with some minor handbag displacement. The effect is that of a station wagon that has just run over a possum.

"Foreign Correspondent" has other gaping plot holes, but they're the kind that require you to hit the pause button and think for a bit, whereas the airplane scene is one of those spell-breaking moments that invite derision and disbelief as surely as the sight of a boom mike atop the frame. Implausible scenes and devices are common to a great many movies ("Casablanca's" supernaturally powerful "letters of transit" being a particularly famous example). The trick is to have them glide by unnoticed, and Hitchcock is not always adept in this regard. Sometimes the problem is heightened by the passage of time. The pop psychology of "Spellbound" (1945), for instance, has aged hilariously. (Hitchcock was more prescient with his next film, "Notorious," which centers on a plan to smuggle uranium for use in atomic weapons. Pitched on the idea in pre-Hiroshima 1945, producer David O. Selznick sold the movie to RKO because he found the central plot device unbelievable.)

But it's in the final act that Hitchcock's films so often disappoint. Rare is an example like "Rope" (1948), in which the ending flows naturally from the preceding events. "Psycho" works too, although by now it's hard to remember if it was ever a surprise. On the laziness front, actor William H. Macy recently pointed out that when Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) first attempts to stab the detective (Martin Balsam) at the top of the stairs, he actually misses. Hitchcock evidently didn't feel it was worth a retake. "To be blunt, I think a lot of Hitchcock is really lame," Macy says. "He hated actors and I think it shows."

When was the last time you saw "The Birds"? Those once-acclaimed special effects look cheesy now, but that's to be expected. Once again it's the ending that really bites. Trapped in a house by marauding fowl that we've been led to believe would just as soon peck out your eyeball as chirp at you, our heroes devise an ingenious escape. The plan: Tiptoe out the door past the pernicious poultry, get into the waiting car and drive away. It works! Who knew? Twelve years later, on Amity Island, Richard Dreyfuss should have explained to Roy Scheider that if you simply ignore the big shark, it will lose interest and swim off in search of sea-going carrots.

Hitchcock did contemplate other endings, such as the couple's discovering that the evil crows have overrun San Francisco, but opted for the vague finish. It was apparently considered more "arty." Hitchcock even decided to forego the traditional screen title reading "The End" -- the movie simply stops. The end title should have read, "We Ran Out of Film. Good Night. Drive Safely."

Whether it's a Hitchcock or some other dubious classic showing up in the late listings accompanied by a multi-stellar rating, you may want to deduct a star and a half for the rosy glow of nostalgia. For every legitimate masterpiece like Carol Reed's "The Third Man" or Fred Zinnemann's "High Noon," there's a revered stretch of tedium like John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath" or Billy Wilder's mirthless "Some Like it Hot." Remember, even the verdict of history sometimes comes from a jury of chuckleheads -- 20 years after they left the air, the Monkees were seriously being hailed as trendsetters.

In most cases though, a Hitchcock movie is still an exciting and romantic journey, so long as you're prepared for a big letdown once you finally check into the honeymoon suite. And many of the man's masterpieces are truly deserving of the title -- "The 39 Steps," "The Lady Vanishes," "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "North by Northwest," "Psycho."

And then again, "Strangers on a Train" is actually kind of fun. So never mind.