Wednesdays in November at 8pm ET | 20 movies
Does the thriller you’re watching feature an innocent protagonist caught up in dangerous circumstances that require a cross-country race and/or an assumed identity? Is the villain charming and socially acceptable? Is the setting used creatively? Do deadly events occur in innocent places? Does the plot hinge on the MacGuffin, something that ultimately seems nonsensical or unimportant? If the answer to one or more of these is yes, chances are you’re watching an Alfred Hitchcock film. Or, then again, maybe not.
With the critical and box-office success of so much of his work, Hitchcock is one of the most recognizable of all film directors. It’s not just his corpulent image, made famous through on-screen cameos in most of his films and appearances on his classic TV series. His films have such distinctive plot elements and stylistic flourishes that it’s easy to identify them. But none of those elements are exclusive to The Master of Suspense. Whether through imitation or the simple fact that Hitchcock helped create the language of the thriller, film history is filled with works that share similar elements. In fact, critics often can’t help but compare other directors’ successful suspense films to Hitchcock’s.
On Wednesday nights in November, our TCM Spotlight pays tribute to Alfred Hitchcock as only the network can — without showing a single one of his films. Instead, we’re presenting 20 thrillers so much in the Hitchcock tradition that audiences could easily mistake them for his work. It’s a festival we’re calling “Could Have Been Hitchcock?” Features range from the comic to the deadly serious, encompassing the scope of the Master’s own work. Hitchcock could make a comedy about murder, like The Trouble with Harry (1955), or insert jokes in the middle of the most gruesome plots, as in Frenzy (1972). And other filmmakers have been quick to follow suit.
So, how do you like your Hitchcock? Are you drawn to charming, socially acceptable villains like those in Saboteur (1942) and North by Northwest (1959)? Then you’ll want to catch Gaslight (1944) and A Kiss Before Dying (1956). The former, directed by George Cukor, stars Ingrid Bergman as a newly married bride to a romantic Frenchman, played by Charles Boyer. However, the couple’s fresh romance is plagued by trouble when they move into her murdered aunt’s former home, and strange goings on begin to affect the newlywed bride. The latter film stars Robert Wagner as a handsome college student attempting to secure his place within a wealthy family by any murderous means necessary. Adapted from the novel of the same name, the film marked German director Gerd Oswald’s feature debut.
Maybe your like to travel and see famous locations in a new light. Hitchcock conjured terror in the windmill fields of the Netherlands in Foreign Correspondent (1940), the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, the Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and even Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. Other directors, like Henry Hathaway, have added the romantic beauty of Niagara Falls to the list, where mismatched mates Joseph Cotton and Marilyn Monroe endure a tumultuous relationship with deadly consequences in Niagara (1953). Stanley Donen uses England’s posh racecourse Ascot Racecourse as the central location where Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren try to thwart a political assassination in Arabesque (1966).
Do shadows give you the shivers? The Master of Suspense made particularly good use of them in black-and-white thrillers like Suspicion (1941) and Psycho (1960), as did Otto Preminger in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), where the shocking truth about Carol Lynley’s missing daughter Bunny eludes authorities, including the Superintendent played by Laurence Olivier. Anatole Litvak also plays in the shadows for Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), where Barbara Stanwyck is a wealthy invalid panicked after overhearing a murder plot on the telephone.
Hitchcock is famously known for his innovative camera work, like the forced perspective effect in Vertigo (1958) or the aerial attacks captured in The Birds (1963). Fans of thrilling style will be impressed by Donen’s camera tricks throughout Arabesque, which anticipated the use of split-screen and disorienting angles in the mod films of the late 1960s. Delmer Daves opens Dark Passage (1947) with a whopper of a trick, 20 minutes shot entirely from the perspective of escaped convict Humphrey Bogart, who needs plastic surgery (and a little help from Lauren Bacall) after being wrongfully convicted of murder.
Hitchcock’s blondes have become legendary through a slate of memorable characters played by Madeleine Carroll, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren, among others. Mark Robson directs Elke Sommer as the blonde chaperone who catches the eye of Paul Newman in the midst of international espionage in The Prize (1963). We even shine the spotlight on one of Hitchcock’s own blondes, Doris Day, who stars in David Miller’s Midnight Lace (1960) as an heiress stalked by a menacing unknown man that her husband (Rex Harrison) and aunt (Myrna Loy) believe is merely a figment of her imagination.
Throughout his career, Hitchcock made the MacGuffin famous. For that, we have an array of MacGuffins, arbitrary plot devices that keep the action moving for the characters but don’t mean much on their own. Hitchcock’s MacGuffins include the secret message carried by Dame May Whitty in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and the industrial diamonds discovered by Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious (1946). To that, we can add the fortunes hidden in plain sight in Donen’s Charade (1963), resulting in the murder of an expat interpreter’s (Audrey Hepburn) husband and a chase throughout France for the goods. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the photograph taken by photographer David Hemmings becomes the plot device that leads him to investigate what he thinks is a murder. A doll containing heroin that accidentally falls into the hands of a blind housewife (Audrey Hepburn) is the key item in Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967).
Of the 20 films being shown, one was almost directed by Hitchcock. When French writing team Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac published their first novel, “The Woman Who Was No More” in 1952, Hitch tried to buy the rights. French director Henri-Georges Clouzot got them instead and turned the book into Diabolique (1955), a classic thriller about the wife (Véra Clouzot) and mistress (Simone Signoret) of a sadistic schoolmaster (Paul Meurisse) who plot to murder him. The film has several Hitchcockian elements, including creative use of light and shadow, as in many of Hitchcock’s black-and-white films, and a wicked sense of humor as a private eye (Charles Vanel) digs into the crime.
Before he started directing films, François Truffaut was among the young French critics championing Hitchcock and other genre-film directors in the pages of “Cahiers du Cinema.” After he’d established himself as a filmmaker, Truffaut even came to America to interview the Master at length for his 1966 book “Hitchcock/Truffaut.” It wasn’t long after that Truffaut directed two Hitchcock homages, both adapted from the work of Cornell Woolrich, whose story “It Had to Be Murder,” Hitchcock had turned into Rear Window (1954). The first of these, The Bride Wore Black (1968), stars Jeanne Moreau as a woman widowed on her wedding day. She assumes a disguise, like many a Hitchcock protagonist, to hunt down the men responsible. Truffaut followed it with Mississippi Mermaid (1969), where plantation owner Jean-Paul Belmondo is obsessed with a beautiful blonde played by Catherine Deneuve just as James Stewart obsessed over Kim Novak in Vertigo.
Brian De Palma was one of the first in a generation of college-trained American directors to model their work on Hitchcock’s. He directed a string of thrillers that used Hitch’s films as inspiration, beginning with Sisters (1972). It starts out with a satire of dating shows, but when the contestants spend the night together, the woman (Margot Kidder) brutally murders her date as a reporter (Jennifer Salt) spies on them from the window across the way. When the police can find no evidence of the crime, the reporter takes it upon herself to investigate her neighbor’s deadliest secrets. The sudden switch in focus and the spying call to mind both Psycho and Rear Window. De Palma would follow with such films as Obsession (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984).
Whatever your tastes, if you love suspense and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, you’ll undoubtedly love the films that could have been Hitchcock.
