MEMORY OF THE CAMPS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945, 1985)

At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration  camps, you know. Horrible. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then, nobody wanted to see it. It was too unbearable. But it has stayed in my mind all of these years. —Alfred Hitchcock

 

As searing a film about the Holocaust as anyone could imagine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Memory of the Camps claims a curious history. Shot by cinematographers who accompanied Allied forces at the liberation of the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II, the raw footage was deemed worthy of preservation in the form of a whole film aimed at confronting Germans with the truth about the camps. Therefore, the project was launched by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information, under the supervision of British producer Sidney Bernstein. Bernstein, who would help produce Hitchcock films (Rope, 1948; Under Capricorn, 1949; I Confess, 1953), enlisted Hitchcock in the project. It is Hitch, the imaginative magician, who tamed the beast of the raw footage, giving it structure and coherence; the ideas behind its formal assenblage were all his. However, geopolitical propriety intervened; the shift in postwar Allied relations with Germany caused the project to be halted. Hitchcock’s brilliant work, incomplete, was buried alive in London’s Imperial War Museum, where it remained until the mid-1980s, when the U.S. TV documentary series Frontline appropriated the material, to which it added nose-rubbing script that actor Trevor Howard, possibly in his cups, read aloud with a voice that had dwindled down to a frail reed and in a smug, superior sing-song manner. Whatever damage the public television people inflicted, Hitchcock’s superlative movie shines through.

We tour a number of the camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau, just as those in charge there scramble to hide away the mass human slaughter they had accomplished (11 million people, including six million Jews). Mounds of corpses, limbs twisted every which way, were bulldozed into mass graves. These camp officials and their subordinates weren’t quick enough; we see, or imagine we see, everything. The coldness and cruelty of the entire enterprise of the camps are encapsulated in the attitude and behavior of guards: an example of the representative piecemeal strategy that permits the more delicate among us (including, ironically, Hitchcock himself) to get a grip on the enormity of the Nazi evil and horror. If you doubt that Hitchcock was a genius, consider the darkly magical dimension of this metaphor: structurally, the true nature of the camps is initially hidden behind the smiling faces of children, enraptured by the cameras, purportedly at the perimeter of Bergen-Belsen. Of course, in the actual chronology of events, who now knows when or where that shot was taken? How I love Hitchcock! How I love cinema! Perhaps our love for all this alone buoys our spirit as the imagery launches our descent into overwhelming depravity and inhumanity. Perhaps this is why Hitchcock elected to turn his Ed Gein-film (Psycho, 1960) into a black comedy.

Distancing is almost always necessary in art; this is most certainly the case when the subject matter is something so horrible as the Holocaust. I doubt, though, the folks at Frontline would agree.

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CHARADE (Stanley Donen, 1963)

Stanley Donen’s best film by far, the scintillating mystery-comedy-thriller-romance Charade, has often been described as “the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock didn’t direct.” Not so—not by a long shot. A stylish, purely superficial entertainment that is not really about anything, Charade is dwarfed by the achievement of North by Northwest (1959), the “Hitchcock movie” with which it is most often compared. As I hope I make clear in my piece on it on this blog, North by Northwest portrays profound human relationships in a complex Cold War geopolitical environment that—this is the overarching point—impacts these relationships. Charade is a trifle, a bauble; North by Northwest, a serious and considerable work of art.

I adore Charade for what it is; Peter Stone’s delightfully preposterous script, Paris, Charles Lang’s gorgeous, shimmering color cinematography, especially at night, with its haunting whiff of the mystery of romance, Henry Mancini’s delicate musical theme: all these contribute to a lovely, strangely elusive thing. But the pleasures one derives from it are the same pleasures one derives from it whenever one visits it. By contrast, North by Northwest opens up new depths each and every time.

 

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YOUNG AND INNOCENT (Alfred Hitchcock, 1937)

A delightful thriller, enhanced by humor and the most tender romance, and ending with an ambiguous shot that deflates complacency as a girl in her late teens naïvely contemplates sublime friendship between her boyfriend—he is in his late twenties or early thirties—and her (likely) widowed father, Young and Innocent is a tantalizing film by Alfred Hitchcock based on what he considered a weak novel (Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles). In this “young and innocent” variation on Hitchcock’s masterful The 39 Steps (1935), the boy, struggling screenwriter Robert Tisdall, is “the wrong man,” Hitchcock’s not-guilty-of-being-a-criminal on the lam from the police, following the strangulation of a screen star, Christine Clay, with Robert’s raincoat belt. Given the dullness of the police, Robert is determined to solve the murder and bring in the culprit himself. He tells Erica Burgoyne, the chief constable’s daughter (Nova Pilbeam, the kidnapped girl in The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934, intelligent, commanding and sensitive) that he and the victim were platonic associates, but (along with Christine’s spouse) we question this. Derrick de Marney’s breezy, charming performance may win us over; but Hitchcock is showing us Robert as Erica sees him, as she wants him to be. We can also see why critics Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol flat-out pronounce him a “gigolo.” Robert seems so certain that his stolen raincoat, once located, will exonerate him that we tend to believe whatever he says; but he may be both innocent of murder and guilty of a more sordid impoverished life than he lets on with the girl who, after all, is seduced precisely by his “innocence.” It certainly does seem odd that Christine Clay should have left a tidy sum in her will to a younger man with whom she was not intimately involved; and if he and Christine were in fact illicit lovers, Robert is not the lucky catch that Erica thinks he is.

The violent quarrel between Christine and her accusative estranged husband with which the film opens may be slyly predicting the marriage between Erica and Robert that presumably awaits them beyond “The End”—that is, if Erica’s father doesn’t intervene to abort his daughter’s relationship with this possibly unsavory young man.

Indeed, this is a film chock full of false and deceptive appearances. With the camera at the low level of their flight above the shore where Christine’s corpse and the belt move around like driftwood, the terrifying flock of seagulls might pass for a host of implacable, bloodthirsty gods. The collapsing abandoned mine that had seemed solid epitomizes the motif of deceptive appearances; and In the film’s greatest passage, in the “Grand Hotel,” the actual murderer is exposed and trapped, the camera closing in on him: the white orchestra drummer in blackface, whose twitching eyes give him away.

Hitchcock, himself, loved this film. He was right to, but be forewarned: it holds a string of cheap jolts of fright that even succeed in making the heart jump despite a blatant use of miniatures and process photography.

Edward Rigby is scene-stealing as Will, the old tramp who assists Erica and Robert in solving the crime.

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THE BIRDS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

Criminal attorney Mitch Brenner lives a divided existence between urban and rural California: in San Francisco, where he practices law; in Bodega Bay, where his widowed mother, Lydia, feeling “abandoned” by her spouse, is ever fearful of Mitch’s “abandonment” as well. Therefore, she does her best to tighten the tie between them, even if this means twisting it. Lydia also undermines respect for her son. When pre-teen Cathy confides to her brother’s potential girlfriend, Daddy’s Girl Melanie Daniels, a socialite, that Mitch routinely defends human trash, we realize that she is too young to have arrived at this nasty conclusion on her own. She is mimicking her mother, who affects a polished surface of propriety and supportiveness. Mitch remains torn between a desire for independence and guilt over his life apart from Mother.

Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film The Birds, in thunderbursts of ornithological mayhem, is perhaps the most terrifying movie ever made—and yet another work of Hitch’s that’s awfully hard on mothers. A certain English air hovers over the proceedings, but in fact the film keeps little more than the title of Daphne Du Maurier’s story; scenarist Evan Hunter mostly invented his own story. What is causing these vicious bird attacks, some of them massive and apocalyptic? To its credit, the film doesn’t resolve this intriguing, puzzling question, preserving the cosmic mystery.

However, mimicry on the part of the birds, and possibly psychological projection on the part of the ostensible “victims,” human beings, may be involved. Consider this example: It is right after Melanie “invades space” by sneaking into Lydia and Mitch’s Bodega Bay house and leaving a pair of caged love birds for Cathy’s birthday that a gull swoops down and attacks Melanie, invading her space and drawing blood. Is some mysterious causality at work here? Later, Melanie herself is accused of bringing on the bird attacks by visiting Bodega Bay. This strikes us as irrational scapegoating, guided by panic, parochialism, perhaps xenophobia. But is it?

Jealousy also may be motivating the birds in their bloodthirsty rampages. Are they irritated by the affectionate attention that the children in Bodega Bay in particular draw? What about eyes? Hitchcock reiterates the impenetrable coldness of the eyes of the birds; one of the film’s most horrific images shows the corpse of a farmer whose eyes have been bloodily pecked out.

The film is headed for an apocalyptic finish, with color cinematographer Robert Burks assisting Hitchcock in creating massive dark, gloomy poetry of birds having quite taken over. Perhaps this is Nature’s revenge on us. Perhaps it is our own guilt and shame getting back at us. Perhaps . . .

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MARNIE (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)

It’s the wee hours and for the first time in decades I revisited Marnie. Absolutely stunning as mother-daughter drama. Indeed, this is one of the most powerful films I’ve seen about parenting. It’s so ironic, this: in Rebecca (1940) and Vertigo (1958), the thematic refrain is “Too late, too late.” This film reverses that refrain, and the outcome is still disastrous. Brutal stuff, what with the horse’s fate and the symbolism tied up in that. All the yonic imagery, too, with its ultimate resolution in flashback in Bernice’s—well, you get the picture (if you’ve seen the picture). Even when the script (by Jay Presson Allen) is thin, Hitch’s film is visually powerful. Beads of Notorious (1946) and Vertigo, but also of Spellbound (1945) and North by Northwest (1959), are threaded into the fabric of this truly unsettling, upsetting film. It’s too long, too plot-ty, and Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigogical score is irritating, and Tippi Hedren (goodness knows!) can’t act; but the strong outweighs the paltry here, and Robert Burks’s color photography is luminous. As with Vertigo, the whole film may be a dream, with each “waking up” in it but another part of the dream.

That shoe slipping out of Marnie’s pocket by degrees: While my heart was teased into cardiac arrest as I watched this, my brain ransacked memory: How many of Hitch’s most suspenseful bits are sexual at some level? (Pity the horse that had to be sacrificed for the sake of frigid Marnie’s substitute-orgasm.)

Of course, the film is packed; it is psychologically dense, as much about father-son as about mother-daughter—and about being the surviving “black sheep” in a family structured around reverence for the memory of the lost son/lost brother (I thought of the Kennedy family, which by this time had added another son to its loss of the revered Joe Jr.). Indeed, husband and wife, Mark and Marnie (similar names), mirror-image each other in many ways: one is an only child, one is not; one is motherless, one is not; one is fatherless, one is not; one does his best to undo the other’s acts of thievery, for example, by making restitution; one embraces and weds an impossible, because frigid, partner; one is neurotic, one is psychotic. Perhaps I was wrong that the film is too long. Hitch’s Marnie carefully composes a jigsaw puzzle of complementary deficient personalities.

Sister-in-law Lil kept reminding me of the vicious housekeeper that Margaret Leighton strikingly plays in Hitch’s Under Capricorn (1949); but how much “softer” a version she is here! The neighborhood child that Bernice has befriended represents an instance of Marnie’s paranoid projection that Hitch has effortlessly drawn into a seemingly objective context.