Last month, I spent some time with the great stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis reminded me of an era when audiences went to the cinema as much for the performers as for the films themselves.
A few months earlier, I had explored Method acting through A Streetcar Named Desire, The Best Days Of Our Lives and On the Waterfront, watching Brando and his cohort of Method actors bring a new psychological realism to the screen.
This month, I wanted to explore Hitchcock – a filmmaker who saw cinema rather differently from the actors who worked so hard to inhabit their characters.
Alfred Hitchcock is often described as the “Master of Suspense”, and with good reason: his films remain gripping more than half a century later, despite countless imitators and advances in technology and special effects.
Suspense is only part of his legacy
After watching this month’s films, I came away convinced that suspense is only part of his legacy. What really struck me was Hitchcock’s conviction that a film should ultimately belong to its director. While Method actors searched for truth from the inside out, Hitchcock believed the director should orchestrate every element – performance, camera, editing, music and pacing – into a single, carefully designed whole.
He once remarked that “the chief requisite for an actor is the ability to do nothing well”, trusting the camera rather than the performer to provide the dramatic emphasis. Elsewhere, when discussing improvisation, he dismissed it with characteristic wit: “That’s not acting. That’s writing.”
Whether or not one agrees with him, watching his films makes it impossible to deny its effectiveness. Rear Window, Vertigo and The Birds all reveal a filmmaker who exerted extraordinary control over what we see, know and feel, and, perhaps most importantly, how we view the role of the film director today.
Rear Window (1954)
Here, James Stewart plays photojournalist L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, confined to his apartment with a broken leg during a sweltering New York summer. Reduced to watching the lives of his neighbours through his rear window, he gradually becomes convinced that one of them has murdered his wife.
The premise is deceptively simple, but Hitchcock transforms it into an exercise in storytelling and perspective: we never leave Jeff’s apartment; we know only what he knows and see only what he sees, becoming voyeurs alongside him.
The result is a masterclass in how filmmakers can create suspense within a surprisingly narrow framework.
Grace Kelly is magnificent as Lisa Fremont. Introduced in what must surely be one of cinema’s most elegant entrances, she appears at first to be all glamour, although as the film progresses we soon find out how fearless, resourceful and clever she is. Watching her climb into the suspected murderer’s apartment is impressive enough; watching her do it in immaculate couture and high heels takes It to another level.
It is one of those wonderfully cinematic moments where style and courage coexist without feeling remotely implausible.
Rear Window is a great film: it’s a compelling mystery, it has brilliant acting, and it’s astonishing that the entire movie takes place in one small space without ever feeling boring. Another thing I admired was how completely Hitchcock controls the audience’s experience. James Stewart gives a superb performance, but the suspense here emerges just as much from the framing, the editing and the careful choreography of what we are – and aren’t – allowed to see.
Here, Hitchcock isn’t simply telling a story; he’s directing our attention with extraordinary precision.
Vertigo (1958)
This was probably my favourite of this month’s films, although it certainly wasn’t the cheeriest. It’s also stayed with me the longest and given me the most to think about.
James Stewart returns as Scottie Ferguson, a former detective forced into retirement after he developed vertigo as a result of an incident in which another policeman died trying to save him. When an old acquaintance asks him to follow his wife Madeleine (played beautifully by Kim Novak), Scottie becomes drawn into a mystery that gradually transforms into something far stranger – and far sadder – than he ever could have expected.
Although Vertigo is often described as a thriller, I found it more compelling as a psychological tragedy. Scottie believes he has failed twice: first in causing the death of his fellow officer and then in failing to save Madeleine, because his vertigo prevents him climbing the bell tower from which she falls. The criticism he receives at the inquest – which felt a bit belaboured, if I’m honest – only deepens his sense of guilt and responsibility, and he ends up in a psychiatric institution for a year after Madeleine’s death.
When he encounters Judy, who uncannily resembles Madeleine, he is incapable of behaving like a healthy man trying to move on; rather, he’s a man whose grief has become entangled with fantasy.
The resulting pressure he exerts on Judy to remake herself in Madeleine’s image is awful to see. Vertigo is often said to be about obsession, but to me this aspect of the film felt less like controlling behaviour as we understand it today, and more like the behaviour of someone whose grip on reality has begun to fracture.
Scottie isn’t simply trying to change the woman in front of him; he is desperately trying to undo death itself.
Judy, meanwhile, must be one of Hitchcock’s most fascinating creations. She is both victim and accomplice – guilty of participating in a murder plot, while also genuinely falling in love with Scottie. The tragedy is that she longs to be loved for who she really is, while knowing that the man she loves has fallen for an illusion she helped to create. Ultimately, while we see her moulded into the image of Madeleine (or remoulded, perhaps) she has more agency than Scottie, who has been manipulated and deceived from the beginning, and is always acting on less information than the other characters.
There were one or two moments that felt less successful to me, particularly the surreal dream sequence with its swirling colours and symbolic imagery. It’s easy to see the intent, but it feels like overkill when Scottie’s disturbed mental state has already been conveyed so brilliantly through atmosphere, music and performance.
By contrast, the famous “Vertigo effect” in the bell tower remains astonishingly effective, allowing us not merely to observe Scottie’s fear but to experience it alongside him. For me, this had the most depth of any of the Hitchcock films I’ve seen so far, although I’m aware there are many more still to go before I can call that a definitive judgement.
The Birds (1963)
If Vertigo is a psychological thriller in the truest sense of the term, The Birds is something altogether different and far more primal.
After a playful encounter in a San Francisco pet shop, socialite Melanie Daniels (played with aplomb by Tippi Hedren) follows lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) to the sleepy coastal town of Bodega Bay. Soon afterwards, birds begin attacking people without warning or explanation.
One of the film’s greatest strengths is Melanie herself. Hedren gives her a mischievous warmth that makes her instantly likeable. There is a sparkle about her from the moment she decides to play along with Mitch’s mistaken assumption that she works in the pet shop. She feels like exactly the sort of person who would be enormous fun to spend time with – witty, confident and just irreverent enough to be able to tease people without being mean. That playful spirit makes what follows all the more shocking.
The remarkable thing about The Birds is that Hitchcock never explains the attacks. There is no scientific solution, no comforting revelation and no neat ending, like we’ve learned to expect in modern disaster movies. The behaviour of the birds is beyond human understanding, and somehow that refusal to explain makes the film even more frightening. In a time when the impact of climate change is being felt more than ever, whether through floods, landslides or wildfires, the stark truth that the control we have over our lives is illusory in the face of nature seems more relevant than ever.
The attic sequence is among the most unsettling scenes I’ve watched during this project. The prolonged close-ups, Melanie’s vulnerability and the sounds she makes during the attack gave the sequence, for me, an unsettlingly sexual quality and a sense of violation that lingered long after it ended. Whether Hitchcock intended that reading is impossible to know, of course, but it undeniably shaped my experience of the scene.
Knowing something of the production adds another layer. The attack took several days to film, with real birds used for much of the sequence. Hedren later recalled suffering an injury to her eyelid and becoming so exhausted that filming had to stop on medical advice. It is a reminder that Hitchcock’s extraordinary pursuit of cinematic perfection sometimes came at a considerable cost.
Yet, once again, what stays with me is the precision of the filmmaking. Every cut, every silence and every camera movement contributes to the mounting sense of dread. Even here, Hitchcock demonstrates that suspense is something carefully constructed rather than simply performed.
The director takes centre stage
Watching Hitchcock so soon after exploring Method acting reinforced just how many different paths there are to great filmmaking.
Brando and his colleagues sought truth by looking inwards, building their performances from the emotional life of their characters. Hitchcock approached the same challenge from almost the opposite direction. He believed the actor should serve the film, while the director brought every element together into a single artistic vision. Of course, both approaches produced masterpieces.
In fact, watching these films also made me question Hitchcock’s own famous comments about actors. Grace Kelly’s effortless elegance, James Stewart’s quiet humanity and Tippi Hedren’s mischievous charm all feel inseparable from the films themselves. Perhaps Hitchcock’s genius wasn’t that actors mattered less than he claimed, but that he knew exactly how to draw out the qualities each performer could bring.
Hitchcock didn’t invent what later became known as auteur theory, but he did more than almost anyone to make it convincing. French critics in the 1950s looked at directors like Hitchcock and argued that some films bore such a distinctive personal signature that the director should be regarded as their true author. More than sixty years later, that idea feels so commonplace as to be unremarkable. We speak of Hitchcock films, Kubrick films, Spielberg films, Tarantino films and Nolan films just as readily as audiences once spoke of Clark Gable or Katharine Hepburn.
That may ultimately be Hitchcock’s greatest legacy. He didn’t simply redefine suspense; he helped redefine the role of the director. After spending a month in his company, it’s easy to see why so many filmmakers – and so many film lovers – still find themselves working in his shadow.