Yesterday (April 29) was the 40th anniversary of the death of the famous suspense director Alfred Hitchcock. He directed 53 films in his lifetime, oversaw hundreds of episodes of television, and the thriller story collection that bears his name still sells well today.
Hitchcock is considered a master of commercial films who are adept at calculation, but he is also the most perverted artist in Hollywood and the world. In fact, he always hid himself in the shadows, and then let the darkness envelop every audience that dared to approach him.
Wen | Zhang Yan
The 2012 film Hitchcock follows the filming of the director's stunning masterpiece "Horror", in which the bathroom murder scene recreated in the film, Anthony Hopkins played hitchcock in a neat suit crazy assassination of Scarlett Johansson in the bathroom, this moment, the director revealed another side of him to us.
Stills from Hitchcock
Of all the great masters of cinema of his time, Alfred Hitchcock is best known to today's film fans, directing 53 films in his lifetime, supervising hundreds of episodes of the series, and the collection of thrillers bearing his name still sells well today (although he contributed nothing but his own name to these novels). At the same time, Hitchcock made himself an icon of the times, and we still think today of the fat man in a suit that flashes in his own movie, or a comic book portrait printed on FMCG.
On January 29, 1960, Hitchcock was filmed on the filming of the film Psychopath. But when you walk into him a little (many people do this, the most famous of them is François Truffaut), you will find that beneath his unchanging solemn and funny exterior lies a soul of inferiority, harshness, arrogance, and even cruelty, who has struggled all his life in inner pain while maintaining a superficial calm, and this contradiction gives him endless motivation to make one after another that may be the greatest films in history, and also makes him sadly depart with a huge fortune after his inability to make films in his old age. Hitchcock was considered a master of commercial films all his life, but he was also the most perverted artist in Hollywood and the world. In fact, he always hid himself in the shadows, and then let the darkness envelop every audience that dared to approach him. Hitchcock was born
Hitchcock always took the trouble to reminisce about a story from his childhood, and once his father punished him by having the police put him in jail for five minutes. Whether this strange incident of corporal punishment really existed is not known, but Hitchcock thought it could provide a suitable start to his creative career, and he attributed his sensitivity and curiosity to horror to the fright of his five minutes in his cell at a young age, but the birth of an idol could not have come from such a trivial matter.
Born into a devout Catholic working-class family in London's East End, Hitchcock attended a strict ecclesiastical school in which students were constantly instilled in their students to be vigilant against sin at all times, for anyone could be tempted by the world to sin and to be punished if they fell, supplemented by harsh corporal punishment to regulate their conduct. This classical moral concept became the ethical basis for all of Hitchcock's future films.
Hitchcock
But Hitchcock was not an obedient student, and on the surface he did not like to make a scene, but whenever he had the opportunity, he would jump out and wreak havoc or bully his younger classmates. At the same time, he was also interested in crime, and he often went to the court to observe the trial of criminal cases and visited the crime museum with various murder tools. The contradiction between the desire for destruction and the harsh living environment shaped Hitchcock's lifelong image, in which he was a polite English gentleman on the outside and filled with an irrepressible fascination with sin on the inside, forcing him to realize his dreams again and again in the images. When Hitchcock was 15, his father died, and then until he married at the age of 26, he lived with his mother, and every night he had to go to her bedside to report. After the age of 26, his wife Emma largely took over the responsibilities of his mother and took over all his life, Hitchcock personally admitted that he and his wife did not have a bed, and throughout his life he called Emma "Madame", and his greatest appreciation for the screenwriters he worked with was "Emma likes this passage you wrote". Relationships with mothers are a recurring topic in Hitchcock's films, where perverted criminals are always obsessed with their mothers while extending their violent hands to young, beautiful women who pose a threat to their mother's status. Hitchcock's 1926 film The Lodger tells the story of Jack the Ripper, whom he himself called "the first Hitchcock film." The film keenly captures the collapse of the traditional British order, the intensification of class conflicts and the panic of the people at that time, which made it a great success.
Stills from "The Lodger" At the same time, the film also reveals some of the complexes that Hitchcock continued to revisit in later films. The heroine's boyfriend as a policeman in the film says that he will one day hang a noose around the neck of the murderer and put the ring on the heroine's hand, which is a sentence that subconsciously juxtaposes the noose and the ring under the surface of ambition. Strangulation is Hitchcock's favorite method of murdering women in his films, and the way his hands are locked tightly on each other reflects the perverted desire to control, which is precisely Hitchcock's attitude towards his heroine, who is keen to shape the image of the heroine in his film, personally selecting every piece of clothing for them in the play, and wanting to dress them up as the most perfect in his heart. During the filming of The Lodger, the heroine was ordered to dye her hair blonde, and she was the first to be asked for this by Hitchcock, but not the last.
After a series of successful films, Hitchcock moved to the United States in 1939, a movie-loving country that gave him ample conditions to play.
Career peak
Hitchcock's first film in the United States, Butterfly Dream, depicts a heroine who enters the aristocratic class from the bottom through marriage, dresses herself as an upper-class hostess against her wishes in order to make herself worthy of her husband's status, and suffers greatly from failure. In Hitchcock films of this period, women were always tortured for the male lead, and this reached its peak in "Beauty Plan".
"Beauty Plan" stills "Beauty Plan" is his first attempt to shoot a love film, in the face of the amazing Ingrid Bergman, 46-year-old Hitchcock for the first time to the audience to fully reveal his entire inner world, through the play, we see the mother and lover of the two identities in the director's heart entangled. As the daughter of a Nazi spy, Bergman, an American spy, infiltrates a secret Nazi base in Brazil to help her partner and lover Gary Grant steal intelligence, for which she is forced to marry a Nazi who loves her deeply and is disciplined by her mother. The two men in the film present two faces of Hitchcock: one is Gary Grant, who loves Bergman but is reluctant to show it out of his identity as a spy and indifferent personality; the other is a Nazi party member played by Claude Ryans, who does not hide his deep love for Bergman, but is constrained by his mother who lives with him, he wants to get rid of his mother's emotional control over him, but when he learns of Bergman's identity as a spy, he can only turn to his mother's wisdom to solve the dilemma. As the object of desire, Bergman resolutely committed a dangerous situation, just to meet the requirements of the loved one, until his life was hanging on the line, he prompted his lover to step forward and get a happy ending.
Stills from "Beauty Count"
These elements later became the source of a series of classics such as "Rear Window", "Psychopath", "Flock of Birds" and so on. One of Hitchcock's most important masterpieces, Hitchcock's Mission Impossible series, which has always liked to pay homage to Hitchcock, reenacts the story to a considerable extent in the second part, in which the icon of the new century, Tom Cruise, revisits the mental journey of his predecessor Gary Grant more than half a century ago.
Soon, Hitchcock filmed his first color film, Soul Reaper, a story told in consecutive times in the same space with only four consecutive shots. But even more shocking than the jaw-dropping filming is the story of two gay college students who strangled their classmates together and then hid their bodies in boxes, using the boxes as tables to entertain a number of guests, including the deceased's father and girlfriend, who went to great lengths to experience the thrill of Nietzschean superman.
Stills from Soul Reaper
The character is reminiscent of another enclosed-space film the director made a few years ago, Lifeboat, which portrays an impressive villain, a Nazi officer, who faces the danger of being alone and caught in the hands of an enemy, controls everyone with a strong physique and superhuman intelligence, and he becomes the prototype of a series of elegant genius criminals in later Hitchcock films. The murderer in "Soul Reaper" makes this image more perfect. On the surface, Soul Reaper seems to be full of malice toward homosexuals, on the one hand jealous of their superhuman intelligence, and on the other hand, they are denounced as murderous criminals; and, two years later, in Train Freak, Hitchcock portrays another perverted killer who is obsessed with the male protagonist, only this time the criminal's homosexual tendencies are expressed very subtly, hidden under his obsession with criminal methods and attachment to his mother. But in fact, Hitchcock has never privately expressed his antipathy to homosexuals, and he has the same (strictly controlled intellectual) curiosity for all sexual acts like a curious child, and perhaps under the smokescreen of homosexuality, he is actually obsessed with these distinctive criminal personalities, who have become the idols of the director who put god in his heart when he visited the crime museum as a teenager.
Two years later, in "Telephone Murder", the director once again dedicated such an elegant high-IQ criminal to the audience, who not only has a superior IQ to single-handedly plan a perfect murder, but also has superior emotional intelligence, and can gracefully sit down and taste the last bite of wine when the crime is revealed and the trend is gone.
In the same year as Murder by Telephone, Rear Window came out, in which James Stewart, who could not move due to a leg injury, and Grace Kelly, another important goddess of Hitchcock, re-enacted grant and Bergman's story in "The Beauty Plan". When Kelly stands next to Stewart, the male protagonist is always unable to show her love, and only when Kelly bravely goes into danger after Stuart spies on a murder, she goes face to face with the murderer, which inspires her lover's love for her. Trapped in a wheelchair and incompetent, Stewart is a true portrayal of Hitchcock, who is so inferior that he can only dare to hide under the elegant and funny mask of the goddess.
"Rear Window" stills This kind of incompetence in Stewart starred in another classic "Ecstasy" incarnated as the protagonist's fear of heights, due to his own illness, the protagonist could not save her at the moment when the heroine he was infatuated with fell off the bell tower, and when he met another girl who looked similar to the heroine, he spared no effort to make her appearance exactly the same as the former, in spite of the objections of the parties, here, the inferiority caused by incompetence gradually transformed into a kind of sadism, laying the groundwork for hitchcock's later film transformation. In 1960, Hitchcock planned to ask Audrey Hepburn to star in a movie, but Hepburn rejected him because of the plot in the film where she was raped, which made Hitchcock furious. Over the years, he always felt betrayed by one heroine after another, including Ingrid Bergman, who married roberto Rossellini, who was also the director, and Grace Kelly, who became the princess of Monaco, and Hepburn became the last straw that overwhelmed the camel. From a deeper perspective, as he entered old age, Hitchcock had increasing difficulty suppressing his violent soul, and he needed a more violent potion to relieve it, so his work entered another phase, which began with the most shocking film of his life. The attack manifests
A classic in film history, 1960's Psychopath is full of readable messages that perfectly shape the spiritual world of a perverted killer. The act of killing the mother first and then stealing the body at home to spend the two-person world with herself is the most shocking presentation of the Oedipus complex, and the heroine is suddenly brutally killed in front of the audience after 40 minutes of appearance, completely subverting the movie-watching habits established by Hollywood for decades.
The film's most concerned scene is the murder in the bathroom, the director used more than 70 shots in more than 40 seconds, supplemented by the sound effect of the bayonet piercing into the body and the high-frequency soundtrack played by the violin, which presented the whole process of the assassination rhythmically, making the audience feel as if every knife had pierced into their hearts. Throughout Hitchcock's film career, such a straightforward and brutal display of murder scenes was absent from his previous films. The director's former weak eyes, which hid in the corner and obsessively watched his sweetheart, disappeared, leaving only the hollow eye sockets of the murderer's mother mummy at the end of the film, with a brutal and ferocious cry.
Stills from Psychopaths
Set against the backdrop of a devastating film in which an overwhelming flock of birds attacks a small town, 1963's Birds tells the story of a mother who is gradually replaced by her son's lover and is abandoned, and she is not the only one who is abandoned in the film. In fact, every character in the film is trying to establish an emotional connection with others, but inevitably leads to isolation, and the attack of the flock of birds is an external manifestation of this tragedy. Federico Fellini describes the film as poetry, and each attack injects a strong tone into that sentiment. The most striking thing about the film is that the heroine is attacked by a flock of birds at the end of the film, and in this two-minute passage, the director carefully shows her being pecked by countless birds from all angles. In order to shoot the scene, Hitchcock had the heroine Tibby Headley stand in front of the camera, and the staff on both sides kept throwing live birds at her, so from morning to night, shooting for five consecutive days, finally causing her to have a mental breakdown on the fifth day and then faint. At this moment, the bathroom murder scene in "Psychopath" is repeated at the same time inside and outside the play.
Stills from "Flock of Birds"
In the director's last classic in his later years, "Berserk", Hitchcock, who got rid of the shackles of film censorship, unabashedly presented the whole process of rape and murder, and the powerless male protagonist in "Rear Window" has become a murderer who can only recover his sexual ability when strangling the other party with a tie, and the hidden darkness in Hitchcock's heart is completely released, while at the same time, his life energy is being exhausted step by step, after completing another movie, At the age of 80, Hitchcock came to the end of his life. At the end of the movie Hitchcock, "Psychopath" premiered, and when the bathroom murder was about to arrive, Hitchcock quietly walked outside the screening hall door, listening to the screams of the audience inside, and waving his hands like a band conductor with amusement. He has spent his life behind the scenes to direct the emotions of the audience, and the funeral on May 2, 1980, which was his last performance, had long since returned to the shadows when more than 600 guests on the scene shared the grief of the film master. (This article was originally published in Sanlian Life Weekly, Issue 21, 2016)
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