Hitchcock's films are known for their suspense, and through the thriller scenes, he shows the different faces of cities.
French director Godard said that there is a type of film that only takes a few minutes to watch, the audience can recognize who made it and understand where it was made in ten minutes. Behind Hitchcock's suspense films, you can not only glimpse a person with a very different personality, but also see a city with clear outlines.
In 1907, 8-year-old Alfred Hitchcock bragged to people that he remembered all the stops of the London tram.
Two years later, he hung a map of the world in his bedroom. He bought Lloyd's Record and Cook's Transatlantic Journey and fantasized all day about a "trans-Siberian train trip."
He sees the film as "a hug to the cities of the world." The American writer Patrick McGilligan, who wrote for Hitchcock, described it this way:
"He saw a lot of movies in London in his early years, but the ones he remembers most vividly are the ones that made him embark on an unforgettable journey and introduced him to the major cities of the world."
If filmmaking is Hitchcock's main business, then recommending the interesting cities he has visited is Hitchcock's "side business" outside of the camera:
From London to New York, from Munich to Nice, from Mount Rushmore to the Greenwich neighborhood. Hitchcock tells a story shrouded in suspense and a city wrapped in a story.
Hitchcock's films are like that. 2019 marks the 120th anniversary of Hitchcock's birth, and behind the twists and turns of the suspense he orchestrated, you can not only glimpse a person with different personalities, but also see a clearly defined city.
In the film North by Northwest, Hitchcock presents the architectural features of the United Nations Headquarters through this perspective: smooth black granite, stainless steel façade. It's a portrayal of Manhattan, New York, and Hitchcock's obsession with urban illusions.
Urban Phantom
Hitchcock liked to use his lens to show urban phantoms.
In Rear Window, James Stuart uses a telescope to "penetrate" the 31-room Federal-style brick house to the privacy of every family in Greenwich Village.
In this film, which "for the first time in history has photographed a voyeur in a good light", the building outside the back window forms a patio, which can be pushed in and closed to peep.
Everyone living in Greenwich Village is exposed to each other's field of vision and can observe each other's privacy habits with the help of tools.
The city's main thoroughfares stretch outwards outside the apartments, intertwining between modern roads, creating an urban vacuum that is likely to be overlooked without a little attention, a miniature version of Hitchcock's hometown, Leytonstone in East London.
The thriller film director has copied the urban outline of his childhood memories into a series of thrilling life and death suspense cases.
A scene from the movie Rear Window. Through the hero's telescope, Hitchcock sketches out the whole picture of Greenwich Village.
What impression did Hitchcock have of Leidenstone?
His home was actually an ordinary vegetable retail store in London, at the intersection of Maryville Road and Southville Road, exactly the same geographical features as the apartment in Rear Window.
From his home, the vegetable shop, you'll see family-run butcher shops, bakeries, shoe repair shops, tobacco shops, sewing shops, dessert shops, knitting shops and seafood stalls in either direction.
Today, outside London's Leytonstone tube station, you can take photos with mosaic art paintings printed with Hitchcock film scenes, and the most photographed of them is of course the film's community environment modeled after Leyton stone's Rear Window.
In such an open and enclosed space, ballet girls, composers, couples who sleep on the terrace all day, have no children but have a dog, and the salesman who is finally judged by Stuart to be a murderer form a miniature sketch of the European and American community in the 1950s:
In "Rear Window" you can see the whole world, and the whole world can see your whole world through the back window of your home.
The apartment in "Rear Window" was built in 6 weeks under hitchcock's personal supervision, and once became the largest indoor set in the history of Paramount Pictures in the United States.
American writer Donald Spottow believes that Hitchcock's obsession with urban corners stemmed from his childhood experiences in London's East End.
They shuttled between wicker boxes and shelves, except for the corridor at the back of the house leading to the narrow back door, which they had to go through the shops to get in and out of their living quarters. They have their outdoor toilets in the small, dark and dilapidated garden. Privacy is rarer than silence or prolonged sunlight. ”
Through the eyes of the protagonist, the audience can glimpse the unknown side of urban life. /The Rear Window
Exotic
When Blackmail was filmed in 1928, because there were no fans in the studio and no ice cubes, the actors called the studio a "steamer", and Hitchcock walked around the studio in a black suit, white shirt, gray tie, black socks, and black shoes.
When the lighting engineer turned on the lighting, Hitchcock almost passed out in the heat.
This is not the most tragic shooting experience of "Xi Fat".
In 1934, Hitchcock took Stuart and Doris Day to Marrakech in Morocco, telling a suspenseful story of a child hunt in North Africa called Catch.
Hitchcock was clearly unfamiliar with the climate in North Africa, with daytime temperatures as high as 43 degrees Celsius during filming, but according to the actors on the scene, they never saw Hitchcock take off his dark coat, even the tie.
However, after returning to the room at night, the director's first action was to drink a glass of "whiskey with more ice cubes".
Hitchcock's urgency can be felt across the screen. / "Catch the Murder" work photo
The Few Africans in Hitchcock's films appear in The Capture.
In 1934, Europe and the United States knew very little about Morocco. At this time, "Catch the Murder" turned out, and the American doctor played by Stuart took his wife and children to Marrakech for a vacation after an international conference in Paris.
From the no-man's land of Marrakech to the la Mamounia hotel in the city center, the exotic atmosphere of North Africa began to leave its mark on the minds of European and American audiences.
The Rama Muña Hotel, a wedding gift from the King of Morocco to his son in the 18th century, has one of the largest gardens in Morocco, covers an area of nearly 8 hectares and is known as an urban oasis on the edge of Marrakech.
It is also at the Marrakech Bazaar near the hotel that audiences sitting by the fireplace and in the café see the murder stories of politics, money and religion.
Since then, Marrakech has become popular, and La Mamunia has become a "punch card mecca" for travel enthusiasts and movie enthusiasts.
In "Catch the Murder", the director quietly appeared on camera and contributed a striking back of the head.
The film that best reflects Hitchcock's "master of urban marketing" is 1955's "To Catch a Thief". Vanity Fair magazine even put it bluntly: "Hitchcock is not making suspense movies, he is making urban propaganda films for Nice." ”
"To Catch a Thief" does meet all the criteria of a perfect documentary.
In the ancient town of Ez between Nice and Monaco, Gary Grant and Grace Kelly are racing in a mad race. No one remembers why they traveled together, because all eyes were fixed on vistas such as the Mediterranean Sea, ancient villages and beach sunbathing.
At a turn somewhere, the two men stopped and took sausages, bread, and even a carefully packed bottle of brandy from the trunk. No one pays attention to Gary Grant's role as "Robbie the Odd Thief" in the show, and no one cares whether Grace Kelly's character is positive or negative.
Los Angeles Times columnist Philip Shure described "To Catch a Thief" as "an overly idealistic absurd plot, beautiful enough of the cityscape."
"The large record of the Gold Coast of Nice makes people and even the director too lazy to think of laissez-faire ( French word, meaning 'laissez')."
In the movie "To Catch a Thief", Hitchcock shows the most beautiful scenery of the Gold Coast of Nice, and the picture shows the hero and heroine playing against each other not far from the Nice coastline.
"There's only one London"
Gary Grant and Eva Mary Center run on the rocks with the heads of Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt in the background.
This is the first time in the history of cinema that a film has used the lens to present the scenic scenery, thus achieving a feat of directly stimulating local tourism.
In North by Northwest, Hitchcock left the climactic scene of the villain hunting down the hero and heroine to the "President's Hill" in South Dakota. So in Mount Rushmore National Memorial Park, spies fly over the wall in the presidential stone carving, trying to arrest the protagonist who holds evidence of his treason.
Hitchcock, a strong believer in fatalism, ended the film like this: Under the gaze of the four presidents of "President's Hill", spies fell to the bottom of the mountain, justice was revealed, and evil was finally suppressed.
The New York Times' view is that because of North by Northwest, South Dakota's tourism industry is on fire, and "President's Hill" has received the most marketing campaign in the world.
At that time, due to the restrictions on the management of the real scene, this part was changed to shooting in the studio, and the so-called night scene was also filmed during the day. /North by Northwest
In addition to the "corner society" of Greenwich Village, the exoticism of Marrakech, and the medieval villages of the Gold Coast of Nice, Hitchcock is equally obsessed with the landmarks of the metropolis.
From the Washington Monument in "Train Freak" where the male protagonist and the male partner walk side by side to the Golden Gate Bridge in "Ecstasy", in Hitchcock's concept, horror has always been tied to the metropolis and landmarks.
But Hee Fat's favorite is still London. In the movie "Strange Tenant", he constructed a story about the London fog. Looking back at the film, shot in 1958, the Los Angeles Times article described the sense of vertigo it presented as "partly thriller, partly panoramic."
Acknowledging the director's lingering, almost obsessive gaze at the city, the article further analyzes, "Hitchcock wanted to show the bloody, dirty side of the city of London. He has always missed the rustic Londoners who lived in the suburbs."
Use London as a prism, like Dickens, to show the evil in the world.
In the foggy capital of London, Hitchcock told everyone with suspenseful stories and thrillers: The city is growing too fast— too much gray, too much dust, too much harmful gases, and I have almost nowhere to go.
✎ Author | junitaille
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