Hitch & Vertigo
EXTRACT:
3.2. Subversive Survivals in Hollywood
It’s already been noted that Hitchcock’s cinema lies at that frictional edge between the European declarative mode and the Hollywood “invisible style” (Ryall, 1986) and that this provides, for Belton (1983) at least, for an overall thematic that, “consists of a stylised use of point-of-view and insert shots directed towards the examination of perception…” (Belton, 1983, p 3)
As the director himself would declare, “the thing that interests me most of all is a change of perspective within a shot” (Pomerance, p. 217). Such a change of perspective – that retains shared real-time between performers and audience, but challenges their given visual field, extends, of course, from the visual to the moral.
It’s a frictional edge which Webster himself encountered four hundred years earlier since the invisible style is also accompanied by a form of moral generalizing that, through conventional stereotyping, easily arbitrates from what, for the audience, should be clearly good and clearly evil. Accounting for the dangers of defamiliarizing technique, Leggett (1992) reminds us that, for the Renaissance audience,
“…the moral generalizing…is not just a sign of the thematic content of popular drama; it is a sign of its theatrical method. The story was not properly told until it was generalized in a clear and satisfying way, creating a sense of community between stage and audience, relating the story to a world of agreed truth.” (Leggett, 1992, p. 128).
It could be argued that, following first the depression of the 1930s and then the challenges of the Second World War, and as factories quickly adjusted to a post-war boom economy, just such a sense of convenient, socially shared agreed truth was the given feature of the American cinema audiences of the late 1940s. Such an audience, now living in the shadow of nuclear Holocaust, would not favour delving too deeply into the uncanny recesses of Jacobean uncertainty principles.
However, just such an examination lies at the centre of the four films Hitchcock made with James Stewart during the frantic years of consumer boom and existential angst that characterised the decade between 1948 and 1958. Considering James Stewart himself, as well as Wasserman’s easeful economic agreement with Hitchcock, it is arguable that Stewart brought to the director a male star persona unlike any other in Hollywood, a unique capacity, that is, to stretch and undermine the familiar heroic positions in which others (Wayne, Gable) seemed to be so concretely set.
Despite its initial box-office failure, for example, It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946) confirmed Stewart’s status as manboy ingénue, that is, a potential to fulfil traditional heroic roles that seamlessly embraced suicidal angst and small town contentment while having, as well, a walking, talking angel as a trusted confident. Similarly, in Harvey (Koster, 1950), Stewart, a recent celebrated Colonel of the U. S. Army Air Corps and recipient of both the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross, spends most of his time happily confiding with a 6-foot invisible rabbit, and at the risk of being certified as insane by his own sister.
The later careful selection and strategic use of Stewart’s malleable potential by Hitchcock supports Dyer’s (1979) star theory contention that, any film, and particularly a Hollywood film may,
“…through its deployment of other signs of character and the rhetoric of film, bring out certain features of the star’s image and ignore others. In other words, from the structured polysemy of the star’s image certain meanings are selected in accord with the overriding conception of the character in the film…” (Dyer, 1979 / 92, p. 143, italics added)
If any male leading actor in Hollywood had a unique “structured polysemy”, therefore, it was Stewart, who more than any other – and perhaps because of his unique business arrangements through Wassermann’s MCA – was financially able and artistically willing to take the creative risk and plunder the rich but often uncomfortable subtextual conflicts that motivated his troubled and torn characters, whether that be for Anthony Mann (five westerns) or Hitchcock himself, and at a time in 1957 when he was being nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the position of brigadier generalship in the Air Force Reserve (concerns from the Senate ensured that by 1959 he was appointed, instead, as public information officer at the Pentagon, Fishgall, 1997, p. 262/263).
And it was through this collaboration with Hitchcock that we can etch a broad narrative curve through and across five films that, from 1948 to 1958, collectively explore and test an ever-deepening thematic interest in – and challenge to – the Realist aesthetic.
This thematic strand follows a darkening schema that extends,
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from Rope (1948), where Professor Rupert Cadell/Stewart realizes the terrible real consequences of an all-knowing moral and epistemological theory;
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to Rear Window (1954) where Stewart plays L. B Jeffries, a complacent professional photographer who must interrogate and question what he sees;
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then in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) he is McKenna (sic), a successful if complacent medical doctor, who gets to know more than he wants to know;
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and finally in Vertigo (1958) he plays retired detective “hard-headed” Scottie Ferguson, whose commitment to the Realist paradigm leads to a nightmarish confusion between sight and knowledge.
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- Extract from Chapter One: jv-extract-ch-1.pdf
- June 2007: Vertigo (1958) in the Top Ten of the AFI Top 100….afi-100-2007.pdf
Now Where…? http://jacobeanvisions.edublogs.org/source-references/
And Cut…
