Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [14]
Byron Orlok, Targets
ON NOVEMBER 4, 1965, Alfred Hitchcock wrote a curt telegram to Bernard Herrmann, his longtime collaborator who had written music for seven of his movies, including Vertigo and Psycho. It was an incredibly fruitful relationship, perhaps the greatest ever between director and composer. But you wouldn’t know it from the tone of this message. It had become increasingly common for studios to release a single with their movie, hoping to exploit the growth of the music business. Songwriters were replacing composers, but Herrmann refused to follow this trend in his work for Hitchcock’s new thriller Torn Curtain. Pressured by Universal Pictures to deliver a hit song, Hitchcock, still smarting over the failure of his last movie, Marnie, was not pleased that Herrmann did not deliver a catchy tune ready for the pop charts. “We do not have the freedom that we would like to have because we are catering to an audience that is why you get your money and I get mine,” he wrote after expressing his displeasure. “The audience is very different to the one we used to cater.”
The irritated message anticipated the ugly fight that would follow. Hitchcock eventually fired Herrmann from the movie, and they never resolved their differences. There was a silver lining, however, since Herrmann moved on to lend moody scores to movies by the next generation of directors such as Brian De Palma (Sisters), Larry Cohen (It’s Alive), and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver). But the episode revealed that Hitchcock was worried he was losing his hold on his audience.
Through most of his career Alfred Hitchcock was a reliably popular entertainer who the critics carped was not willing to address themes worthy of his talent. Many of his classic movies received harsh reviews. The New Yorker described Vertigo in 1958 as “farfetched nonsense.” By the mid-sixties, his reputation as a hit-maker had started to suffer. Torn Curtain opened in 1966 and was a flop. Three years later, Topaz was another disappointment. The irony is that at the same time that he was losing the mass audience, he was gaining cachet in elite opinion.
A concerted effort by European critics that started in the fifties, which was later picked up by their American counterparts, led to a reevaluation. Hitchcock became known as the ultimate misunderstood mainstream artist. He was a studio showman who, his admirers argued, smuggled his own distinctive visual style into canny entertainments. This was always a slight oversimplification, since Hitchcock worked within a system that helped guide his vision. But the image of him as a powerful, single-minded auteur who made his movies through an uncompromising force of will reached a crucial turning point in 1967, when the French critic and director François Truffaut published a booklength interview with the master. Treating his works, even the minor ones, with the seriousness afforded a major painter in a museum retrospective, the book became essential reading for students of film and aspiring directors. Among other notable elements, Hitchcock laid out his theories about scaring audiences, which would become tenets of moviemaking.
He articulated his famous distinction between “surprise” and “suspense,” illustrating it by comparing two scenes. In the first, characters are sitting at a table when a bomb goes off. That’s surprise. In the other, there is a shot of the bomb under the table and then another of people having a conversation above who do not know the bomb is there. The audience waits for the explosion. That’s suspense. In outlining these two strategies, Hitchcock implied that more artistically serious movies, such as those he made, employed suspense, while cheap ones tried surprise, a distinction that hardened into a common wisdom. But most of the finest scary movies, including some by Hitchcock, have both.
Hitchcock also popularized the term “Pure Cinema,” which became something of a religion among horror directors. French avant-garde artists from the 1920s first