I watched all of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies with my grandma when I was a little kid. Perhaps they made me paranoid, question the motives of all humanity and really, really hate birds.
But overall, I think that Hitchcock’s directorial intentions are misrepresented in popular culture because of the horror-film nature of Psycho. To be clear, Hitchcock was not primarily a horror director, but instead was certainly a master of suspense.
He was also a really quirky guy. He included himself in cameo roles in all of his films (he leaves a pet shop with two little dogs in The Birds; he walks down the street with a trumpet case in Vertigo). He also introduces every episode of an excellent way to get a sense of Hitchcockian suspense, his weekly television series from 1955 onward, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Although Hitchcock himself only directed a few of the episodes, his introduction and name is on every episode. If they are predictable to you, it’s only because of the generations of film and television writers who have borrowed from the master. Most of the time, his episodes seem modern, fresh, and, perhaps more often than I would like to admit, unpredictable.
I watched the episode “Portrait of Jocelyn” last week. In it, a man wants to buy his wife a painting for their one-year wedding anniversary. Both he and she are horrified when the art dealer reveals a portrait of the man’s first wife, who has disappeared, in place of the portrait the man had originally purchased. The man’s wife, Jocelyn, allegedly went to Europe, and her brother, hasn’t heard from her in many years, except for a letter he received from her one year after her disappearance. However, he manages to track down the artist who created the painting. The artist lives in a remote village where the man and Jocelyn visited during their marriage. There, the man finds a sculpted head of Jocelyn, and his wife finds her things hanging in the closet.
Think you know what’s going on? You don’t.
The man goes to visit the artist at his house near the water. The artist says that his wife, Jocelyn, is only upstairs. The man insists that he call her down, but the artist finally admits that she isn’t upstairs. Instead, the artist says, Jocelyn admitted to him that she was leaving him for another man. The artist goes to show the man Jocelyn’s grave when (*spoiler alert*) the man admits that he had killed Jocelyn long ago for the same reason. At that point, the artist/detective and Jocelyn’s brother emerge to reveal that they had planted the painting of Jocelyn, knowing that his guilty conscience would eventually get the best of him.
Are you watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents?