Quote of the Day (Dwight Macdonald, on Illogical Thinking in Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“Tippi [Hedren] warns a teacher that crows are massing outside the schoolhouse; their jointly worked-out response to the threat is not to put the kids into the cellar but to march them outside to walk home. To no one’s surprise but Hitchcock’s, the birds come shrieking like Stukas onto the helpless little column.” —American cultural critic and editor Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

Sixty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds premiered in New York City. The above quote is only a sample of Dwight MacDonald’s ironic takedown of this film from the “Master of Suspense.”

A post of mine from nine years ago discussed how Hitchcock radically transformed Daphne DuMaurier’s dark, short tale of isolation and terror in a British cottage into something quite different. But I thought that Macdonald’s quote was not only worthwhile in itself to read, but pointed to the sharp critical divide that quickly developed around the film.

At the time, detractors assailed the film for a variety of reasons: a weak script, awkward acting, sadism, special effects at the expense of logic or motivation. 

Movie fans paid no heed to the naysaying reviewers, making this a financially successful follow-up to Hitchcock’s Psycho from three years before.

Even so, the film continues to split opinion, only this time Hitchcock critics call the director out for using live birds for the avian attic attack on Tippi Hedren—an experience that understandably traumatized the actress. (And that was before even  worse treatment she would suffer at his hands during the making of Marnie, when the director subjected her to sexual harassment.)

The Birds, then, is certainly controversial. Yet I hardly think I am alone in regarding it as mesmerizing and chilling, all the way down to its final, ambiguous—and deeply foreboding—image of a landscape filled with the birds, silent and watching.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Psycho,’ With a Subtly Suspenseful Sequence)

Milton Arbogast [played by Martin Balsam]: “I'm a private investigator. I've been trying to trace a girl... that's been missing for, oh, about a week now from Phoenix. It's a private matter. The family wants to forgive her. She's not in any trouble.”

Norman Bates [played by Anthony Perkins]: “I didn't think the police went looking for people who aren't in trouble.”

Arbogast: “I'm not the police.”

Norman: “Oh, yeah.”

Arbogast: “We have reason to believe she came along this way. Did she stop here?”

Norman: “No one's stopped here for a couple of weeks.”

Arbogast: “Mind looking at the picture before committing yourself?”

Norman: “Commit myself? You sure talk like a policeman.”

Arbogast: “Look at the picture, please.”

Norman [looking at it]: “Mm-mmm. Yeah.” 

Arbogast: “Sure? Well, she may have used an alias. Marion Crane's her real name... but she could've registered under a different one.”

Norman: “I tell ya, I don't even much bother with guests registering any more. One by one, you drop the formalities. I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets, but old habits die hard. Which reminds me...”

Arbogast: “What's that?”

Norman: “The sign. A couple last week said if the thing hadn't been on... they would've thought this was an old, deserted...”

Arbogast: “You see, that's exactly my point. Nobody'd been here for a couple weeks... and there's a couple came by and didn't know that you were open. As you say, old habits die hard.”— Psycho (1960), screenplay by Joseph Stefano based on the novel by Robert Bloch, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I am afraid that, for all its formal cinematographic brilliance as an experiment in low-budget Gothic horror, the lesson of Psycho for subsequent filmmakers lay less in how to scare audiences—i.e., how to make them feel delicious tingles at the back of their necks over something that might or might not occur—than in how to shock them, with depictions of gore (though much of this, given censorship regulations of the day, was simulated).

But moments of anticipation, a tightening of mortal stakes for the film’s characters, did exist, even though they were not of the conspicuous kind present, for instance, in the famous shower scene. Such was the encounter—a portion of which I’ve excerpted here—between Norman Bates and Arbogast, a detective hired by the employer of embezzler Marion Crane.

What the audience knows—but Arbogast doesn’t—is that Marion has been stabbed to death in Bates Motel. But in the lines I quoted above, Norman—despite his attempts to stonewall the detective—has made a slip.

It's the slip that a nervous person, hoping to fill a conversational void or to add a detail that might add more weight to what he's said, might make. It’s a small error, maybe the kind that you or I might not immediately realize in the ebb and flow of a conversation. 

But Arbogast immediately pounces on Norman’s contradiction. He pursues the accidental disclosure that people have indeed stopped at the motel, and he uses it as an opportunity to persuade a now-tenser Norman to allow him to check the motel register and establish that Marion, under an assumed name, checked in. 

From there, the conversation gears shift rapidly. Little physical action occurs between Balsam and Perkins that would constitute a normal marker of suspense (a body dangling from a cliff, say, or two arms reaching for a gun).

No, the suspense lies in what is said and what is not—Arbogast's flat declaration that something is amiss (“If it doesn’t jell, it isn’t aspic, and this ain’t jelling”), followed by his increasingly confrontational, accusatory questions (“Did you spend the night with her?... Then how would you know she didn't make any calls?”) and Norman’s stuttering responses and sweating attempts to end the conversation-turned-interrogation.

Alfred Hitchcock didn’t give his actors much direction, believing that he’d chosen them for their skill and that they’d figure out how to play their scenes. Here, Martin Balsam justifies that faith.

Over the course of his long career, the character actor won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the mid-Sixties comedy A Thousand Clowns, acted in classics like Cape Fear, 12 Angry Men and Murder on the Orient Express, and appeared before a sizable weekly audience as Carroll O’Connor’s Jewish business partner in Archie Bunker’s Place.

But as Arbogast, he made the most of short screen time and limited plot function to suggest character dimensions not apparent in his dialogue.

The audience already knows something about Norman—his shyness, his domination by “Mother,” his weirdness beneath that nice-young-man exterior. But here, Balsam establishes Arbogast.

Well-schooled in his craft, the detective is cool and confident but also can be blunt, brusque and maybe cockier than this setting previously unknown to him might warrant. 

He has learned that something has happened here. But, once he glimpses “Mother” in the window in the house on the hill, the chief instinct of his profession—curiosity—leads him to disregard the chasm between his knowledge and the real situation.

His entry into that dark, foreboding house is inevitable, then, as is his ill-fated encounter with “Mother” on its stairs.

In October, which has become the de facto month for horror depiction on film and television, Psycho holds pride of place. The sequence I’ve discussed supplies many of the sinews of this classic—and, following the surprise dispatching of the focus of the first third of the movie, Marion, follows with that of Arbogast, whom we had only shortly before expected to relentlessly pursue her killer and bring him to justice.

The detective proved inadequate to the task. Blessed with the intelligence to sense a crime, even one different from the embezzlement he’d been hired to investigate, he still lacked the imagination to comprehend the level of insanity and evil—not to mention the danger that represented to him—in this sleepy backwater of the American Southwest. Who could?

Quote of the Day (Jordan Peele, on the ‘Jump Scare’ vs. ‘Slow-Building, Unnerving’ Terror)

“At one end of the spectrum, there’s the jump scare, and at the other end, there's slow-building, unnerving anticipation—the terror. For my money, terror is the best type of scare, because it’s the promise of horror to come. When the audience is in that state, you don’t have to do much. Their imagination is more powerful than any piece of imagery or any timing or misdirection you could do.”— African-American screenwriter-director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), quoted in Jonah Weiner, “The New Master of Suspense,” WSJ. Magazine, March 2019 (registration required for viewing)

(The image accompanying this post comes from Peele’s Get Out, with perhaps the most famous scene from that 2017 thriller: Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris as he descends into the “Sunken Place.” During these weeks leading up to Halloween, it’s well worth seeing how this Oscar-winning screenplay—with nods towards The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby—anticipated America’s unfolding real-life racial nightmare.)

This Day in TV History (‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ Premieres)

Oct. 2, 1955—When Alfred Hitchcock launched his half-hour anthology series on CBS, he found a new platform for his work in the growing medium of television and reached a level of recognition other directors of similar duration and distinction had never known.

As Peter Ackroyd observes in Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life, the English director was less personally involved in the show named for him than many viewers suspected. He did not write any of his droll intros or close-outs, for instance, and left crucial script and casting decisions to his long-time associates, executive producer Joan Harrison and associate producer Norman Lloyd. Moreover, on a regular basis, he only entered into the production process as he watched rough cuts of episodes, when his team knew how to follow up on his brief, sometimes cryptic comments (e.g., a camera-angle suggestion, or a “Well, thank you” that signified dissatisfaction).

None of this is meant to suggest, however, that his restricted role in Alfred Hitchcock Presents had no bearing on the focus of his attention: his films.

His penchant for self-promotion, already evident in the cameos that fans had come to expect from the “Master of Suspense,” now gave him additional money and clout in making movies as he wished. He could assess the work of actors he might use later for the big screen. And the 17 episodes he directed out of the series’ more than 300 enabled him to experiment cheaply and quickly with techniques and themes he would use more intensively for his larger canvasses.

In a sense, the visual that opened each show—the bald, rotund Hitchcock stepping sideways to the tune of Charles Gounod’s "Funeral March for a Marionette," until his figure formed a silhouette—could serve as a metaphor for how he shaped the series. (Unlike his work on much of the rest of the show, he worked on this sequence himself, harking back to his early days in the British film industry, when he illustrated title cards for silent movies.) In the case of the show, Hitchcock designed the outline. It was up to his collaborators to figure out how to give substance to his formidable shadow.

Several actors featured in the series would show up later in his films, including Barbara Bel-Geddes (Vertigo), John Forsythe (The Trouble With Harry, Topaz), Vera Miles (The Wrong Man, Psycho), Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern (both in Family Plot).

But, among the episodes in which he took the helm himself as director, Hitchcock delighted in the low-cost, low-risk environment of TV to try something different. In “Breakdown,” for example, he shot from the viewpoint of a callous businessman, William Callow. After Callow is paralyzed, then stripped of his clothes and left for dead following a terrible car accident, Hitchcock focuses on blank, horror-stricken eyes, much as he would with Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane sliding down in the shower in Psycho. (The tears coming down his face alert the coroner in the morgue that the body in front of him is, in fact, alive, so Callow is saved, ironically, by a show of emotion he scorned previously.)

But shooting immobility posed the danger of looking static. So, as Jack Seabrook pointed out in a post on the blog “barebonesez”, Hitchcock and editor Edward Williams used a “good variety of angles and distances that keep the shots of Callow's paralyzed form from becoming repetitive or monotonous.”

“One More Mile To Go” touches on a motif that Hitchcock would explore at greater length in Psycho and Torn Curtain: the need to clean up thoroughly after a gruesome killing. Death, he is emphasizing, is an extremely messy business. This second season episode also underscored the primacy of image in his work, as 10 minutes--one-third of its length--elapse before any character says a word.

“The Case of Mr. Pelham” is a small-scale version of the doppelganger or “double” theme that Hitchcock had employed previously in Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train (I examined the latter in this prior post), and would do so again in Psycho.

Far before the term came into common parlance, Hitchcock created a personal “brand” through the show. He drew a reported $129,000 per episode from CBS and sponsor Bristol-Myers, then, the following year, leveraged that into a deal to license his name for a new suspense publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (which still exists today).

That cushioned him against the inevitable flops that moviemakers sometimes experience (in his case, The Wrong Man and, at least on its original release, Vertigo). Better yet, it enabled him to self-finance Psycho when its gory subject matter made Paramount Pictures balk. (He even used the sets, camera and crew from the series.)

There really can be too much of a good thing, and so it proved with Alfred Hitchcock Presents. After six seasons, CBS decided to give the show an additional half-hour. Though the show survived another three seasons, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour did not benefit from the new length, losing much of its tightness and suspense. 

But in its most interesting early episodes, it offered useful employment to writers such as Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Henry Slesar, Ed McBain, and John D. MacDonald; opened space for a new, subversive tone on TV (Hitchcock’s close-outs were meant, in part, to circumvent censors who objected to any suggestion that a killer could get away with a crime); and helped its host achieve new levels of popularity even as it spurred his dark art.

Quote of the Day (Gillian Flynn, on Great Thrillers)

“Old-fashioned suspense is more engaging than immediate violence. A great thriller to me is more about creating a sense of unease, a queasiness that comes with knowing something is not quite right. It’s why I love unreliable narrators — there’s something so wonderfully unnerving about realizing midway through a book that you’ve put yourself in the hands of someone who is not to be trusted.”—Gone Girl novelist Gillian Flynn, on what makes a great thriller, in “By the Book” interview, The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2014

Movie Quote of the Day (‘North by Northwest,’ on an Inconvenient Abduction)

"Not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then, but I have tickets for the theater this evening.”—Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), in North by Northwest, screenplay by Ernest Lehman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1959)

Quote of the Day (Robert Bloch, on a Vampire’s Cloak)

“The cold, heavy cloth hung draped about Henderson’s shoulders. The faint odor rose mustily in his nostrils as he stepped back and surveyed himself in the mirror. The lamp was poor, but Henderson saw that the cloak effected a striking transformation in his appearance. His long face seemed thinner, his eyes were accentuated in the facial pallor heightened by the somber cloak he wore. It was a big, black shroud….

“The old man took the money, blinking, and drew the cloak from Henderson’s shoulders. When it slid away he felt suddenly warm again. It must be cold in the basement—the cloth was icy.”—Robert Bloch, “The Cloak,” in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, edited by Peter Straub (Library of America, 2009)

Right about now would be a great time for Henderson to high-tail it away from that cold, dusty costumer’s shop (better to buy this at home, on eBay, where the one in the accompanying image came from) and its shuffling, ancient, yellow-eyed owner. But this is Halloween night, and Henderson badly wants a monster’s costume to frighten his friend Lindstrom and his silly society friends.

More to the point, this vampire’s cloak makes Henderson look better—a huge selling point to a colossally arrogant narcissist.

On the other hand, most readers like myself don’t want Henderson to run away, as it would deprive us of a chance to see a modern master of the macabre at work, especially at his tongue-in-cheek best.

The decades immediately before and after World War II represent a godsend for readers of genre fiction. Devotees of detective, science, and supernatural/fantasy fiction could turn to all sorts of magazines—especially the pulps—and find terrific short stories, turned out by masters such as Ellery Queen, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and H.P. Lovecraft, to name a few. The last of these was a major influence on the writer of “The Cloak,” Robert Bloch, born on this date in Chicago in 1917.

Bloch is known best today for the novel Psycho, which furnished Alfred Hitchcock with the raw material for a bravura exercise in the art of pure filmmaking. But his talent for horror hardly ended there. In a prior post, I alluded to a terrific Bloch short story, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” which featured Sherlock Holmes on the trail of the serial killer.

When I saw this particular story in American Fantastic Tales, I knew I had to buy this Library of America anthology—even though it also has such classic genre (and non-genre) authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Lovecraft.

Bloch might have looked initially to Lovecraft (who first encouraged the teenaged neophyte writer to contribute to Weird Tales) as a model, but by the time he wrote this for Unknown, at age 22, he had developed his own unique style. 

Take, for instance, the opening of this tale: “The sun was dying, and its blood spattered the sky as it crept into a sepulcher behind the hills. The keening wind sent the dry, fallen leaves scurrying toward the west, as though hastening them to the funeral of the sun.”

Henderson, seeing the change in the atmosphere, can only ask why he has to waste his time thinking about "cheap imagery." Bloch is sending up one of the conventions of the horror genre--establish a sense of atmosphere--even as he's about to reinforce it. Henderson is so concerned about his own silly errand that he ignores unmistakable signs (including that the window into the costumer's shop looks like "a fissure into hell") that he is in an environment where his very sense of self will be radically destabilized.

Forget Edward and Bella, kids—if you really want a vampire tale to sink your teeth into, this is the one.

(By the way, I had remembered Henderson as being an actor, but that is never given as his profession in the story—the one reference I found to something like this concerned college theatricals in which he appeared.  I’ve since learned, however, that in his own adaptation of the story, part of The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Bloch made the connection obvious by turning Henderson into a horror movie actor. That could only have accentuated the humor running throughout the tale.)