What would Hitch do?

It's a question filmmakers have been asking themselves for 70 years, since a 30-year-old English director named Alfred Hitchcock finished his first sound film, "Blackmail." While other silent-era filmmakers were still struggling with the mechanics of the medium, Hitchcock, whose centennial birthday Aug. 13 is being celebrated worldwide this month with retrospective releases and tributes, was already using it not only for dialogue but for dramatic impact.

For a scene as influential in 1929 as the shower stabbing in "Psycho" would be in 1960, Hitchcock took dialogue from the popular stage play from which "Blackmail" was adapted and turned it into something uniquely cinematic. Having murdered a man who attempted to molest her, a woman goes about her household chores while listening to a neighbor talk about the still-unsolved killing.

As the neighbor rambles, Hitchcock raises the volume every time the neighbor says the word "knife," instilling the idea it is the only word the guilt-ridden killer actually hears; all the other words the neighbor speaks become increasingly indecipherable. Finally, the distracted killer innocently picks up a bread knife, and when the neighbor says the word yet again, the camera zooms in on the knife in her hand: It then seems to wrest itself from her grip, rattling to the floor. Expel breath here.

Hitchcock "provided the prototype for the sound film treatment of drama" said one of the movie's stars, John Longdon, in Donald Spoto's revealing 1983 Hitchcock biography "The Dark Side of Genius."

"When a director undertakes to make a Western, he is not necessarily thinking of John Ford, since there are equally fine movies in the genre by Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh" said Hitchcock's ardent admirer and fellow filmmaker Francois Truffaut. "Yet if he sets out to make a thriller or a suspense picture, you may be certain that in his heart of hearts he is hoping to live up to one of Hitchcock's masterpieces."

"There's really not a lot you can do that he didn't do first," said Brian De Palma, whose films "Dressed to Kill," "Blow Out" and "Body Double" are rife with Hitchcock references. De Palma's "Obsession," which will be shown in a Hitchcock retrospective that runs Aug. 26-Sept. 11 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is an unabashed homage to "Vertigo" (1958), often considered the apex of Hitch's art. But then, similar claims are made for "Rear Window" (1954) "Strangers on a Train" (1951), "North by Northwest" (1959) "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943) and "Rebecca" (1940), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

"I believe that's the only Oscar you ever won," noted Truffaut in his acclaimed book of interviews, "Hitchcock/Truffaut."

"I've never received an Oscar," Hitchcock replied.

"But you just said that "Rebecca' . . . "

"The award went to (David O.) Selznick, the producer," Hitchcock interrupted. "The directing award that year went to John Ford for `Grapes of Wrath.' "

Hitchcock, who was nominated for best director five times ("Rebecca," "Lifeboat," "Spellbound," "Rear Window" and "Psycho"), was finally presented with an honorary Academy Award in 1968, for "the most consistent high level of production achievement by an individual producer." Hitchcock was known for his droll, deliberate wit, so it was expected that he would have a choice word or two, and he did.

"Thank you," he said, and walked away.

It may be coincidental, but entirely appropriate, that Hitchcock shares his end-of-the century centennial with Edward K. "Duke" Ellington. Both represent artistry that was often taken for granted by the public, reluctantly respected by critics, appropriated freely by the less inspired -- and finally hailed as genius. Hitchcock directed movies the same way Ellington wrote and arranged music, turning the intimate and the sophisticated into the wildly popular and accessible. Both used their carefully cultivated images to commercial advantage, while remaining intensely private men.

Not long before he died, Hitchcock, recognizable to half the world by his signature silhouette, told an interviewer he would be remembered as "what Churchill said of Hitler: An enigma inside an enigma." The age of microscopic media murdered that dream. Since his death in 1980, Hitchcock's films and life have been thoroughly dissected and deconstructed. Even his character-defining myth -- that his father arranged for him to be locked in a police station cell at age 4 or 5, because that was "what happened to naughty little boys" -- is now regarded as an invention.

It is, though, a great piece of storytelling, one that offers psychological explanation without apologizing for its ramifications -- which just happens to be a theme that runs through Hitchcock films from his first, 1927's "The Pleasure Garden" -- to his last, 1976's "Family Plot."

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on Sunday, Aug. 13, in Leytonstone, in London's East End, at home above his father's greengrocer's shop. His family was Catholic, and while Hitchcock was not religious, he credited the family faith with playing a large role in his art. He blamed the Jesuits, by whom he was educated, for his fear of physical punishment, as well as the sense of dread and suspicion that pervades his films.

But his fascination with crime, he claimed, was "a particular British problem." Like many young middle-class Englishmen, Hitchcock regularly read the grisly tabloid News of the World and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' novels. Unlike most, he spent days at the Black Museum of Scotland Yard, with its exhibits of weapons used by notorious criminals, and kept notebooks of the murder trials he attended at Old Bailey Court.

Though he claimed he planned on entering engineering, he seems to have spent most of his teen-age years watching American movies, and when he read that American movie company Famous Player-Lansky was opening a London studio, Hitchcock applied for a position with a portfolio full of drawings and designs. He was hired immediately to design title cards, upon which pieces of dialogue and other pertinent information were displayed in silent films.

Hitchcock quickly graduated to set design and even stepped in to finish a film after the original director left in a dispute. (He also directed his own two-reeler, "Number Thirteen" which was never finished. It was subsequently lost.) Around this time he made two discoveries that would forever alter his course: German expressionist cinema, with its dark shadows, tangled stories and tortured protagonists; and a film editor and writer named Alma Reville, who worked with him on his German assignments in the early '20s, and to whom he proposed on the way back to England.

Reville, as lively and outgoing as her husband was shy and diffident, would become Hitchcock's lifelong collaborator, offering him welcomed advice on everything from editing to casting to story development. She apparently played a major role in turning his first official film as a director, 1927's "The Pleasure Garden," from a routine melodrama about pair of chorus girls and their love lives into a psychological drama capped by a pair of concurrent chase scenes. The film was a smash, and a reviewer hailed Hitchcock as a "young man with a master mind."

He suffered setbacks: His second film, "The Mountain Eagle," was lost long before his death, and he had no regrets: "It was a very bad movie," Hitchcock said. But with his next film, 1926's "The Lodger," Hitchcock's reputation as a master mind was firmly established. Here he used imagery to narrate and propel his story, and hardly needed the title cards he once designed; the film's tale of a woman who comes to believe her lodger may be Jack the Ripper is presented with terrifying visual clarity.

To illustrate the landlady's anxieties over the man upstairs, Hitchcock constructed a glass ceiling, from which we could observe the lodger pacing back and forth, causing the chandelier in the room below to sway back and forth. More importantly, Hitchcock divides our dramatic allegiance between the lodger -- who may or not be the Ripper -- and the detective sworn to catch him.

With "Blackmail" (1929), Hitchcock defined the difference between shock and suspense; he manipulated the audience by telling them something had happened, or was about to happen, and incited them to squirm until the resolution. With "The 39 Steps" (1935) he codified the idea of "the MacGuffin," which he described as the item that maintains the audience's interest and establishes the plotline, but really has little do with the actual story.

"To me, his most important contribution is the solidification of film language," says Dan Auiler, who has written three books on Hitchcock's films, including the recently published "Hitchcock's Notebooks." "Watching these films gives you the feeling you're seeing something written for the very first time."

In "The 39 Steps" the MacGuffin is a military secret -- the specs for new fighter planes. In "Notorious" (1946) it's uranium concealed in a wine bottle, and in "Psycho" it would be embezzled money hidden in a newspaper. Hitchcock delighted in making us emotionally invest in the importance of all these items, yet they are finally just devices to catapult the movies forward. The best Hitchcock films, be they espionage thrillers (1936's "Sabotage"), psychological suspense ("Strangers on a Train") or sophisticated romantic comedies (1955's "To Catch a Thief") have a mesmerizing momentum that makes us want to leap off and hang on.

"I'm very impatient" was Hitchcock's offered explanation, but in the tape-recorded script notes for 1963's "The Birds," transcribed for "Hitchcock's Notebooks" we hear him going over and over every detail in every sequence to make the story tighter and faster. There are so few superfluous moments in a Hitchcock movie that the slower, more subdued films like "The Paradine Case" (1947) seem to drag more than they actually do.

"The Paradine Case" is one of only four films Hitchcock made in collaboration with legendary producer David O. Selznick, who lured him to America to make a film version of the novel "Titanic." Instead, Selznick acquired the film rights to the best-seller "Rebecca," a Daphne du Maurnier novel in which Hitchcock had expressed interest. The film was a perfect entree to America, Hitchcock said, because everything about the story was British, from its Gothic tale of a woman haunted by the ghost of her husband's dead ex-wife, to its star, Laurence Olivier.

"I consider the Selznick films the best of the black-and-white Hitchcocks, and not just because we have them," says Jay Douglas, of the Troy, Mich.-based Anchor Bay Video. Douglas said he "lied in wait" for rights to the Selznick films to become available and "pounced when they were."

"For me, these are the films that show what Hitchcock could do with the best actors in movies. Olivier was never better in movies than he is in `Rebecca,' and the same thing goes for Ingrid Bergman in `Spellbound' (1945) and `Notorious.' He just got things out of them that other directors didn't."

This runs contrary to the myth that Hitchcock didn't care about actors, that they were "cattle." ("I never said that," Hitchcock said. "What I said was that they should be treated like cattle.") Hitch delighted in delving into the darker sides of movie icons, never more successfully than with Jimmy Stewart, who starred in two of his bona fide masterpieces: "Rear Window" and "Vertigo."

"Hitch used me in a way no director ever had before," said Stewart, who played a wheelchair-bound voyeur in "Rear Window." "I owe my success in that movie to him." Their next collaboration revealed not only more of Stewart, but also to most scholars, more of Hitchcock than had ever been seen on film.

"In this enormous body of work, it is forever fascinating to me that only `Vertigo' reveals something of the inside of Hitchcock," says Auiler, whose first book, "Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece," was a detailed account of the making of the film. "It's an intensely personal film from someone who had heretofore been considered the ultimate craftsman."

A dreamlike exploration of the links of eros and thantos -- sex and death -- "Vertigo" makes the more explicit "Eyes Wide Shut" look moribund and morose by comparison. Stewart plays a retired, acrophobic detective who becomes obsessed with a woman (Kim Novak) her husband has asked him to tail. Though he saves her from one suicide attempt, he is unable to prevent a second, and suffers a breakdown. Much later, he encounters her double on a San Francisco street, and attempts to remake her in the dead woman's image. The film is dreamlike and disturbing and invites the endless analysis and admiration it has since received. But it was not nearly as popular or profitable or influential as the blunt "Psycho," which followed two years later.

" `Pyscho' was my entryway to Hitchcock, like it was for a lot of people," says Auiler, 35. "So it's a surprise for people who come in that door to go in all these rooms and discover all these incredibly sophisticated, surprising movies. There's so much there that people spend their entire lives discovering and rediscovering and reconsidering the work."

Published 8/15/1999