December 7, 2016
Hitchcock Revisited
Michael Wood
Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Princeton University
Ruth Miller and Michael Wood
Minutes of the 12th Meeting of the 75th Year
The 12th meeting of the Old Guard of Princeton’s 75th year was called to order at 10:15 a.m. by President Jock McFarlane.
Gerald Berkelhammer read the minutes of the Nov. 30 meeting.
The following visitors were introduced: Larry Hans by John Riganati; Rick Ober by B.F. Graham, and Bev Glockler by Julia Cole.
The attendance was 122.
President McFarlane announced that Old Guard member Reeves Hicks died on Nov. 30. A moment of silence was observed in his memory.
President McFarlane announced that John Cotton has agreed to serve as secretary of the Executive Committee for the rest of the 2016-17 program year.
Bob Altman, chairman of the Membership Committee, introduced the following new members: Helena J. Bienstock, Barbara J. Felton, John P. Hall Jr., Thomas Harvey, Richard F. Hespos, Susan L. Hockaday, David Long, William Ralph Phillippe, Martin W. Schwartz, Ruth E. Scott, John Silver and David C. Wetherill. The president welcomed the new members and reminded them of the importance of regular attendance.
Ruth Miller introduced Professor Wood as one of the foremost literary and cultural critics of our time. Apart from his interest in literature, Professor Wood is also a serious student of the cinema and writes a highly regarded column, “At the Movies,” for the London Review of Books.
His most recent book in the film genre is “Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Professor Wood began by saying that Hitchcock lived for a “longish” time – 81 years – then recognizing the makeup of his audience, allowed that perhaps it wasn’t so long after all. Hitchcock saw two world wars, many changes in science and technology, and the entire history of film, more or less.
Wood said that we first we have to decide which Hitchcock we have in mind. There are many candidates: the auteur, the philosopher, the portly fellow with the famous silhouette and the theme music, the English gent with a macabre sense of humor, the silent Hitchcock, the talking Hitchcock, the English Hitchcock, the American Hitchcock, the entertainer, the artist. And finally, the hugely successful filmmaker, who never won an Oscar yet has at least one work on almost everyone's list of best films.
Wood chose to focus on two groups of two – the portly gent vs. the philosopher, and the American Hitchcock vs. the English one. In the first instance, Wood used Chico Marx’s famous line –“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” – to summarize Hitchcock’s ability to create suspense. Wood took us through a couple of scenes in “Vertigo,” explaining that a clue is most often just an appearance -- what we think we see -- and nearly always leads us to the wrong inference. In “North by Northwest,” Cary Grant is seen holding a knife that is in a man’s chest. In fact, he is trying to remove it, but who’s going to believe that? The evidence of murder seems irrefutable, and that, Hitchcock would say, is what is wrong with the idea of evidence. Visually speaking, there is no difference between someone who is suspected of being a murderer, and a murderer.
With regard to the second pairing, Hitchcock made 24 feature films for English companies, 30 for American ones, although some of his American films may be more English in nature. Hitchcock's English films are either about the war, the mindset of the war or of the prewar period. Hitchcock sees Englishness as a form of limitation, an inability to see how dangerous the world can be. A naiveté, as exemplified in “Foreign Correspondent” by the lack of concern about fascism, and in “The Lady Vanishes,” which features a pair of stuffy gentlemen who are more concerned about the prognosis for the English cricket team than about the future of England itself.
Wood fails to find an equivalent slant in Hitchcock's American films. They often glance at politics, and they address various American preoccupations -- privacy, violence, the law, gender relations, religion -- but nothing that might be Hitchcock's take on the country as a mentality. Wood wonders whether, for Hitchcock, England's lack of fear before the war may be matched by an American vulnerability to fear in the 1950s.
This is exemplified by “Strangers on a Train,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho.” What if the stranger on the train was not another person, but another aspect of yourself, the one you have under control most of the time? What if being mistaken for a man who doesn't exist is a pretty good figurative description of the way we feel people treat us generally? And what if we have an innocent habit of thinking that any man might be a serial killer? This isn't sensible, and it doesn't affect our day-to-day behavior but, unfortunately, we won't always be wrong.
Ultimately, Hitchcock says that the English don’t know how to be afraid, whereas Americans, at least in the 1950s, tend to be afraid of everything -- victims of, as Mel Brooks might say, “High Anxiety.”
Respectfully submitted,
Henry Von Kohorn
Gerald Berkelhammer read the minutes of the Nov. 30 meeting.
The following visitors were introduced: Larry Hans by John Riganati; Rick Ober by B.F. Graham, and Bev Glockler by Julia Cole.
The attendance was 122.
President McFarlane announced that Old Guard member Reeves Hicks died on Nov. 30. A moment of silence was observed in his memory.
President McFarlane announced that John Cotton has agreed to serve as secretary of the Executive Committee for the rest of the 2016-17 program year.
Bob Altman, chairman of the Membership Committee, introduced the following new members: Helena J. Bienstock, Barbara J. Felton, John P. Hall Jr., Thomas Harvey, Richard F. Hespos, Susan L. Hockaday, David Long, William Ralph Phillippe, Martin W. Schwartz, Ruth E. Scott, John Silver and David C. Wetherill. The president welcomed the new members and reminded them of the importance of regular attendance.
Ruth Miller introduced Professor Wood as one of the foremost literary and cultural critics of our time. Apart from his interest in literature, Professor Wood is also a serious student of the cinema and writes a highly regarded column, “At the Movies,” for the London Review of Books.
His most recent book in the film genre is “Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Professor Wood began by saying that Hitchcock lived for a “longish” time – 81 years – then recognizing the makeup of his audience, allowed that perhaps it wasn’t so long after all. Hitchcock saw two world wars, many changes in science and technology, and the entire history of film, more or less.
Wood said that we first we have to decide which Hitchcock we have in mind. There are many candidates: the auteur, the philosopher, the portly fellow with the famous silhouette and the theme music, the English gent with a macabre sense of humor, the silent Hitchcock, the talking Hitchcock, the English Hitchcock, the American Hitchcock, the entertainer, the artist. And finally, the hugely successful filmmaker, who never won an Oscar yet has at least one work on almost everyone's list of best films.
Wood chose to focus on two groups of two – the portly gent vs. the philosopher, and the American Hitchcock vs. the English one. In the first instance, Wood used Chico Marx’s famous line –“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” – to summarize Hitchcock’s ability to create suspense. Wood took us through a couple of scenes in “Vertigo,” explaining that a clue is most often just an appearance -- what we think we see -- and nearly always leads us to the wrong inference. In “North by Northwest,” Cary Grant is seen holding a knife that is in a man’s chest. In fact, he is trying to remove it, but who’s going to believe that? The evidence of murder seems irrefutable, and that, Hitchcock would say, is what is wrong with the idea of evidence. Visually speaking, there is no difference between someone who is suspected of being a murderer, and a murderer.
With regard to the second pairing, Hitchcock made 24 feature films for English companies, 30 for American ones, although some of his American films may be more English in nature. Hitchcock's English films are either about the war, the mindset of the war or of the prewar period. Hitchcock sees Englishness as a form of limitation, an inability to see how dangerous the world can be. A naiveté, as exemplified in “Foreign Correspondent” by the lack of concern about fascism, and in “The Lady Vanishes,” which features a pair of stuffy gentlemen who are more concerned about the prognosis for the English cricket team than about the future of England itself.
Wood fails to find an equivalent slant in Hitchcock's American films. They often glance at politics, and they address various American preoccupations -- privacy, violence, the law, gender relations, religion -- but nothing that might be Hitchcock's take on the country as a mentality. Wood wonders whether, for Hitchcock, England's lack of fear before the war may be matched by an American vulnerability to fear in the 1950s.
This is exemplified by “Strangers on a Train,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho.” What if the stranger on the train was not another person, but another aspect of yourself, the one you have under control most of the time? What if being mistaken for a man who doesn't exist is a pretty good figurative description of the way we feel people treat us generally? And what if we have an innocent habit of thinking that any man might be a serial killer? This isn't sensible, and it doesn't affect our day-to-day behavior but, unfortunately, we won't always be wrong.
Ultimately, Hitchcock says that the English don’t know how to be afraid, whereas Americans, at least in the 1950s, tend to be afraid of everything -- victims of, as Mel Brooks might say, “High Anxiety.”
Respectfully submitted,
Henry Von Kohorn