THE “HITCHCOCK TOUCH”

Southland Times, Issue 23335, 20 October 1937, Page 8

THE “HITCHCOCK TOUCH”

SUSPENSE ON THE SCREEN DIRECTION OF MELODRAMA Mr Alfred Hitchcock is a walking monument to the principle of uninhibited addiction to sack and capon, prime beef and flowing ale, and double helpings of ice cream, says a writer in The New York Times. His free-float-ing, unconfined waistline is a triumph in embonpoint, and he scrutinizes the world, catching its moods and manners and filing them away for future availability, through bright, piercing eyes that peek elfishly out of a rubicund face. When he smiles, his chins all smile with him, one after another. It is reassuring to be able to report that the future of melodrama, as long as it remains in his expansive custody, will never suffer for lack of attention. Mr Hitchcock interprets everything in terms of suspense value or melodramatic quality. Hence he will have no truck with the garnishments of the cinema, colour photography, crooners, singing and dancing stars, unless he can use them to advance his story. The red funnels of a steamer against a gray dawn; the blink of traffic lights through a pea-soup fog; a drop of blood on a daisy petal; these colour possibilities Mr Hitchcock would like to be able to make use of if he didn’t have to be bothered with a colour director daubing everybody up like men from Mars. These would be extensions, by the way, of the application of Mr Hitchcock’s theorv of negative acting. That is the secretof the so-called “Hitchcock touch,” the trick of making the ordinary humdrum of everyday life appear as full of suspense as the night a young husband spends outside the delivery room door. The spectacle, for example, of a man drinking tea (Mr Hitchcock’s parables have a British flavour) becomes chock-full of suspense if the audience has been tipped off previously that a half minute after he finishes it death will strike him.

MURDER WITH ARTISTRY Mr Hitchcock’s preoccupation with suspense has brought him to the dabbling stage. He has extracted some measure of suspense out of almost anything you can mention, and nowadays he looks for new and more placid purlieus to galvanize. “I want to commit murder amid babbling brooks,” says he. He also wants to make a film of a book called “Malice Aforethought,” because he likes the first line of it. The line reads, approximately, “It was not until three months after Dr X decided to murder his wife that he took any steps toward doing so.” The nearest he has got to “murder amid babbling brooks” is his latest, “A Shilling for Candles.” In it Mr Hitchcock uses Nova Pilbeam’s film relatives to create suspense. Nova’s aunt making her join a children’s party, while outside, on a country lane, a young man she’is helping elude the police awaits her. Mr Hitchcock fixes things, by arranging a game of blind man’s buff, with Auntie blinded, and letting Nova and her young man escape after he had wrung all the suspense he wants from the situation. The only clue the police have to the real murderer in this one is that he has twitching eyes. Mr Hitchcock’s camera man locates him before the police do, dollying the camera through a hotel lobby, across a ballroom floor, into the blackface orchestra, over to the traps and then zoom! full into the drummer’s eyes—which twitch.