Three movies that wouldn’t exist without Alfred Hitchcock
While you can argue plenty about who the greatest director of all time might be, and people do, frequently, there probably aren’t many more influential than Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense who had a career so long and varied that he started off in the era of silent movies but was still able to direct Paul Newman in his heyday and made his last film some six years after The Beatles broke up.
The mark that Hitchcock made on cinema can’t be overestimated. Not only did his themes and ability to work with an audience prove pivotal, especially in the genre of thrillers and mysteries that he so excelled in, but many of his filming techniques, most notably the zoom-in dolly shot so iconically borrowed by Steven Spielberg in Jaws, have made it into several modern-day classics.
Of course, ever since Hitchcock’s creative peak, usually considered between 1954 and 1964, the decade during which he made the likes of Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window, other directors have been hugely inspired by the British legend, with some famous examples stating his influence on their work outright.
Indeed, many films simply wouldn’t exist had it not been for those of Hitchcock, so great was his shadow on Hollywood. They include some of the movies of Brian De Palma, the Scarface director, who is widely recognised as the most successful director who has heavily borrowed from Hitchcock’s body of work.
His 1981 movie Blow Out, for example, aside from being one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite films, is packed with nods to Hitchcock’s canon, in terms of the narrative structure, the plot inspired by Hitchcock’s voyeuristic classic Rear Window from 1954, and the explicit reference to Psycho’s shower scene at the start of the movie.
The film, which stars John Travolta, also leans on the Hitchcock trope of a wronged man thrust into a dangerous conspiracy, while De Palma’s filming style and framing is without doubt reminiscent of the great man.
Second up is John Carpenter’s seminal slasher Halloween, the 1978 shocker that put the director on the map and simply wouldn’t exist had it not been for Hitchcock’s Psycho some eighteen years previously.
Carpenter considered Psycho the precursor to all slasher films, saying: “That’s the signpost everyone followed,” and in order to drum up some promotion for his low-budget feature, he cast Jamie Lee-Curtis in the leading role, who just happened to be the daughter of Psycho’s leading lady, Janet Leigh.
Carpenter also made explicit references to the earlier film, with a Doctor played by Donald Pleasance named ‘Sam Loomis’ after a character in Psycho, and ‘Tommy Doyle’ borrowed from Rear Window. Carpenter also used techniques familiar to fans of Hitchcock, with long camera tracking shots, and he couldn’t help himself when making the follow-up Halloween: H20 in 1998 – handing a cameo to Janet Leigh herself, with her final scene showing her climbing into the same car she drove in Psycho.
Finally, there’s Charade, the 1963 film that many refer to as the greatest Hitchcock film he never made. Starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, it’s a zany comedy mystery that tells the story of a woman on the run, chased by men after a fortune stolen by her late husband.
The most obvious link to Hitchcock is first in the casting of Grant, who famously starred in the director’s masterpiece North by Northwest, from 1959, among others. But again, there’s the ‘innocent person stuck in a conspiracy’ theme, and the film’s director, Stanley Donen, was frequently compared to his British counterpart.
The twisting, turning plot with comedic undertones is certainly reminiscent of Hitchcock, as are the animated titles and the glamourous settings. Donen wasn’t a fan of the similarities being pointed out however, saying at the time: “Who said it was only Hitchcock who had the right to make mysteries?”
Nevertheless, it’s a great film in its own right, even if it took Hitchcock’s genius to make it happen in the first place.
