After the sprawling chase picture North by Northwest (1959) became Alfred Hitchcockâs most commercially successful movie, the director long accustomed to production gloss and generous budgets made a characteristically shrewd decision. A keen observer of the audience, Hitchcock noted that lowly exploitation horror movies like AIPâs I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Allied Artistsâ The House on Haunted Hill (1959) were striking gold. So he made one of his own. Psycho (Paramount, 1960) became Hitchcockâs most famous film and one of the most influential of the coming decade. His study continued. As he contemplated his next project in 1961, Hitchcock conducted some research that initially seems surprising. Records indicate that the Master of Suspense went to a screening room and watched Ingmar Bergmanâs The Magician (1958) and The Virgin Spring (1960), Michelangelo Antonioniâs LâAvventura (1960), and JeanâLuc Godardâs Breathless (1960) â among the most acclaimed and demanding works of the postwar European art cinema.1 The result was The Birds (Universal, 1963) with its combination of spectacle and oppressive mood, unusual soundtrack, and open, anticlimactic ending.
In 1962 Hitchcock sat for a series of career interviews with criticâturnedâdirector François Truffaut, pillar of the French New Wave movement and fresh from the release of his latest work, the radiant Jules et Jim (1962). Their relaxed and respectful conversations became more direct versions of the artistic dialog Hitchcockâs recent work had undertaken with driveâin exploitation and art house experimentation â with cinemas, that is, seemingly anathema to his proven command of the crowdâpleasing, bigâstudio genre movie. He was at the forefront of a significant trend. Over the next twenty years, while many Hollywood movies remained doggedly traditional, more ambitious filmmakers worked to incorporate alternative film styles into commercial frameworks with fascinating results. Hitchcockâs unique talents aside, his work throughout the postwar era reflected emerging patterns in the Hollywood industry as well as larger cultural currents in American society.
Coming to America in 1939, Hitchcock made a string of commercially and artistically successful pictures through the World War II years. After the war, while many of his peers struggled in a changing business, Hitchcock thrived. He did so by skillfully engaging virtually every innovation, trend, or challenge that Hollywood faced in those years, often with greater success than the industry as a whole. Hitchcock was an artist of original talent. Yet his continuing success, indeed climb, to popular and aesthetic heights was also due to his being a consummate industry professional. He succeeded not through a singleâminded and rigid method but by careful observation and adaptation to changing industrial and social contexts.
As actors, directors, and producers left the longâterm exclusive contracts that had bound them to particular studios (even before that system was ended by the 1948 Paramount antiâtrust case), the era of independent production began, in which the studios acted as financiers and distributors rather than as originators of movies. For filmmakers, the appeal of independent production was both greater creative freedom and potentially much greater financial reward. In 1948 Hitchcock and producer Sidney Bernstein formed Transatlantic Pictures, intending to alternate production of films between Hollywood and Britain. From this partnership came Rope (1948), an exercise in extreme longâtake shooting, and the lessâmemorable Under Capricorn (1949). Rope has since become one of the directorâs most praised works but neither movie pleased critics or audiences at the time, ending the venture. Nor did this result please Hitchcock who always measured his professional success in part by the response of wide audiences. Regardless, the precedent established, he struck multiâpicture deals with Warner Bros., Paramount, and other studios through the 1950s which, on the heels of solid box office returns, made him a powerful independent producerâdirector with nearâcomplete control of his work.
Rope also first paired Hitchcock with actor James Stewart, en route to becoming one of the biggest postwar stars. In 1948 Stewart signed an important deal with UniversalâInternational through his agent, MCA head Lew Wasserman, in which the star took no upâfront salary in exchange for net profit participation of up to 50 percent in his movies. Wasserman was also Hitchcockâs agent, and his four collaborations with Stewart yielded two of the directorâs most enduring movies, the suspenseful Rear Window (1954), and what has become for many critics the most powerful work of both careers, Vertigo (1958).2 Artistic success was underpinned by firm mastery of a dynamic industry structure.
Hitchcock sampled other trends as well. When Hollywood turned to making movies in Europe to exploit postwar economic and regulatory conditions there, he responded with To Catch a Thief (1955), taking Cary Grant and Grace Kelly to the French Riviera to produce a sexually charged thriller. As the domestic movie audience declined, the industryâs experiment with 3D technology to draw patrons back led Hitchcock to star Kelly in Dial M for Murder (1954), a drawing room murder story against the grain of more spectacular 3D projects. Barred from direct ownership of television stations or networks, the studios became major suppliers of prime time episodic series by the late 1950s. Leveraging the clever cultivation of publicity that had already made him a celebrity when few directors were well known, Hitchcock undertook one of his most lucrative and visible efforts via the CBS anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which aired from 1955 to 1964. His humorous onâcamera introductions highlighted one of the most recognizable programs of the time. After the somber Vertigo, a deeply felt project that met a disappointing commercial reception, he returned to a proven form, the romantic espionage thriller North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. With its suave, witty hero, deadly villain, and complex set pieces, climaxing with the leads hanging off the giant faces on Mount Rushmore, it was virtually the model for the James Bond spy adventures that began with Dr. No (1962). Still, it is important to reiterate that Hitchcock led none of these trends or innovations. Instead he marked them and responded in his own way, grasping not only the changing contours of the film industry but shifting socioâcultural dynamics as well.
The balance of this chapter considers three major currents that shaped the style and themes of postwar Hollywood movies: (1) a broad consensus about basic aspects of American social and political life, and its shattering in the late 1960s under pressures unleashed by the Vietnam War, effects that contextualize narrative shifts apparent in many subsequent movies; (2) rearrangements of the film industry after the breakâup of the studio system in 1948, which affected how movies were made and shown; and (3) closely tied to these changes, the simultaneous shrinking and fragmentation of the movie audience into three fairly distinct segments marked by the rise of driveâins and art house exhibition. The crash of the postwar ideological consensus was not synonymous with the increasingly divided audiences and exhibition circumstances in the 1960s but, even so, there are suggestive analogies between these phenomena. Finally, we consider how Hitchcock navigated these rapids in Psycho and The Birds, now perhaps his bestâknown movies.
âThe Vital Centerâ ⌠Cannot Hold
Writing in America in Our Time (1976) about the growing cultural and ideological split in American society in the 1960s, British journalist Godfrey Hodgson argued:
But it wasnât always this way. Hodgson and others have described the twenty years from the end of World War II through the midâ1960s as the era of âconsensus politicsâ in American life, especially the period between the end of the Korean War and Lyndon Johnsonâs 1964 landslide. Hodgson understands this as a generalization, pointing to enduring social conflicts, especially the simmering Civil Rights struggle. While the 1950s may be remembered for âthe man in the gray flannel suit,â symbol of whiteâcollar corporate striving for men, and for idealizing the roles of suburban homemaker and mother for women, the postwar years were also the time of existentialism and the Beats, Rosa Parks and rock ânâ roll, The Feminine Mystique and the Pill. Moreover, a period of unprecedented affluence was suffused with fears of the atomic bomb and international communism. After 1947, Hollywoodâs response to congressional investigations was to blacklist anyone in the industry known to have, or even vaguely suspected of having, sympathy with communism or any leftâwing causes, a practice that persisted until Kennedyâs election in 1960. The result was that larger political tensions were often apparent in movies only as subtext or by implication. Neither the times nor the movies produced in them were simple, though, seen from a deeply conflicted and anxious America in the early 1970s, the fifties seemed virtually placid. Still, prevailing social and economic conditions had encouraged consensus thinking.
Hodgson contends that the postwar intellectual climate became prone to consensus theories through the conjunction of two major forces: the booming economy, particularly while Americaâs international competitors lay physically devastated by the war; and the rise of the nuclearâarmed international communist bloc that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had pledged to oppose through the global containment policy of measured military and political response to any perceived threats or encroachments. The âliberal consensus,â as Hodgson terms it, was characterized foremost by the belief that âThe American freeâenterprise system is different from the old capitalism. It is democratic. It creates abundance. It has a revolutionary potential for social justice.â Moreover, âThus there is a natural harmony o...
