You could, of course, say that such physicality makes Hitchcock’s films feel out of step with 21st-century cinema, and that today we would have a digital shot fly around Janet Leigh as she stands in the shower in Psycho. He knew that you had to film Ingrid Bergman’s hand with a key in it. Hitchcock often said that he didn’t just want to photograph people talking. The houses in North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960), the key to the wine cellar in Notorious (1946), the phone box in The Birds (1963), the apartment in Rear Window (1954), the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) – all are such physical things.
Hitchcock’s films are more plugged into the essence of cinema. When we buy a ticket for a would-be blockbuster movie today, we often end up watching superheroes duking it out in weightless, computer-generated worlds. Too many directors forget that the flickering medium of film yearns for objects and buildings. One reason for this is their sheer physicality. Or do they? Cary Grant’s beautifully cut suits and Grace Kelly’s diamonds and cocktail dresses are certainly far removed from our era of Greta Thunberg and Harry Styles, but dive into the films of Hitchcock and you find they’ve weathered the storm in our lives, and in cinema, rather well. His films of the 1950s and 60s, about glamorous people in peril, surely feel like they’re from an age gone by. The social, technical, political, scientific and cultural changes since then – the end of the Soviet Union, the birth of the internet, 9/11, identity politics, climate activism, streaming, artificial intelligence – amount to a world shift. The year that filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock died, 1980, seems forever ago.
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