Top Ten Alfred Hitchcock Movies

A few weeks ago, I asked Life, Death and Fog readers to send me their five favorite Hitchcock movies.  Because the blog is for folks interested crime-fiction books and films, I thought the list might show which of his 50 films still speak to us in 2013.

Here are the Top Ten vote getters:

10.  Shadow of a Doubt

9. Dial M for Murder

8. To Catch a Thief

7. The Birds

6. Psycho

5. The ManWho Knew Too Much

4. Strangers on a Train

3. North By Northwest

2. Vertigo

1. Rear Window

Last Call— For The Fun Of It

One of the most contested issues in the broader film community is which of Alfred Hitchcock more than films are among his best. Bloggers and critics argue. While there are certainly more important issues to settle these days, please take a few moments to help create the Life, Death& Fog List.  If you need a complete list of his films, you can find it here.

What I’d like my film-lover friends and their friends to do — if you haven’t already — is provide me with the names of the five best  (or just your favorite) Hitchcock films in no particular order, no repeats. Just five. No more. No less. 

The top ten nominees will appear in the poll.   Thanks go out to the many who have already responded.

Put your five in the comment section or send your list of five to Ron@ronaldtierney.com.  I promise not to use or sell your address to anyone. 

Book Notes — The Servant, On Paper And On The Screen

The Maughams knew something about servants.  Certainly, Somerset’s nephew 2nd Viscount “Robin” Maugham must have.  He travelled in all the “right” circles, including those of his more famous uncle.

The Book: First American Edition

While he wrote several novels— four of which were translated to film — one of them gained particular acclaim as both a novella (really a short story bound as a hard back) and as a film, adapted by Harold Pinter, featuring Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles and James Fox. The Servant was published in 1958 and the film released in 1963.

Many consider the story an indictment of the British class system — and it is.  For me, it is both macro and micro views of power and domination.  Even though no one dies and there is no real crime in a legal sense, killing someone else’s soul might be a pretty horrendous act of cruelty, just as keeping servants in their place is an act of social injustice and abuse.  Thus, a symbolic victory by a servant who turns the tables on his master might have us rooting for how deftly the tables have been turned.  A small step for humankind.

The movie

But this seeming fluff of a story has a bit more bite than one might expect.  Going back to the power and domination theme, which befits a plot about a rebellion against an institutionalized class or caste system, the story nevertheless remains powerful without the social context.  It can be simply personal.  In the course of any relationship, for example, the person who seems to be the one running the show may not be.  Or, over time, through premeditation or natural selection, the weaker one in the beginning may preside in the end. (Certainly, there might be some nasty business in the interim.) I think this is the question the story asks.  Who deserves our sympathy?  The poor human who, through accident of birth, is given the short end of the socio-economic stick? Or the easily conned human, who while consciously meaning no harm, seems blissfully unaware that his upstairs status as a human being was also a result of a sperm lottery and unearned in any sense of the word? If he is also unaware that he and others like him have been exploiting a large chunk of the population upstairs and downstairs and all around the colonies, does that mean he deserves to be singled out and destroyed? Does the punishment fit the crime if criminal doesn’t know what crime he has committed?

Robin Maugham, The Nephew

I think The Servant makes the moral to be drawn, if you choose to draw one, a much more complex calculation. 

Robin Maugham was the author of more than 30 books, many of them crime fiction.  He was among the first of the popular writers to include gay themes and characters, which may have contributed to his early literary decline, whereas his far more successful, closeted gay uncle chose to avoid the subject altogether.

Best Crime Fiction Awards — Who Needs Them?

Dick Francis, most Edgars

During the last 30 days or so, it has been award time in the crime fiction world.  Not the winners, but the nominees.  There are dozens and dozens of organizations wanting to give crime writers their due, not only for best novel of the year but also in many sub-categories — best first novel, best paperback original, best short story, etc. — all vital to the genre.  Many of the most coveted awards will be announced this fall as the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) holds its annual convention — Bouchercon.

Should we care?  These are difficult times for everyone who reads, writes, reviews and publishes crime books. Even the professional organizations are struggling to find ways to acknowledge and honor contributors while the dramatic changes in e-book and self (independent) publishing have complicated the way they have been doing so since they began doing business. Anybody can publish a book.  And sometimes, it seems, everyone is.  To be fair and inclusive is nearly impossible. Some, MWA for example, have adjusted submission criteria.  Others have added categories. In any event, awards no matter what shape they may take, will likely remain part of many readers’ vetting process.

Laura Lippman, picking up the prizes

Paying attention to formal accolades is not the only way to find good books, particularly if you are interested in establishment-challenging sub-genre books and break-out-of-the-box, emerging writers. However, most of the library-going and book-buying public are traditional readers.  They are looking for something new or different to read with some assurance they are not too far out of their comfort zone. Browsing a list of award winners isn’t a bad place to start.

I’ve picked five professional crime-writing related organizations that have been honoring writers with awards since (at least) the year 2,000.  Some have been doing so longer. To contemplate who, among contemporary crime writers, might be considered best of the best, I checked the following award histories to see who won the “best novel” award more than once.  Here are the results:

MWA (The Edgar)*

Historically, Dick Francis picked up the most Edgars with three.  James Lee Burke won two prior to 2000. In this century, John Hart and T. Jefferson Parker have picked up two, Hart for successive novels.

John Hart, up and coming

Mystery Readers International (Macavity)

Michael Connelly, Nancy Pickard and Peter Lovesey have each won two since the first award was given in1987.

Deadly Pleasures magazine (Barry)

Michael Connelly and Laura Lippman have each garnered two.

Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) (Shamus)*

From the birth of the Shamus in 1982, Sue Grafton has been honored with the award three times, Max Allan Collins and Bill Pronzini twice.  Also, since 2000 Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman have picked up two.

MWA (The Anthony)*

Michael Connelly has received four Anthonys.  Louise Penny, Sue Grafton and Laura Lippman have been awarded the prize three times. S, J. Rozan and William Kent Krueger have each won twice.

Other Notes 

In 2008, Laura Lippman won three of the five top awards for What The Dead Know.  In 2011, John Hart also received three of the five major prizes with The Last Child. The Edgar for Best Novel of 2013 was announced at ceremonies in New York earlier this year.  Dennis Lehane picked it up for Live By Night.

Click here for the complete list of 21^st century “best novel" winners from the above organizations.

*To clarify, MWA has two awards, the Edgar determined by the organization and the Anthony determined by a vote of the membership.  To qualify for PWA’s Shamus, the novel must feature a P.I who is paid for his or her work.

The Alfred Hitchcock Primaries — We Want Your Vote

While researching the previous post, I came across several articles and blogs that rated the “top” five or ten movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  The legendary director created more than 50 films, and the various (and often very different) lists by more and less scholarly folks than I, generated a lot of heat.  I found myself talking to my computer screen: “How in the world could you even consider blankety blank in any top five?  Or why isn’t such and such on the list?

Ah hah!  In a shameless attempt to bump up my blog readership after a short, but unavoidable absence, I’m not only setting up a list, but also planning a poll.  I need your help. Because 50 films are too many for most interactive polls, the first step is a primary to determine a narrower list of deserving nominees.

What I’d like my film-lover friends and their friends to do is provide me with the names of the five best  (or favorite) Alfred Hitchcock films in no particular order, no repeats. Just five. No more. No less.  Early voting is encouraged.

The top ten nominees will appear in the poll. 

Send your list of five to Ron@ronaldtierney.com.  I promise not to use or sell your address to anyone. 

Should you choose to follow my blog by email, you may do so by using the block near the top of the right column.

Film Pairings — Espionage Light, Some Early Hitchcock

Espionage is in the air.  I suspect the folks hanging around Hollywood are in a spirited development mood as they work on surveillance and spy stories to pick up on the national, if not international mood — not that there aren’t some classics in the archives.  An evening not so long ago I revisited some Hitchcock films made before he packed his British bags and headed for the colonies, where in my amateur assessment, he did most of his best films.

However in Secret Agent (1936) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) we clearly see what made Hitchcock Hitchcock — suspense pleasantly undermined by humor or humor slightly spiced by suspense. 

In Secret Agent, we have mostly a Noel Coward-styled, bantering dialogue with super actors John Gielgud and Madeleine Carroll as well as scene-stealing Peter Lorre and a surprisingly dashing Robert Young.  The film was based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham, one of the most popular novelists of the day and often credited with being one of the masters of the spy novel, along with Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

A couple of things jumped out at me while watching Secret Agent.  I had just seen Gielgud in a 1994 episode of the “Alleyn Mysteries” a few days earlier. He played an elderly gentleman, which of course he was.  But he seemed almost elderly in 1936 as well.  That means he had to have been 35 when he was born. The second shock was how beautiful and talented Madeleine Carroll was.  Where had she been all my life? I don’t remember her from my teen years watching all those late night movies on the hulking Zenith TV from the springy discomfort of the Hide-A-Bed in the living room after everyone else went to sleep. The third surprise was a handsome, debonair Robert Young. This was an actor as far from Jim Anderson in “Father Knows Best” or “Dr. Marcus Welby,” as could be.  It was easy to see Hitchcock locking on to an actor who promised to be Cary Grant. 

In the film, Gielgud and Carroll are hired to find and dispose of a German agent out to harm the allies. And they have psychopath Lorre to “help” them. It’s a wonder we won the war.

The Lady Vanishes is cut from the same cloth as Secret Agent and perhaps both, in terms of style, owe a great deal to The Thin Man, a popular American film that preceded both of them by a couple of years.  A little silliness, some outright slapstick and a flirtatious duel between Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave, reminiscent of Nick and Nora.  Maybe this similarity merely reflects the style of the times.

Dame May Whitty steals the show, for me, as the lady in the title.  It takes a few minutes, more than it should, I think, for the story to take off. Once they get out of the hotel and onto the train, it’s a great ride. And we pick up more early evidence of Hitchcock’s fascination with cool blondes and fast trains. The film was based on the novel, The Wheel Spins, by Ethyl Lina White, a popular British crime writer of the era.

An accompaniment to the evening? Gin and tonic, possibly with a slice of cucumber. Hide your smart phones. Get comfy in your upholstered chairs and give in to espionage with twists of Brit wit and whimsy.  This is late 1939, remember.  Not a lot of blood and car chases.

Film Pairings — James Bond and Jack Reacher, Peas In Separate Pods

There’s never a shortage of superheroes.  At the moment The Lone Ranger and the zillionth portrayal of Superman, are dazzling or disappointing filmgoers.

However, we home-alone viewers with Netflix accounts are not necessarily “trending.”  We are catching up. The local theaters are no longer showing the two films I highlight here.  They are Skyfall, the latest of many James Bond films and Jack Reacher, the first of what is likely to be a new franchise searching for iconic status and profits.  They are about smart, tough guys who save the world or, in Reacher’s case, a tank of a man who cleans up a piece of a smaller domain.  The main characters in each are human though impervious to death. In both cases their near superpower comic-book feats take an immense suspension of disbelief.  Yet we do suspend it even if the Reacher character, designed by his creator at a towering, and intimidating 6’5, 250pounds,” is played by the diminutive Tom Cruise.  We want to believe.

When I was in my teens I read all of the 12 slim volumes of Ian Fleming’s 007 adventures.  I was mesmerized.  This was before I saw any of the movies.  I probably would have cast (as I learned that Fleming preferred as well) the sophisticated David Niven before the earthier Sean Connery, though it didn’t take long for me to buy into the Scotsman. I was disappointed to learn that he and Bond had separated after seven films, but quickly accepted Roger Moore who, in many ways for me, better captured the original, light-hearted spirit of the character.  I thought Pierce Brosnan split the difference and did so very well. So too have I, an avid cinema fan, accepted and welcomed Daniel Craig, though it seems we’ve almost come full circle — the most solemn of the lot.  He seems old and grumpy (I can identify with that), not the original, carefree Bond. This is also in keeping with the way we are seeing American superheroes these days, wit buried under stone.

Craig’s two Bonds, like it or not, have changed the Bond franchise. To drive the point home in Skyfall, with appropriate symbolism, the elegant Aston Martin is blown up on a dystopian landscape not disappearing out of the frame on a scenic highway along the French Riviera as it should.  This Bond is weary, sullen, craggy, yet demands your attention. He seems, perhaps — his superhuman feats aside — too human.  There’s not an ounce of a Devil-May-Care martini in his veins.

For Jack Reacher, maybe it would have been too easy to cast someone like Ryan Gosling as Reacher, the character inhabiting the best selling 17-book series by Lee Child.   Or maybe Channing Tatum.  Seriously. For me Tom Cruise is a sort of journeyman leading man.  And a case could be made that physicality aside, this was a perfect role for him.  Not a lot of nuance here to worry about.  As we expect from both films it is about right and wrong, good and evil.  We root for our heroes to win so we can go to bed believing the world is safe for the few minutes it takes to go off into our own dreamland.  These two heroes are not cut from the same cloth, however.

Bond, however rebellious at times, works for the bureaucracy in service to what we must presume or at least hope to be a larger good.  After all, he pretty much saves the world in each adventure.  Not so, Reacher.  There’s a line in the movie, which I don’t have precisely; but the gist is our hero doesn’t believe in the law or justice.  He believes in what is right.  Right is what is right in his world and the story may be written so we, in our secret vigilante hearts, agree and root for the three-in-one protagonist — judge, jury and executioner.  We do so with, I hope, a little caution from our better selves.

The director and cinematographer do a good job conveying Reacher’s worldview if it can be described so broadly.  Bond is filmed against incredible, wide-sweeping landscapes. It’s a big world with lots of moving parts.   In Reacher the camera is completely focused on Cruise.  He is constantly, slowly, importantly entering a room with music and lingering camera angles that emphasize his self-assured domination of the small world around him.  It is all immediate and personal.  It is all about him.  He is standing tall.  That seems to be all that matters.

Both films provide a couple of hours of worthwhile escape from our less eventful daily lives.  Jack Reacher is not complex as a movie or character.  The upside of that is the film is finely plotted and clearly told. Robert Duvall makes a cameo, as does Werner Herzog. Also on screen is the talented Richard Jenkins, who is clearly under utilized here.   Of the two, Bond is not only richer cinematically (also more than twice the budget), but also treats us to a cast of acting legends.  In addition to Daniel Craig, we have Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Javier Bardem and Albert Finney.

For the evening viewing of Bond, a martini is appropriate of course, if for no other reason than a tribute to an earlier era.  For Reacher, maybe a Pabst to reflect a film and a lead actor, both delivering the goods in an efficient and timely manner.