In the following essay, Hemmeter reviews the textual antecedents of Alfred Hitchcock's film Sabotage, proposing that the director used both the novel and play versions of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.

To trace the creative drives behind Hitchcock's films to sources in psychopathology (possible, after all, to some degree with any artist) does not necessarily invalidate the emphasis placed in my book on their therapeutic impulses: indeed, it could logically be felt to strengthen this emphasis by giving the therapeutic impulses a particular focus or motivation. I still feel that the Hitchcock films I most admire are centred on a movement towards health via therapy and catharsis. I have, however, beco...

Hitchcock's career to date falls neatly into four phases: the silent period (nine films); the 1930s in Britain (fourteen films); the 1940s in America and Britain (thirteen features and two shorts); and the period since then, beginning with Strangers on a Train (twelve films). To indulge in drastic oversimplification, these phases represent respectively: apprenticeship; the perfection of a style; appreciation of the limitations of that style and an erratic quest for a new style; and final maturity. (p...

Although Alfred Hitchcock is the most primitive of major directors, he belongs in their company. Those who emphasize his primitivism also dismiss his achievement, but his achievement is fundamental to the art of cinema—more specifically, to the art of using cinematic means for audience manipulation. (p. 295) Most of Hitchcock's ideas about the real world are indistinguishable from the commonest pieties—which, of course, helps to explain his unique popular appeal. To begin with, he is di...

At heart, [Alfred Hitchcock is] a practical joker, a cunning and sophisticated cynic amused at the French critical vogue for his work, contemptuous of the audience which he treats as the collective victim of a Pavlovian experiment, perennially fascinated by his own ability to exploit the cinema's resources. His narcissism and its concomitant coldness have damaged those films whose themes have called for warmly sympathetic treatment: The Ring, I Confess, and The Wrong Man are obvious examples of stori...

To stay with the audience, Hitchcock set out to win it over by reawakening all the strong emotions of childhood. In his work the viewer can recapture the tensions and thrills of the games of hide-and-seek or blindman's bluff and the terror of those nights when, by a trick of the imagination, a forgotten toy on the dresser gradually acquires a mysterious and threatening shape…. [This] brings us to suspense, which, even among those who acknowledge Hitchcock's mastery of it, is commonly re...

Like his painter in Blackmail … Alfred Hitchcock employs pointedly nonverbal methods—and not the expositional theatrics so common to most early sound films—as brush-strokes to bring life to his murderess's dilemma…. [In] Blackmail "… sounds are linked to movements, as if they were the natural consummation of gestures which have the same musical quality…. Everything is thus regulated and impersonal; not a movement of the muscles, not the rolling of an e...

Though Hitchcock's work remained out of the reach of fads, except to the extent to which he cast currently popular actors in his films, he absorbed as natural and fitting all of the technical changes of the decades through which he proceeded with his natural caution, like someone crossing a mine field, not because he was afraid of being blown up but because of his aversion to disorder of any sort…. Though Hitchcock pretended to consider himself a prude as movies became increasingly gamey, I su...

What Hitchcock has done in Topaz is exciting to anyone who believes that an artist's work has coherence, a progression, and a deepening of fundamental themes. (p. 17) In Hitchcock's curious and largely unsuccessful Torn Curtain, a statement of some kind about modern political morality seemed to be competing with the personal story for significance. Hitchcock is not a socially-oriented director, though certain social motifs (especially fear of the police) trace back to the beginnings of his car...

Hitchcock cares little about the minor springs of plot—what he calls the "MacGuffin," the gimmick—because he is dealing with more inclusive rhythms. "To me, the narrator, they're of no importance." And this narrative sense, Hitchcock asserts …, is the most important part of his directional method. (pp. 22-3) Hitchcock's films frequently approach the problem of detachment and involvement through separate but complementary treatments that night al...

What interests Hitchcock? Not precisely character: he creates it, and his flair for casting sustains it, but it is character directed to the ends of a limited dramatic situation, star personality cut to size, Not, certainly, professional crime, the mechanics of a bank robbery or the operations of a spy ring. Professionalism hints at routine, and Hitchcock's is the art of the unexpected—a celebration of that jarring moment when, walking in the dark down a staircase which you know every foot of ...

I am convinced that [Rear Window] is one of the most important of all the seventeen Hitchcock has made in Hollywood, one of those rare films without imperfection or weakness, which concedes nothing. For example, it is clear that the entire film revolves around the idea of marriage. When Kelly goes into the suspect's apartment, the proof she is looking for is the murdered woman's wedding ring; Kelly puts it on her own finger as Stewart follows her movements through his binoculars from the other...

Alfred Hitchcock might be grateful to us all if we would forget "The Lady Vanishes" and "The Thirty-Nine Steps." We pay him the compliment of believing that in his chosen field of melodrama he is a craftsman and stylist, and as a result we raise the passing mark. The later, or Hollywood, Hitchcock might be willing to trade us his reputation for a little charity, and that's the deal we may eventually make. It would not be easy, however, to indulge him in the case of "...

[The Trouble with Harry] opens with a characteristic flourish, an incisive transition from tranquility to violence…. Unlike The Ladykillers, which broke wholly with reality, or Bunuel's Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, with its ambiguous terrors. The Trouble with Harry establishes a setting neither entirely fantasticated nor disturbingly close to the real. (pp. 30-1) Relaxed and deliberate, The Trouble with Harry spins out its single joke—the calm acceptance of the fact of violen...

"The Lady Vanishes" is a typical work of that genius in the art of motion pictures, Alfred Hitchcock, the overstuffed and delightful gentleman from London. But Hitchcock chooses to use his genius where it will do the least harm to the most effect, and so while everything he does has such speed and clarity it's a pleasure to sit there over and over and watch him work, he works frankly in surface motion. There is human interest and sympathy because his people are always right; but the act...

Hitchcock is said to be very pleased with [Psycho], and well he might be. In it he has abandoned the commercial geniality of his recent work and turned to out-and-out horror and psychopathology. The film begins with a drab, matter-of-fact scene in a hotel bedroom…. It imperceptibly shifts to a level of macabre pathology, unbearable suspense, and particularly gory death. In it, indeed, Hitchcock's necrophiliac voyeurism comes to some kind of horrifying climax…. So well is the picture mad...

[Both To Catch a Thief and The Trouble With Harry] drag along from scene to scene without much inner motivation. Of the two films, To Catch a Thief is much more successful because of its superior cast and brighter sense of fun…. The Trouble With Harry is the more ambitious film of the two, and consequently, the nobler failure. It doesn't come off because even the little touches are done badly.

When, nearly ten years ago, Alfred Hitchcock broke away from his Daphne du Maurier phase with Shadow of a Doubt, there were premature congratulations. He was first in with the real location melodrama, and it looked as if he might have returned to his older and more entertaining style. The succeeding Hitchcock films, popular, adept and replete with useless trick effects, have been, however, peculiarly depressing in that their hollowness has derived from Hitchcock himself, and not—as in the cases of so...

The Birds could be called a hybrid of Shadow of a Doubt and Psycho. It combines the former's character-exploration with the latter's shock-effects, and emerges as one of Alfred Hitchcock's most striking and formidable achievements. On any level, a masterpiece…. The Birds is a modern fable about the complacency of Man and the uncertainty of his position in the universe. Life is going carelessly by, but out of nowhere comes a dreadful enemy—one that no amount of reasoning ca...

Gracelessness is the word one wants to describe the overall quality of Alfred Hitchcock's latest film, Rear Window; and no word could be sadder. For what are the qualities that we associate with classic Hitchcock if not, precisely, the elegance of proportion, the ease and sureness of manner? Here, however, the unevenness runs from beginning to end, the intermittent brilliances and delicacies serve only to emphasise it. Rear Window has a situation which promises intricacy and then fails to provide it....

A good deal of Alfred Hitchcock's interest in film-making seems these days to consist in setting himself technical problems for the satisfaction of overcoming them…. In The Wrong Man … Hitchcock has filmed his first true story, a precise and documented account of a case of mistaken identity. The problem here is to achieve a particular atmosphere of factual suspense, a spider's web entanglement of circumstantial detail enmeshing the bewildered and passive victim….

Notorious lacks many of the qualities which made the best of Alfred Hitchcock's movies so good, but it has more than enough good qualities of its own. Hitchcock has always been as good at domestic psychology as at thrillers, and many times here he makes a moment in a party, or a lovers' quarrel, or a mere interior shrewdly exciting in ways that few people in films seem to know…. [He is] resourceful, and exceptional, in his manufacture of expressive little air pockets of dead silence. He...

Hitchcock provides only one of many possible approaches to cinema. He is not and never has been a raw realist. To enjoy Hitchcock's films, one must accept the fact that he reprocesses reality into pliable cinematic images. His is, therefore, more a cinema of signs than of essences. He has never been interested in sensuality for its own sake. His vision of life is more Freudian than Jungian, in that he does not allow any possibility of heroic regeneration. Fear is far more common than courage, and hel...

Precise and without pretensions, ["The Lady Vanishes"] is the best spy thriller in a long time: growing suspense from beginning to end, no empty threats, no sticky romantics, no stupid explanation, no misleading clues—every minute is used to advance the plot, which has an almost mathematical logic. Of course, a whole arsenal of old tricks is employed, but with authority and irony. By this quantity is changed into quality. About the excellent use of the comic relief provided by two Engli...