How to Watch Hitchcock: 5 Steps to Unlock the Master of Suspense
Look up “suspense” in the dictionary, and there should be a little sketch of Alfred Hitchcock’s silhouette next to it. He never won an Oscar — the academy finally gave him an honorary one in 1968 — but the British director is inarguably one of cinema’s most influential auteurs, the kind of filmmaker even a casual movie watcher has heard of.Even if you don’t know his movies, chances are you can recognize the shower scene from “Psycho,” or have seen a spoof of his work on “The Simpsons.” My own introduction to Hitchcock came at the tender age of 3 or 4: In “Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird,” a plane flies over Big Bird in a cornfield to get his attention — a homage to a famous scene from “North By Northwest.”Hitchcock’s work is marked by carefully framed images and a fondness for playing with our emotions, but his greatest talent was making us freak out, and showing other filmmakers how to do that, too. With a selection of his movies now on Netflix, here is a beginner’s guide to understanding how the Master of Suspense creates suspense.‘Rear Window’ (1954)Step Inside a Character’s Point of ViewHitchcock loved to stick us right in the minds of his characters — many of whom are in the throes of obsession and desire — and thus play on our own passions and nerves. “Rear Window” centers on an all-too-familiar pastime for city dwellers: peering curiously, and a tad illicitly, into the neighbor’s window.Jeff (Jimmy Stewart) is a photojournalist who’s stuck in his Greenwich Village apartment because his whole leg, from hip to foot, is encased in a cast. Thus stranded and frustrated, he becomes intrigued by the lives of the people living across the way, an assortment of typical New Yorkers — a composer, a dancer, a lonely single woman, a bickering couple — and he starts to wonder if one of them is a murderer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
