BFI Hitchcock Season – Menagerie V, The Influenced
Despite my lengthening commitments at the moment – I’ve only just realised that Holy Motors opens today and I must catch that on the big screen given its storming Cannes reception and strong critical plaudits – I did want to keep the Hitchcock train puffing along despite not attending any screenings this week. After a productive day catching up with all my outstanding commitments (which should be drip fed over at Sound On Sight in a week or so) I thought it best to turn my attentions to an obvious choice, the films that immediately spring to my mind when someone invokes the phrase ‘Hitckcockian’. This list could easily run to a few dozen or more movies such is the portly one’s enormous, hulking presence on filmmakers past and present, but brevity is the soul of wit as someone wiser than me once said, so here is a rough collection for your perusal and consideration;
The Last Embrace – This little known espionage thriller is to my mind Jonathan Demme’s finest picture, and one of the most criminally underrated thrillers of the Seventies. The departed and sadly mourned Roy Schneider took a rare leading part in this Hitchcock homage, as a secret agent lured into a trap and left for dead in the local sanitorium. It has it all, an exciting chase structure, the sexual elements of cat and mouse spycraft, a man on the run for his life with a thrilling climax at the symbolic Niagara falls, echoing Hitch’s use of emblematic locations on which to imprint his own deadly manoeuvres. It also contains an early Chris Walken appearance, before he became ‘Chris Walken’ if you catch my drift.
Dressed To Kill – Well, I could have picked a De Palma movie at random and found some theft somewhere but Dressed To Kill is perhaps the most overt pilfering of the style and attitude of Hitchcock, of psychosis and sex, of neurotic murder and death. I wanted to link the opening of the film which is unfortunately restricted due to the grisly razor bloodletting, you can’t open a movie with a woman butchered in a shower and not cast your mind to another unfortunate cleansing incident. I’ll say this for De Palma, much as I dislike much of his work he knows how to film the fuck out of a steadicam glide…..
Halloween – Without Psycho there would be no Halloween or any further John Carpenter pictures, at least as we know them. The acceleration of the POV shot to encompass an entire opening sequence was radical for its time, and it was one short step to build an entire movie sub-genre which has endured to this day, unlike the numerous dismembered former residents of Camp Crystal Lake…..
Final Analysis – Another overlooked gem, although to be fair I haven’t seen this in years and it may have aged badly. It’s a psychological thriller directed by Phil Joanou – whatever happened to him? – starring Kim Basinger as a suspicious femme fatale and Richard Gere as a psychiatrist drawn into a murderous plot, this has always stuck in my mind despite not seeing it for many years. I must track this one down for another look….
Basic Instinct – One wonders what Hitchcock would have produced had he been born a half century later and making films without the punitive restrictions of the censorship code, probably pictures that would make Basic Instinct’s coupling of sex and murder like a Pixar movie in comparison. Verhoeven was a big fan of Hitchcock, and his use of duplicitous females in this notorious movie was his own small nod to Vertigo. The sequel is catasphorically bad, one of the worst films of the past decade, which I highly recommend as a laugh out loud exercise in pure, unencumbered hilarity.
Les Diabolique – Not so much an influence as a pretender to the throne, this gallic gallows piece is probably the film most often quoted as the greatest Hitchcock film he never made. With its sexual frisson between the female conspirators and a chilling twist which still has audiences quaking in their seats, it remains a sodden and brooding chiller, just ignore the redundant Hollywood remake.
Crimes & Misdemeanors – Whilst Woody Allen’s best known influence is Bergman he has been known to branch out to other periods of film history, and this murderous tale of a successful doctor removing a jealous mistress from his life in eternal fashion is one of his most atmospheric and evocative tragicomic thrillers. It’s my favourite of his movies, his quiet masterpiece between the early comedies and his clunky, tired and increasingly charmless recent output. Speaking of comedy, here is the finest death scene ever filmed….
Minty's Menagerie 
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