A Dose of Hitchcock

Let’s talk about Hitchcock. Best plot twist in a Hitchcock film? Strangest character? A setting you’d like to use in one of your novels?

by Paul D. Marks

I have a confession to make. I love Hitchcock! Not everything, but plenty and not without reservations, though that’s for another post. And though I didn’t come up with this question I think it’s a fun one, so:

Plot Twist:

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD

Since I’m writing this ahead of time, I’m sure someone else mentioned my chosen plot twist as their best plot twist in a Hitchcock movie. Mine is the Kim Novak character, Madeleine, in Vertigo (one of my fave Hitchcock movies).

Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock's wife

Briefly, Jimmy Stewart, a former detective suffering from vertigo, is hired by an old friend to follow the friend’s wife, Madeleine. Jimmy falls for her—no pun intended (if you know the movie you’ll know why it’s a pun…). Something happens and he loses her. But some time later he finds another woman who reminds him an awful lot of her, which leads to some very intriguing plot twists.

The first time one watches Vertigo these twists come on like a tsunami and, indeed, give the viewer a sense of vertigo. Wow! Where did that come from? But not ‘where did it come from’ in the sense of it’s out of the blue, but in the sense of ‘I didn’t see that coming’. It does work and it does grow from the plot. That said, it does strain credulity just a little, but one of the main conceits of movies is to suspend disbelief and truly great movies do that with panache.


Strangest Character:

As to who the strangest character is. Well, I’m not sure if he’s the strangest but I love Hume Cronyn’s Herb in Shadow of a Doubt. He plays the next door neighbor of Charlie (Teresa Wright) and her family, and along with Henry Travers, who plays her father, has a macabre fascination with murder and talks about it with a certain glee. You can see Hitchcock’s dark sense of humor bleeding through in their characters (pun intended). They’re constantly talking about how to kill people and get away with it.

Herbie Hawkins (Cronyn): Well, if I was gonna kill you, I wouldn't do a dumb thing like hitting you on the head. First of all, I don't like the fingerprint angle. Of course, I could always wear gloves. Press your hands against the pipe after you were dead and make you look like a suicide. Except it don't seem hardly likely that you'd beat yourself to death with a club. I'd murder you so it didn't look like murder.

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Shadow of a Doubt

Joseph Newton (Travers): We're not talking about killing people. Herb's talking about killing me and I'm talking about killing him.

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Herbie Hawkins: He ran plunk right into the propeller of an airplane.
Joseph Newton: Ooh boy!
Herbie Hawkins: Cut him all to pieces. Had to identify him by his clothes. His shirts were all initialed.


Setting:

There’s so many great locations in Hitchcock, I’d love to use them all. Brazil in Notorious. Bodega Bay from The Birds. Denmark in Topaz. England in Frenzy. The middle of the ocean in Lifeboat, which occasions his most creative cameo.

Saboteur

And not so much a setting I’d like to use in one of my novels, but one inspired by Hitchcock: the use of famous Landmarks. In North by Northwest there’s the very famous climax on Mount Rushmore. And before that in Saboteur the climax on the Statue of Liberty. And my novel Broken Windows (the sequel to White Heat, and coming soon…I hope) opens with a woman climbing the Hollywood Sign, though I won’t tell you why here, and it also appears later in the story. I don’t really know if it was inspired by Hitchcock, but for the purposes of this article let’s say it was ;) . Also, I’d like to set something on the French Riviera, a la To Catch a Thief, mainly so I could go over there, have a swell time with the swells and write it off. And then there’s Marrakesh, from The Man Who Knew Too Much. And the list goes on. Click here to view a video of Crosby, Stills & Nash performing Marrakesh Express: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzB5eRu6HOk 

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All the movies mentioned here are worth a look if you’re looking for something to watch some cold, rainy night.

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Well, a lot of people are at Bouchercon this week. And Amy and I were supposed to be there too. Unfortunately we had to cancel. But we hope everyone’s having a great time and good luck to Art and Catriona on their nominations. And Bob Levinson, whose story The Dead Detective, from the Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea anthology (which Andy McAleer and I co-edited) is nominated for a Best Short Story Shamus Award.

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Check out Akashic's St. Louis Noir anthology with my short story Deserted Cities of the Heart.

www.PaulDMarks.com

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Trumpet-blowing for Hitch....by Cathy Ace

Let’s talk about Hitchcock. Best plot twist in a Hitchcock film? Strangest character? A setting you’d like to use in one of your novels?

Oh my, oh my…this is a tough set of questions! First of all, I know I saw all the Hitchcock films on TV in black and white before I saw them any other way. We finally got a color television set in about 1976 largely, as I recall, to accommodate my father’s desire to watch the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau "properly". This point will gain greater import below... The great advantage, of course, was that I was able to watch all TV, and films on TV, in color too. Ah, the wonders of Technicolor! North by Northwest was the first Hitchcock I saw in color, and I was blown away! So glamorous. So richly hued. Surreal. Stunning. I’m pleased to say that, over the years, I’ve seen all his films, and enjoy them all, in different ways and for different reasons. 

Best plot twist? From the man whose plots were as twisty as San Francisco’s famous Lombard Street I’ll pick the very end of the film he set in that city – Vertigo – which, when I first saw it, made me very cross indeed. 

Strangest character? Again, asking this about the work of a man who peppered his films with some of the weirdest people ever thrown together on celluloid is a tough one. Strange is normal in a Hitchcock film. Many of his minor characters appear to be simply aids to the plot, with actors hamming it up deliciously as they provide a critical “clue”, and I often adore those pieces. I’m going to bow out of this as gracefully as possible and nominate the Great Man himself who, in his cameo in the abovementioned Vertigo, appears as a passer-by carrying a trumpet case…which I like to think is him acknowledging his desire to blow what’s in it on his own behalf.

A setting I’d like to use in one of my novels? I’ve done that already – the south of France from To Catch a Thief, which was the setting for my first Cait Morgan Mystery, The Corpse with the Silver Tongue. I opted for Nice (which he uses for the scene in the flower market and for some exteriors), rather than Hitchcock’s core setting of Cannes, though I admit I spent several days at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes one year, just because of this film. Little did think, when I first watched Cary Grant motoring along the Grande Corniche to Monaco, that the same area would become my second home for more than half a decade and....here we go with the link-back...in Monaco there's the fabulous Oceanographic Museum...where Jacques Cousteau was director of the aquarium from 1957 to 1988!!

What about you? Favorite Hitchcock film? Least favorite?

 Cathy Ace writes the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries (book #2 THE CASE OF THE MISSING MORRIS DANCER became available in trade paperback on August 31st in the UK, and will be available in November in the US/Canada) and the Cait Morgan Mysteries (book #8 THE CORPSE WITH THE RUBY LIPS will be published in paperback in October). Find out more about Cathy and her work, and sign up for her newsletter at http://cathyace.com/