Learning on ScreenDo we ♥ Hitchcock?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnhJ_JnLdag
And (again) yet… In the absence of the original credit titles, the restorers get the name of the cameraman wrong, and they implausibly credit Hitchcock not only as art director, assistant director, and scriptwriter, but as film editor as well. Moreover, the associated publicity made wildly misleading claims. The eminent critic and scholar David Sterritt described it as providing “the missing link” in Hitchcock’s career, “a priceless opportunity to study his visual and narrative ideas when they were first taking shape.” Although it was directed not by Hitchcock but by Graham Cutts, Sterritt was happy to write off Cutts as no more than a “hack” – clearly anything of interest in it had to be ascribed to Hitchcock.
Nor did Sterritt or anyone else note that, immediately after the critical and commercial fiasco of The White Shadow, the Cutts-Hitchcock combination made The Passionate Adventure, a film which survives in full (albeit with inter-titles in German) and is in every way more impressive than its predecessor, and rather more significant as a ‘missing link’. It has been accessible for years, but – like other silent films by Cutts and British contemporaries – only in Britain.
You can forgive Sterritt and company for having only a hazy knowledge of the early part of Hitchcock’s career. At least we can’t complain any longer that scholars in the US or anywhere else are unappreciative of the British films that he himself directed. The seminal Hitchcock books of the 1960s by François Truffaut and Robin Wood were so dismissive of their merits, in comparison with the Hollywood output, that for decades there was little incentive to bother with them – and it was hard to see them anyway. Now, with the help of steadily-increasing DVD availability, that battle has been decisively won.
‘To study him is to find an economical way of studying the entire history of cinema’
But a second battle is still in progress. The David Sterritt view is still common: Hitchcock as a solitary Man of Cinema struggling to assert himself, in those formative years, in a hostile environment, alongside colleagues and contemporaries who were no better than ‘hacks’. The downside of the BFI’s campaign, and of the related book, is that it tends by default to reinforce this view of The Genius of Hitchcock. But in the words already quoted from Cohen, ‘To study him is to find an economical way of studying the entire history of cinema’ – and the British cinema in which he was formed is an important part of that history.
