Quentin Tarantino Dumps on Alfred Hitchcock -- Four Times

THREE: "The 50s held him down, Hitchcock couldn't do what he, left to his own devices, would've wanted to do. By the time he could do it in the late 60s and early 70s, he was a little too old. If he could have gone where he wanted to go in the early 60s and through the 50's, he would have been a different filmmaker."

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Well, isn't that TRUE of ALL filmmakers from the censored era(30s, 40s, 50s?) Maybe not Frank Capra, but Wilder's movies and Preminger's movies would have had more blatant sex and Hitchocck would have upped the sex AND the violence but...that's not when they worked so QT can hardly blame the directors in question, Hitch included.

I've noted that Hitchcock actually got away with a LOT of sex and violence in the 40's and 50s.

Violence: the opening (sexual) gay strangling in Rope; the raw brutality of the killing of Walter Slezak in Lifeboat(and the implied amputation scene); the diplomat shot in the face in Foreign Correspondent; the young boy impaled on an iron-spiked fence in Spellbound, the rape-like attack on Grace Kelly in Dial M(and the scissors in the back close-up as her assailant dies); the lingering knife in the back death of Louis Bernard in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Sex: Ingrid Bergman's trampy ways in Notorious(and pretty direct references to sex with both Cary Grant and Claude Rains on her part); Miss Torso's gyrations in Rear Window; the sexual banter twixt Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief; James Stewart having see Kim Novak nude in Vertigo; Eva Marie Saint's blatant come-on to Cary Grant on the train in NXNW...EVERYBODY's sexual banter in The Trouble With Harry(plus "I'd like to paint you in the nude" on first meeting.)

CONT

I think film DIRECTORS have more education. Some college, at least.

And with screen writers, usually some college. Though Joseph Stefano -- screenwriter of Psycho -- was a high school dropout. His "Psycho" script isn't necessarily high art, but the phraseology was quite good as was the inherent wit of the dialogue("Mother's..not quite herself today.")

Tarantino said that he considers Robert Bolt to be the greatest screenwriter, "because John Milius told me he was." Well Bolt was certainly the most LITERATE screenwriter(some college?) The dialogue in "A Man For All Seasons" sounds close to Shakespeare, and Bolt was the "go-to guy" for David Lean's coffee table movies of the 60's and 70s: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter.

QT may be informed by TV series I never even watched once ("The Virginian") and perhaps he stole some lines from that show ("Two measly bullets and that's the end of Mexican Bob") , but he has had, from the start, an innate "genius"(there's THAT word) for keeping up a constant stream of entertaining patter for his characters unmatched by anyone. And from Kill Bill on, he demonstrated a knack for filming action(WITHOUT dialogue) that only further enhanced his auteur credentials.

Figure that regardless of education, writers and directors can be "self taught" if they watch enough movies, read enough books, read enough SCREENPLAYS. I think that both Brian DePalma and William Friedkin said this: "Don't go to film school to learn about making movies. Just watch ten of the best Alfred Hitchcock movies." The "education" is from film itself.

CONT

"People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think its wonderful when actually it is a very mediocre movie."

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I've been stewing a bit over QT's quote above on North by Northwest; I answered it in a post above but i wish to elaborate here.

I've written before of a "revelatory" full-house college screening of Psycho that I caught in 1979 in which most of the room screamed long and hard and often -- it TRANSFORMED a movie I had only seen on TV or with small groups into EXACTLY what it was in 1960: a movie that turned the audience into a screaming mass of terrified customers(the screams from when Lila Crane simply DECIDED to go down into the fruit cellar, all the way to the climax, were constant, unending and only got LOUDER when the two Mrs. Batess revealed themselves. Hell they were still screaming when the shrink started talking -- you couldn't hear him)

I consider that Psycho screening to be the "movie miracle of my life." Without it, I never would have REALLY experienced Psycho.

But I got two great public screenings of North by Northwest in the 70s, too. One at a college, one at a revival theater. Full houses, both times. And complete and total audience involvement -- noisy, vocal, all the way through.

Much of it was LAUGHTER -- NXNW is somewhat of a comedy even with its life and death stakes.

Those LA/Hollywood audiences really got into screenings, I think. Almost TOO MUCH.

Example: When Cary Grant on the train ducks out and the cops run past him, he tells Eva Marie Saint:

"Seven parking tickets."

Now with at least one of those full houses, THAT line got a HUGE laugh, followed by sustained applause, followed by more laughs as Eva Marie deadpanned her response.

Hey, I don't think it was THAT funny. But that full house crowd still did.

CONT