|
 Among
the centenaries falling this year, the one surely the most popular
is that of Alfred Hitchcock, born in London on august 13th 1899 and
dead at Los Angeles on April 29th 1980.
We quote straightaway the most memorable titles: “Rebecca”
(1940), “Spelbound”, (1945), “Notorius” (1946),
“The Paradine Case”, (1947), “I confess, (1953),
“Rear Window”, (1954), “To Catch a Thief”,
(1955), “Vertigo, (1958), “North by Northwest”,
(1959), “Psycho”, (1960), “The Birds”, (1963)...
 The
news about the death of Hitchcock got to the Italian newspapers just
twenty four hours after I've seen again on the television and
once more admired a revival of “Notorious”. There has
already been a little gala of memories at the television: the bright
Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, very dark haired, the severe Claude Rains,
and that story of bottles of champagne containing instead uranium
powder. Let's say the truth: even if the plot were expected at all
and foreseeable scene by scene, the thrill intensity was not lessened.
Literary terms, it's the same for the classics that never disappoint.
 “Notorius”,
especially, has performed one of the most confident models of anxiety:
that of the poison poured in the cup of the unacquainted victim,
a model Hitchcock employed to explain to uninitiated what “suspense”
is.
If we go along again in a hurry the Hitchcock world, which images get
to the memory? The complex and hallucinating dreams borrowed from
Freud, herds of ravenous birds blacker than hurricanes, poised men
over ribs of skyscrapers, corpses lying as harmless manikins at the
bottom of old chests, spies plots, breathtaking pursuits, unavowable
secrets...
Nevertheless, horror did not live in this world, if you except certain
moments of “Psycho”. Almost a sort of slight disenchantment
holds back the over.
 I
interviewed Alfred Hitchcock an afternoon in September 1966. The interview
went on in a hotel of Milan and my first impression was that of having
not in front of me the magician of the thriller, but a seraphic lord,
aware of playing the role of the oracle. From the old notebooks of
my notes, questions and answers of that meeting get back.
- Mister Hitchcock, if those who go to the movie to see your pictures
had a bad heart, how would you behaviour?
“I will stop being a director and, notwithstanding how old I am,
I will turn into a medicine student“.
- Why, in so many years of career, have you never won an important festival?
“ I will never be a bride, I will be always a bridesmaid “.
- What's your opinion about the very long series of TV films you have
realized for the television?
“ I get asleep in front of the telescreen: if I'm not wrong the
television answers this purpose “.
- Why do you appear for few instants in all the films you direct?
“ I appear for few instants so to make my dignity not suffer longer
“.
- Would you fell up to do a film about the Cinderella tale?
“No, for the public will expect to find at least a corpse in the
golden carriage“.
- Would you like to be the director of a picture having as the protagonist
the personage of James Bond?
“No, because the emotions of Bond are not my emotions: nobody takes
care if Bond kills well or not “.
- What do you think about actors in general?
“They blame me since once I said that actor are as animals, but
I love them because they are very nice animals “.
- What do you think about the contemporaneous movies?
“Too many pictures show only pictured persons while they are talking
“.
Only once Hitchcock let himself go to his so loved theorems about fair:
“I do not make mystery movie - he said. In mystery one wonders
when something will happen, in my pictures ones wonder what
will happen “.
His walk, some majestic, while he got far toward the corridors of the
hotel, gets sharp now in my mind while I'm writing these lines for
the centenary.
A director leaves a checkable heritage. Even for Hitchcock there has
been and there will be “revivals” and retrospectives.
Grandeur is not to be discussed. But if any gear of his thrill machines
will show some rust or will have misted releases, maybe we will feel
a sense of freeing. The nightmare stands still behind us or harbours
in our secret. As it happened to me that far-off afternoon, after
the interview, when the memory of the pictures got the upper hand
and I expected to find a corpse in the boot.
|
...........................
