Book review: Alfred Hitchcock’s Moviemaking Master Class, by Tony Lee Moral

 

“He pioneered and revolutionized the way all kinds of stories were told on screen.” Who could be that we’re talking about? None other than the Master of Suspense - and, as described in the book, suspense is the stretching out of anticipation -: Alfred Hitchcock. Because every story - even the love stories - could use a bit of suspense, Hitchcock’s influences can be seen in all of cinema and even in other arts. I once searched and found out that there were more than 2,600 books written about Hitchcock, according to the Goodreads database. Another one comes to the batch: Tony Lee Moral’s “Alfred Hitchcock’s Moviemaking Master Class”. Is it a good addition or an unnecessary new book? Let us see.

Through examples from Hitchcock’s oeuvre, the book teaches things such as pitching a story to a producer, choosing the theme of the film, writing the screenplay, exploring your background scenario and props to the maximum, storyboarding key scenes, working with actors (who are not cattle), exercising camera logic, the importance of editing and how to advertise your film.

The sub-sections of the chapters are short and straight to the point. Nothing is discussed in a deeper focus, and this isn’t a problem. Once the point has been made about the section’s title, it’s time to move on. This makes reading easy and in a nice flow. However, to Hitchcock’s experts, there is very little that they haven’t heard about. In the end of each chapter, something different appears: exercises and tips about movies to watch and books to read to further the ideas presented in the chapter.

Writing the screenplay is given a whole chapter. A job divided in the outline, the treatment and the screenplay, this is explored in deep focus, which is no surprise considering that writing the screenplay was Hitchcock’s favorite part of making a movie. He closely followed the writing of the screenplays for his movies, but, preferring to focus on telling a story visually, he left the dialogues for his screenwriters.

There is also a whole chapter devoted to how Hitchcock cut and assembled his films. The author explains how the director portrayed a character’s reaction through cutting - using the Kuleshov effect - and how he created fear and depicted violence also through cutting - by choosing to show several close-ups instead of the violent act: this is what happens in the shower murder scene in “Psycho” (1960). We then learn about how Hitch used jump cuts, match cuts and cross-cuts to establish ideas and develop the plots of his films.

We can find the definition and exemplification of terms such as the famous McGuffin and the “ice box syndrome”, that is, the holes left in the plot that become debates once the viewers leave the movie theater and hit home. One very interesting term I learned - and something Hitchcock used in many movies - is the double chase: when the hero is persecuted at the same time by the police and the villains. Another learning opportunity came with the discussion of the Vertigo Shot and how it was achieved, zooming in on camera and having the camera dollying back simultaneously.

We have the comparison between leading men Cary Grant and James Stewart. Grant was the debonair seductive man Hitchcock wanted to be, while Stewart was the boy-next-door type. The author said Stewart was the man Hitchcock actually was, but I just partially agree with this affirmation.

There is, of course, valuable advice and many great catchphrases, such as: “When characters are unbelievable, you never get real suspense, only surprise.”; “Surprise takes 10 seconds; anticipation can take an hour.”; “A successful movie juxtaposes tension and relaxation, and relieves horror with humor.”; “He was a purist and believed that film is a succession of images on the screen; this in turn creates ideas, which in turn creates emotion, which only seldom leads to dialogue.”

There are quotes from other directors about how Hitchcock influenced them, and plenty of examples of Hitchcockian non-Hitchcock movies. We can also find quotes from stars who worked with Hitch, such as Eva Marie Saint and Kim Novak, as well as quotes from people who were part of the crew in some Hitchcock movies.

There are also plenty of inspiring quotes from Hitchcock himself, such as: “A film cannot be compared to a play or a novel. It is closer to a short story, which, as a rule, sustains one idea that culminates when the action has reached the highest point of the dramatic curve.”; “Mystery is an intellectual process, as in [solving] a ‘whodunit’…but suspense is essentially an emotional process. With suspense it’s necessary to involve emotion.”; “I think a director should understand the psychology of audiences,”; “People don’t often always express their inner thoughts to one another; a conversation might be quite trivial, but often the eyes reveal what a person thinks or feels.”; “For me, suspense doesn’t have any value unless it’s balanced by humor,”; “A woman of elegance, on the other hand, will never cease to surprise you.”; “ The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture”; “ Sex on the screen should be suspenseful, I feel. If sex is too blatant or obvious, there’s no suspense.”; “You can’t direct intelligent men, the things that should come to them naturally, such as hesitancies.”

Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife and constant collaborator who helped shape many screenplays, is only briefly cited as the one who saw that Janet Leigh blinked after her character Marion was murdered in “Psycho”. Another mistake in the book is saying that the French term for “pre-production” is “mise-en-scène” - it simply isn’t. Some sentences are poorly written and there are some typos that a more accurate revision would have erased, as well as factual errors - Anny Ondra wasn’t on the cast list for “The Lodger” (1927).

The Master of Suspense - who was also the master of branding - is as relevant as ever, no matter that he died over forty years ago. As the book says, there is always something new and exciting to find out when rewatching Hitchcock’s films. We, creatives, can also learn something new by rewatching his movies. Tony Lee Moral, an expert in Hitch, offered us valuable advice in this tight and thought-provoking book.