Hitch turns 100

Plus, going psycho in Belgrade

Happy hundredth, Hitch! A child was born, August 13, 1899.

Here in Boston, Sir Alfred's centenary was celebrated with the Brattle's summer retrospective. In New York City, I caught before its shutting down the Museum of Modern Art's "Alfred Hitchcock: Behind the Silhouette," a small but significant gallery showing of posters, stills, memos, storyboards, continuity sketches, and other Hitchcock memorabilia. A telephone used in Dial M for Murder. From Psycho, Norman's stuffed owl.

Explained Mary Corliss, assistant curator of MOMA's Department of Film and Video and the organizer of the show: "For Hitchcock, filmmaking was what happened in his head, and then on paper, before shooting began. His movies were no accident -- art was the distillation of his design." The artifacts revealed an "auteur," a control freak of every phase of production. Several prime examples: Hitchcock's personally penciled storyboards for the climbing-down-Mount-Rushmore sequence in North by Northwest, featuring his close-up drawings of Washington and Lincoln; his 102 notes of January 14, 1958, each detailing a subtle change he'd demanded of his editor after watching a rough-cut screening of Vertigo; his script breakdown of the playground attack in The Birds, which comprised an Odessa Steps-like montage of 67 (!) distinct shots.

Did anyone except his wife, Alma Reville, see Hitchcock without his gentleman's jacket and tie? He wore them even for his famous walk-on appearances in his movies. I rode up and down a mini-escalator at MOMA examining stills along the walls showing all of these cameos. In only one was he out of his conservative suit and popped into a funny 19th-century costume. The movie was unnamed. Is it 1949's Under Capricorn?

Surprise, Alfred wasn't always tubby. There was a 1924 photo in which he's size regular, he has hair in a pompadour, and he has a moustache. In 1925, he and Alma got "hitched," and MOMA offered a photo of the English couple slicing the cake. No moustache, the hair is slicked back, and the belly is taking shape. Our Alfred! A later photo revealing Hitch's famously macabre humor: he, formally attired by a swimming pool, his shoe sitting murderously on the head of his little daughter, Pat, who is bobbing in the water.

And here's a little revelation: Gus Van Sant gets a bit of vindication for his much-loathed remake because, it turns out, the original lobby-card advertisements for Psycho showed scenes from the movie in color. The Bates house on the hill has snot-green lights emanating from windows. These same ads also have Psycho's dandy come-on line: "The screen's master of suspense moves his cameras into the icy blackness of the unexplored."

The British film magazine Sight and Sound includes with its August issue a Hitchcock booklet with several okay articles plus bytes from various filmmakers -- Woody Allen to John Waters -- describing their favorite Hitchcock movie. It turns out that even as self-absorbed a maestro as Greece's Theo Angelopoulos has a sweet tooth for Hitch: "I have seen all of Hitchcock's films, and I always had a very good time with any film of his. . . . I have a weakness for Notorious, perhaps because of Ingrid Bergman's face."

Not enough filmmakers are polled to make the survey mean that much -- besides which, you could vote for more than one film if you liked. Still, Psycho led with 13 first-place votes, followed by Vertigo with 7. The only oddity: no ballots from anybody for Strangers on a Train. And my idiosyncratic best-loved Hitchcock film, The Wrong Man, got only a single mention, one of the votes from Martin Scorsese.

For the record, my favorite Hitchcock films, in descending order: (1) The Wrong Man (1956); (2) Psycho (1960); (3) Rear Window (1954); (4) Shadow of a Doubt (1943); (5) Vertigo (1958); (6) Strangers on a Train (1951); (7) North by Northwest (1959); (8) The Lady Vanishes (1938); (9) Marnie (1964); (10) Notorious (1946); (11) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955); (12) The Birds (1963).

What was Hitchcock like away from the studio? I once interviewed his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, who acted in Strangers on the Train and Psycho. She recalled the father of her childhood and their LA home in Bel-Air. He read biographies, listened to classical music, made Yorkshire pudding. "My father was not an athlete at all. He didn't do any exercise." Instead of a pool he had a wine cellar, and foods were shipped fresh from about the world: scrod from Boston, Dover sole from England.

"I was brought up rather as an English child," said O'Connell. "You didn't speak unless spoken to." Hitchcock was, all his life, a devoted Catholic. "On Sundays, father took me to church regularly, until I could drive. Then I'd drive him to church regularly. It's because of his diligence that my religion is so strong today."

No surprise that, at home, Hitchcock was a neatness nut. O'Connell described his perfectly stacked Christmas presents beneath the tree. "Before you knew it, they'd be opened and put away. Even the wrapping paper would be thrown right away. It was hysterical!"

Did her father wear his tie in the house? "No, but a buttoned-up shirt . . . to the top button."

---

"Everyone has gone crazy in Belgrade, where you accept mental and physical violence as something normal," Goran Paskaljevic, veteran filmmaker of the powerfully nihilist Cabaret Balkan (now at the Kendall Square), described his Serbian-capital home city when we talked at last year's Toronto Film Festival. "We live in complete intolerance. There's no more middle class. Practically everyone is poor. The political class is without ideas except get to money and put it in their pockets, and the opposition, too. They all want the same thing, power and money.

"I don't believe any more in my generation. The intellectuals are in the mousehole. We're dealing with a Slavic mentality: everything is fatalistic, but if we try to make things better, they get worse. Women suffer a lot. We are a macho country."

No wonder, then, that Cabaret Balkan's impossibly depraved panorama of a night in Belgrade is a self-consciously structured rondo of rape and random violence. Serbia's most important actors appear in this movie and therefore seem to endorse its grim view of life under Milosevic. "They enjoyed the script, they like me," Paskaljevic explained.

Yet among the cast members, Aleksandar Bercek is infamous in Serbia for his public support of Milosevic's government, especially during the war in Bosnia. He plays an alcoholic ex-cop who's crippled by a man he had tortured. "He's brilliant in the movie," said his director, though it seems a consummate act of masochism for Bercek, a traitor in liberal artistic circles, to play such a toady, self-incriminating role.

"I live in France and Belgrade," Paskaljevic pointed out. "My wife is French, but my mother is in Belgrade, so I'm very vulnerable. The film I made is much more active opposition than if I were to go there and form a political party. It's my duty to say what's wrong in society, to show the worst before I can be affirmative. But I love my people, and I'm proud to be a Serbian. It's a great culture."