For now I'm continuing to do it, and the latest I'm making my way through -- slower than I might like -- is Hitchcock/Truffaut, which was given to me as a gift at some point over the last ten years.
If you aren't familiar with it, you probably should be, at least by reputation. It's a conversation between Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut conducted over a week in 1962, in which Truffaut is wearing his journalist's hat in discussing literally every movie Hitchcock had made to that point. (They could not, of course, discuss movies he hadn't yet made -- or could they? More on that in a moment.)
It's delivered to us in a coffee table-sized book, in other words, the size of book you would find on a coffee table, not a book as big as a coffee table. There are a lot of stills from Hitchcock's films, sometimes covering whole two-page spreads, and the conversation is recorded as an exchange of dialogue, like you'd find in a script, with each man's initials and a colon before what he's saying. (I'm a little unclear on the logistics, because I don't think Truffaut spoke perfect English, and many of the thoughts he expresses are quite complex.)
I must admit I am a little confused on the timing though. Wikipedia says the book was not released until 1966 but that the conversation took place in 1962, and yet there are references to The Birds in the conversation, which was not released until 1963. Well, fortunately we live in the age of AI, which just explained to me that principal photography had already been completed on The Birds at the time the conversation took place, meaning it was front of mind for Hitchcock -- though obviously Truffaut would not have seen it yet, or at least not more than some isolated dailies.
There are a couple reasons it's taking me a long time to get through this:
1) It turns out that reading a dialogue between two people doesn't feel the same as reading a book. It's more like listening to an audio transcript. When I'm reading a book, I'm looking for crafted sentences and other signs of compelling writing. I'm not interested just in what two men said, even if the content of what they said is inherently interesting. And that leads me to point 2:
2) The content is not all inherently interesting. A number of the movies they're talking about are movies I haven't seen, and others are movies I've seen, but not for ages. So a lot of it is a bit abstract in terms of resonating with me, even if some of Hitchcock's war stories have a certain appeal unto themselves.
The first I can't do much about, if I do want to ultimately finish Hitchcock/Truffaut. And I'm a completist, especially when it comes to books I start, so not finishing it is out of the question.
The second? I do have some options there.
And so I've started watching movies alongside the chronological discussion, projecting 20 to 30 pages down the road so I can have one of these movies fresh in my mind when it comes up. It's kind of like what I did last year with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation. Last night, I watched my third such previously unseen Hitchcock. At the very least, this project could get me closer to having only a dozen Hitchcocks remaining, meaning at some point in the future I can spend an annual viewing project on finishing off his filmography.
The first was Sabotage (1936), which was among Hitchcock's final handful of films he made before coming to Hollywood. It concerns a terrorist planning a series of attacks in London while hiding in plain sight of owning and operating a small movie theater.
The second was Foreign Correspondent (1940), one of only four Hitchcock movies nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, meaning my viewing knocks out one of my future viewings on my perennially in progress Audient Bridesmaids series. This one deals with the classic Hitchcock character of an innocent thrust into espionage and intrigue, the titular character sent to Europe to cover World War II but getting involved in an intricate spy plot instead.
Those first two were quite recognizably Hitchcock pictures. Last night's was not. The third was Lifeboat (1944), a classic frame story in which about eight characters are trapped on the titular vessel after their ship is sunk in the Atlantic during World War II, one of whom is a German. This one is more about human nature than deception and mystery.
If I'm keeping with the four-year intervals, Hitchcock made Rope in 1948, though I've already seen (and loved) that one, and am due for a rewatch. So I guess it would probably be either 1947's The Paradine Case or 1949's Under Capricorn, both of which are unfamiliar to me.
What do these movies have in common, other than coming out at four-year intervals, which isn't really an actual attribute?
Well none of them blew my mind, and I guess I can't expect lesser Hitchcocks to measure up to the classics. I've seen almost all of the real household names in his filmography, so it was inevitable that some of the ones I'm watching now couldn't hold a candle to those.
But I was particularly surprised at how little Foreign Correspondent did for me, especially when you consider the Academy consider it one of the best ten films of that year. (One of his other nominees for best picture actually won it in the very same year: Rebecca, a stone-cold classic.) Although there's some good stuff in this movie, some stuff you would note as "Hitchcockian" -- the assassin escaping under the umbrellas, the titular character getting his overcoat caught in the windmill gears -- my overall impression of the film was disappointment.
Sabotage was the winner of the bunch for me, even though Hitchcock's and Truffaut's dialogue about it is mostly negative -- the leader actor being wrong for the role, a key decision that I won't spoil being morally dubious from him as a filmmaker.
Lifeboat? I was hoping the restricted locale would inspire some of the director's greatest cleverness, and that it might give me Rope vibes. Instead, this felt like one of the pictures Hitchcock made as a favor to somebody, not delving into his usual proclivities like I thought it might have. (I haven't gotten to that one yet in the book, so let's see what they say about it.)
The problem with this whole companion viewing I'm doing is that sometimes they don't say much about a particular movie at all. That hasn't been a problem with either Sabotage or Foreign Correspondent, but there are certain films that got little more than a cursory mention. If I had chosen to watch those, I would have felt like it was a wasted effort indeed.
It is nice, though, to have some good counterprogramming as I start to ramp up on current year releases, which will become more and more of a preoccupation for me the closer I get to my ranking deadline in January.
And yeah, it'll get me a lot closer to the ultimate goal, which seems pretty hard to attain at the moment: making my way through all of Hitchcock's films.
At a glance, it looks like I have only about 35 more to go ...
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