What is the relationship between a Hitchcock movie and the noir genre?
Suzanne Lummis:
These days, for certain complicated historical reasons, the noir scholars maintain that film noir is not a genre— that most of these movies didn’t know they were “films noir” when there were being made. They thought they were “crime thrillers.” On the other hand, Hitchcock movies are part of a genre. And that genre is called. . . Hitchcock. He’s one of a handful of directors with a subject area and style so consistent and distinctive that they became their own genre. (The way no one says, ‘I’m going to see a Swedish movie about suffering people searching for the meaning of their lives.’ They’re going to see a Bergman movie.) In terms of similarity, both types of movies have crime at their center. However, Hitchcock was engaged in an almost clinical exploration of how the sense of suspense is created in the audience then exploded on the screen. The Psycho shower scene—78 camera set ups, 52 edits. Film noir isn’t as good in that area. Most were made quickly on a budget. Who had that kind of time?
David Lehman:
The quick answer is that Hitchcock is in a category all his own. That said, some of his films are as noir as you get: Vertigo, where the hero loses his lover twice – and possibly his sanity; Psycho, where the terminal revelations, the solution to the case, are far from reassuring; The Birds, where nature erupts as if in a vicious rebuke of mankind; and the lesser Suspicion, where Cary Grant carries a glass of possibly poisoned milk up the stairs to Joan Fontaine, his timid wife quaking in bed. Others, too, have pronounced noir elements notwithstanding the feeling of relief, at movie’s end, once the culprit has been captured. The murderer dies in Shadow of a Doubt, but Teresa Wright does lose her uncle; Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train is now free to marry his true love, but the violent death of his wife was not the way he wanted it to happen; the jig is up for Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder, but how happy can Grace Kelly be, knowing her husband has tried to kill her? There are noir elements in Notorious, Spellbound, and Rear Window, but the very mention of these reminds me that Hitchcock is in a category of his own.
I’ve written an essay titled “Hitchcock’s America” that appeared in American Heritage. Maybe I should include a link. Or this poem from my new book Playlist, where I get to sneak in a mention of five Hitchcock titles in two of the lines.
I live in Hitchcock’s America
What does that mean
It means the ride always ends in an amusement park
and a girl and her uncle can have the same first name
Cary Grant is suave Jimmy Stewart has a broken leg
or a bruised psyche Doris Day’s voice fills the house
Even the Jews and the blacks are white
Even the brunettes are blonde
I confess I’m at the end of my rope,
spellbound by the notorious master of suspicion
maybe Janet shouldn’t have taken that dough or had that tryst
Joel McCrea tells America that all Europe’s lights are out
and Priscilla Lane recites Emma Lazarus’s lines
atop the Statue of Liberty
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