10 Off My Head - Acting Out For Alfred

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First things first, head on over to The Film Experience for August's "Team Experience" topic du jour - this month the movie-loving hive-mind of TFE is taking a look at "The Most Memorable Performances in Hitchcock's Films." It's Hitch's birthday in a few days, you see. As Amir points out in his as always excellent introduction, Hitch's legacy is one of The Director (The Auteur) above all - he famously likened actors to cattle, dull lumbering things just to be placed where he needs them and not listened to. Course as with all things Hitch his tongue was pretty well up in his cheek, and all you need to do is look at the endlessly fascinating acting going on in his filmography to know twasn't quite so simple as all that. 

Indeed in coming up with my own list I faced a self-structured quandary. There was one list I could make, the one with the Jimmy Stewarts and the Cary Grants and the mile-high pile of blondes. All entirely worthy mind you, and most of them made it into TFE's entirely worthy communal list. I can't knock a single one of the ones over there - they are all glorious and make my world go round.

But I figured you know what, as much as I have a "thing," Alfred Hitchcock is my "thing" - I know these movies like the front of my hands. Top to bottom and every nook and cranny. And so I took a big red marker (well a mental one, anyway) and slashed it right through all of the big fancy-pants movie stars. My personal list was gonna be one for the other folks. Three of my "other folks" actually did break the communal top ten, but let's have a look-see at all's I picked, eh? I love this list so much, by the way. It brings me immense joy.

10. Patricia Hitchcock, Psycho - Even though her father infamously cast her as "Chubby Bannister" in her very first acting role, in order to dissuade her from the business, she still acted for him two more times (actually if you count the TV series it's twelve more times!) and so this placement was for all her work with him. I think she's always terrific in his movies, whether she's nearly being strangled to death just for wearing glasses in Strangers on a Train or being an irritating blabbermouth in Stage Fright, or perhaps most memorably in Psycho embodying so well that annoying co-worker who won't stop jabbering in your ear until you simply must do something drastic to get the hell outta there, wedding day tranquilizers be damned.

9. Claude Rains, Notorious - Mr. Rains placed 8th on the big list, much to my delight - even though he was a bigger star and in a bigger role than I was trying to focus on with my own list I had to shove him in just to make sure he got some love in case he got stepped by, because good lord he's a terrible man doing terrible things in Notorious and yet he manages to totally and completely break your heart while doing it.

8. Brenda de Banzie, The Man Who Knew Too Much - Speaking of sympathy for the devils, which is all over this list (and Hitch's films, natch) the magic that de Banzie works on her kidnapping villainness is sturdy magic indeed - it's tremendously moving to watch as her heart melts for the little boy thrust into her care and she sacrifices herself for him and his safety in the end.

7. Suzanne Pleshette, The Birds - Oh poor poor Annie. Rejected by Mitch and living in the shadows of his life, watching with bemused sadness as the Chirpy Colorful Thing breezes into town to snatch him away for good, all she can do is puff on a cigarette and sigh, right before having her face clawed off. Pleshette makes the stakes in The Birds matter - she casts an air of tragedy over it all. (See the Ways Not To Die post dedicated to her here.)

6. Patricia Collinge, Shadow of a Doubt - Speaking of deep deep sadnesses, doesn't Collinge just grab hold of the heart in your chest and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until you just can't take it any more? She makes this simple woman not a joke but a bastion of All Good Things - all she wants is warmth and happiness, a home filled with love, but you can sense her fragility is learned - she's been confronted by her brother's horrors before, no doubt, and is right at her tipping point. And so the stakes in Doubt become immense, in the rescuing of this sad woman's last vestiges of happiness, and keeping out the dark. Collinge makes it matter more than you can nearly stand.

5. Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train - Alright alright so he's fussy and annoying and just awful, plus he's totally prone to murder or whatever, but I still want to be Bruno Anthony sometimes. So gleefully assured of who he is and what he wants - and what he wants is footsie with Farley Granger, which I totally get. Walker's just divine in the part, able to swing from funny to crazy-eyed scary on a dime. Or a monogrammed lighter, even.

4. Judith Anderson, Rebecca - And now for another Queer Creep, hooray! I just re-watched this movie last night and while I've come to appreciate the parts where Anderson's no on-screen more than I used to, it's the parts where Anderson's on-screen where this movie just soars. She makes Mrs. Danvers thrum with palpable distaste - every word, even when whispered, sounds half a beat away from being fully spat right in Joan Fontaine's face. And her body language, the way she glides around ensconced in the curtains - she's a distinctly feminine threat, sexual even, and primed to burn it all to the ground. A real terror.

3. Joseph Cotten, Shadow of a Doubt - While not necessarily "gay" per se (although you could convince me of it quite easily) Cotten makes Uncle Charlie a "queer creep" in the sense that his sexuality is so strangled it's become nothing but rage and hate and mayhaps a dash of incest. He courts not with flowers but with broken steps and car exhaust. Cotten makes Charlie's beyond warped love for his niece a thrilling dare, a duke-it-out over this one specific family and therefore The Family, writ large. He squirms into that home like curdled milk oozing through the cracks.

2. Thelma Ritter, Rear Window - What can I possibly say about Thelma Ritter in Rear Window? That the way she delivers every single line of dialogue handed to her makes every single line of dialogue handed to her something so alive and funny and awesome that it's all right there etched in stone in The Book Of Movie Lines I Will Be Quoting Until The Day I Die? Yeah, that. And while I'm at it I might as well spread some common sense on the bread - Thelma Ritter ought to be the first person we clone, one Stella for everybody, because how does anything ever get done without her?

1. Leopoldine Konstantin, Notorious - Okay so right off the bat I don't mean to belittle this performance by saying this (or the list as a whole, now that I think of it) but here's where I admit that I was a little bit drunk when I made this list, and in my tipsy state I became rambunctiously enamored with the remembrance of Leopoldine Konstantin in Notorious to the detriment of all else in my affection's wake. It's just, there's this scene where her son, played by the previously regaled Claude Rains, comes to wake her to tell her that he has discovered the terrible truth about his bride, namely that she's a spy for the Americans working towards his (and therefore his mother's) doom. Madame Sebastien, perfectly monikered Madame Sebastien, sits up, her hair in the sternest most frightening braid ever assembled, coiled around her like a whip or an alien's scorpion-like killing appendage, and she lights a cigarette in the single greatest fluid yet determined manner that has ever been seen. I don't mean the greatest that was just captured on film. I mean out of all the times people have lit cigarettes in all of human history, this is the best looking most perfect instance, the Platonic Ideal of Lighting Up, bar none. I feel completely safe in saying that. For that, all the awards.

Special Mention: I don't know how this happened (perhaps it was the booze) but I feel terrible that Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo, who I adore as Midge, poor poor Midge, totally slipped my mind. I'm as bad as that bastard Scottie, staring off into space as she tries and fails to keep me grounded.

For Hitch's birthday back in 2010 I did a list of eleven things off of the top of my head that I loved about the man's movies, and a couple of these things were up in there too, so check that out if you can't get enough. And first things last, once more, do click on over and read the communal list at The Film Experience. Everybody's write-ups on the performances are spectacular.

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