14. Robyn Hitchcock, I Often Dream of Trains (1984)

[2019 review here]

I have to admit most of the albums on this countdown list are flawed one way or another—bum tracks mainly, sometimes swamping the good stuff (see Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday, down at #47, where you’re better off just getting “I Feel Love” as a single). But Robyn Hitchcock’s third solo album I Often Dream of Trains may be the exception—a nearly perfect album start to finish, bracketed by the lovely piano instrumental “Nocturne” (“Prelude” and “Demise”). The album tends to stay within itself yet exceeds all goals. It probably belongs higher on this list but it’s too late for that now. Like Todd Rundgren on A Wizard, a True Star, the set finds one person alone in the studio with his thoughts. James Fletcher plays saxophone on one song (“Flavor of Night”), Chris Cox plays bass on one other (“Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus”). The rest is Hitchcock, often overdubbing intricate and beautiful harmonies on the vocals. The mood is far more austere and elegiac than Rundgren’s. Hitchcock’s piano and acoustic guitar are a simple, hushed accompaniment to his prolific casual flights of surreal lyrics, all packed up with semi-opaque psychotherapy-related meaning. Hitchcock’s weird scenes and people, his blurring the lines of mental illness and treating death candidly as an interesting sideshow, all of it somehow often hilariously funny—they are given center stage where they arguably belong in his work. Most of it has been accompanied by bands. I Often Dream of Trains is psychedelic in the way many of these songs can function as earworms, ringing in your brain for days, where the strange words enable the strange, chilly way of thinking to emerge. This music is filled with dread yet equally full of elfin and beguiling touches.

The ghost of perhaps even Sigmund Freud hovers over these proceedings, from the title forward. The novelty song “Uncorrected Personality Traits,” a 1:46 a cappella number, may be the single purest distillation here. But you must be prepared to endure an epic earworm of Kars 4 Kids proportions. It reminds me in many ways of Joni Mitchell’s “Twisted,” also an earworm. But it’s so twisted it makes “Twisted” look like a reusable drinking straw. Hit it, Robyn: “Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child / May prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult / Lack of involvement with the father, or overinvolvement with the mother / Can result in lack of ability to relate to sexual peers.” The program for life is found in the bridge: “The spoiled baby grows into / The escapist teenager who’s / The adult alcoholic who’s / The middle-aged suicide. / (Oy!).” Extra points for prescience, recognizing and acknowledging transsexuality in various ways, tongue in cheek, daffy and gentle: “Even Marilyn Monroe was a man, but this tends to get overlooked / By our mother-fixated, overweight, sexist media.” Wut? That’s just one song on this original set of 14 so I’ll leave off about it now. “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl” is another that hits similarly. Many more tracks here are warm evocations one way or another, such as “Cathedral” and “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” with their obvious gospel overtones. “Trams of Old London” indulges a wry nostalgia that feels like Dickens. I Often Dream of Trains is largely a comfortable album, standing up well to daily listens. The stranger songs are often the shortest, with longer songs that follow, letting your brain marinate, deceptively, as when “Uncorrected Personality Traits” is followed by “Sounds Great When You’re Dead.” As I say, some of the greatest pleasures here come hours and days later, when the album is only playing in your head. Hitchcock has made a good number of albums in a long career, but this one still sounds like the best to me. And even after all these years it still has new things to disclose too. Play in darkened rooms, in winter, with lava lamps.

17. Soft Boys, Underwater Moonlight (1980)

[2012 review here, 2012 review of “I Wanna Destroy You” here]

There’s so much sleaze on the second album by the Soft Boys (Robyn Hitchcock, Kimberley Rew, Mathew Seligman, and Morris Windsor) that I had to keep checking the genre designations to make sure I was where I belonged: “neo-psychedelia, post-punk, new wave, psychedelic pop, jangle pop, power pop” (Wikipedia). Underwater Moonlight is full of absolute banging rockers, kicking off with the guided missile of “I Wanna Destroy You.” That, more than its psychedelic strains, is more likely the main reason it’s one of those albums that didn’t sell well but started a million bands. The head trips lie more in the words—Hitchcock was a student of Syd Barrett and loved him almost as much as I love Hitchcock. The tracks here resemble love songs, but the twists have been torqued nearly to breaking point—“I wanna destroy you” is also the psychic mission statement for the album. It’s followed by “Kingdom of Love,” where “You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching out under my chin / Now there's tiny insects showing through / And all them tiny insects look like you.” You don’t need a lyric sheet to catch the main themes. Hitchcock enunciates them well and they are pushed way up in the mix. An unsettling element of sexual and/or reproductive urge is often bubbling under these proceedings in uncomfortable ways. Did I say bubbling under? The longest song on the album is “I Got the Hots for You” and the one song with songwriting credit for the whole band is “Old Pervert.” The thing is, these elements—the excellent 2 guitars bass drums rock band and the weird sex notes in the words—are perfectly balanced, so much so that when the set erupts at the two-thirds point with an instrumental, “You’ll Have to Go Sideways,” it’s an orgasmic blast of thrilling energy that defines the whole project. Or at least gives us a moment off from love songs like “Insanely Jealous,” about a stalker. It reminds me of what the Pretenders did on their first album (also 1980), five songs in with “Space Invader.” Sometimes an instrumental says it all, and so it is here as far as the primo band goes. “Sideways” is followed by “Old Pervert,” about a guy who lives under a bridge and whispers to girls passing by. Wrenching, to say the least. Underwater Moonlight is an odd and perverse mix but somehow it works quite well at blowing the mind. Kimberley Rew would eventually move on to Katrina & the Waves, which doesn’t have much to do with psychedelics but a lot to do with adjacent pop (sunshine). Hitchcock, solo, with bands he put together the Egyptians and Venus 3, and in collaboration with many others, would totter down his gnomic surreal pathways always, staying true thus to the psychedelic banner, and delivering of himself at least one more stone classic.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

USA, 101 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook, Patricia Highsmith, Ben Hecht

Photography: Robert Burks

Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Editor: William H. Ziegler

Cast: Robert Walker, Farley Granger, Patricia Hitchcock, Kasey Rogers, Marion Lorne, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Howard St. John, Jonathan Hale

In director Alfred Hitchcock’s rogue’s gallery pantheon of woman-hating psychopaths—which includes at least Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker as Bruno Antony here in Strangers on a Train, and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho—Walker is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. I would not put him last in any stack-ranking and might put him first. Everyone knows the story in Strangers on a Train from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt”: “Met a stranger on a train / ... He said / ‘You take me and I’ll be you’ / ‘You kill him and I’ll kill her.’” Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) becomes the target of convenience in Antony’s plot for the perfect murder(s). Antony wants to rid himself of his judgmental tycoon father and save his inheritance too. He offers to kill Haines’s troublesome wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, billed as Laura Elliott), who won’t give him a divorce now that she knows he’s involved with a senator’s daughter. Miriam is also pregnant by another man. Antony says his plan is perfect because no one can connect the murderers to their victims. Haines, who has indeed just met Antony on a train, takes it as an unpleasant joke and thinks no more of it. Then Miriam turns up dead, strangled to death in a lover’s lane near an amusement park. And now Haines begins hearing from Antony about what he needs to know to murder Antony’s father.

Miriam is killed surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the idea comes up—barely 20 minutes into the movie. It’s practically a shock to the system. Miriam and the amusement park and the two men she is on a date with are lurid and wanton and the whole scene seems made to order for murder if not orgies of violence. Once the deed is done the boom increasingly lowers on Haines, who doesn’t know how to get out of the mess and instinctively tries to hide that he knows Antony at all—which of course does not work. Antony has ways, as a D.C. party scene shows, of insinuating himself into the life of Haines and the senator’s family. Granger plays Haines like a cornered rat, sweating and licking his lips in anxiety and trying to square the various points of guilt that are hemming him in. Inevitably the movie ends up back at the amusement park, whose ambience has not improved any.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

USA, 108 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, Gordon McDonell
Photography: Joseph A. Valentine
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: Milton Carruth
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, Hume Cronyn, Macdonald Carey, Wallace Ford, Edna May Wonacott

In my attempts to make the case that Fritz Lang's M is flawed and overrated, too much a propaganda exercise pushing for return of a death penalty in Germany in the early '30s—hey, we all have our blind spots—I used to counter claims it was the best serial killer movie of all time by calling attention to Shadow of a Doubt, director Alfred Hitchcock's first movie set exclusively in the US and also reportedly his own favorite of all the movies he made. In 1986, Henry made the whole argument moot, of course (though not all fans of M see it that way), and in hindsight I would have to say that Hitchcock's conception of a serial killer and his society is nearly as romanticized and off-key as M, though both movies also have many things right about the curious brutal phenomenon of modern life.

M focuses on the sexual perversion, general skulking pathetic qualities, and the heinousness of the crimes, preying on children, whereas Shadow of a Doubt makes Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten, typically great even in an unusual role for him) more of a preening Nietzschean superman type, openly, almost compulsively scornful of social institutions such as banks and churches. A soul of darkness. He's the one you'd think more likely to send postcards to newspapers and police. But Uncle Charlie is actually a good deal more circumspect and ultimately perhaps rational, going to great pains to hide his identity and in many ways committing his crimes for the money. He's closer to Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley than Jack the Ripper. The genius here is to set this serial killer down in the middle of California small-town Leave it to Beaver land.

Fegmania! (1985)

Robyn Hitchcock's follow-on to I Often Dream of Trains was a kick in the season of Talking Heads' Little Creatures, Danny & Dusty's Lost Weekend, and the Knitters' first. For one thing Hitchcock was playing with a band again—the Egyptians, 60% of which actually used to be Soft Boys, so really kind of back to that, though I think Kimberly Rew must be missed because something is missing. Or, anyway, this gets close to the best of the Soft Boys only infrequently and in short bursts. Compared to Hitchcock's previous solo outing, it feels slightly muddied with rehearsal, collaboration, and group dynamics, erasing much of the sharp edge of Trains. It's still the zany Hitchcock eight-ball stream of conscious blab—note title, a made-up word—zinging out from realms and quarters of where the fuck. The song by which Fegmania! may be best known is "My Wife and My Dead Wife," which you should be able to tell right away is working the surrealism beat again. "My wife and my dead wife / Am I the only one that sees her?" he cries plaintively on the chorus. One theory is that he's in a relationship but haunted by another, so "metaphorical." Another is that he's insane, so "literal." And still another is that it's true and right in an inscrutably personal way, so "poetic." I'm opting for the third as a general safe bet for all best outcomes. The song is also funny because it's sung a bit like a predicament episode of some sitcom, with the feeling somewhere between Lars and the Real Girl and the heartrending episodes of The Walking Dead. But it must be said that it also flirts dangerously with an eerily disaffected misogyny. I thought the best songs were on the second side, the ones I put on tapes—still associate this one with vinyl and cassette tapes and such—"The Man With the Lightbulb Head," "Glass," and "Heaven," which veer from surreal radio theater slapstick horror to elysian fields and cloudy mountaintop spiritual vistas. "Glass" is suffused with sadness because it always breaks and "Heaven" approximates its namesake the best way a rock band can, by playing together so carefully and letting the song carry everything away. In fact, it's one of the better songs named "Heaven."

I Often Dream of Trains (1984)

When you hear all about the superiorities of analog versus digital recording, how the sound of analog is warmer, deeper, fuller, best heard on vinyl, I still don't put much credence in it. But somehow I suspect it might help explain Robyn Hitchcock's gem of a Freudian catharsis, a solo album in the Todd Rundgren and Prince sense, meaning that it's mostly just Hitchcock multi-tracking piano, acoustic guitar, and vocals. I'm skeptical about the analog/vinyl theory because, for example, I've been listening to I Often Dream of Trains on CD and other digital formats since the '90s, when my turntable went by the wayside. It always sounds warm, deep, and full. It's an album for winter, late night, a fire, a tab of acid, cocoa. The icy dignity of Hitchcock's piano chording and his high holy vocal harmonies—"Trams of Old London" so beautiful—are punctured by his typically loony word porridge, which is often less charming goofball free association and more slightly distressing vomitus from the unconscious. But wait, it's a joke, right? The uncertainty makes it work. Take "Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus," an impressive gospel-grounded number that works the same anti-irony approach musically as the Velvet Underground's "Jesus," posing on the one hand as a plaintive cry to God's mercy for your future hymnal consideration. But there's something off about the words: "Dyin' of starvation in the gutter ... / Or alcoholic poisoning, in the toilet of my choice ... / Fried to death in seconds by the Russians." Eventually it works up to: "If you believe in nothing, honey, it believes in you." This rage is not exactly the anti-irony approach to gospel of the Velvets.

Another thematic element is the sound of early-'70s John Lennon ("Flavour of Night" all but a Plastic Ono Band outtake) and it can also feel like Al Stewart's id on the loose. Hitchcock's weird words must be taken as surreal. I think there's a good deal of humor to them as well but the point where they turn from jokes into something more serious, those things out of the unconscious that surrealists are forever exploring, the lines are gray and blurred. Consider "Uncorrected Personality Traits," the terrible earworm and song you are likely doomed to live with inside your head for the rest of your life, along with the 1-877-Kars4Kids radio ad. It's just Hitchcock's voice, the insanely catchy nursery rhyme melody, and Freud truisms: "Lack of involvement with the father, or over-involvement with the mother / Can result in lack of ability to relate to sexual fears, and in homosexual / ... If you give in to them / Every time they cry / They will become little tyrants / But they won't remember why / ... The spoiled baby grows into / The escapist teenager who's / The adult alcoholic who's / The middle-aged suicide (oy)." And all together one more time: "Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child may prove to / Be ugly in a fully grown adult." I love this song and hate it and grudgingly respect it and think it's brilliant all at the same time. Some of Hitchcock's riffs on sexuality, notably transsexuals ("even Marilyn Monroe was a man"), feel at least a little problematic now, if presciently open. This also applies to "Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl" (why the wish? "so I could ROOT myself in the shower," though the lyric sheet says "wreck" rather than "root" ... actually I don't know what it means either way but calling attention to pretty girls in the shower for no particular reason is I guess what's worrying me). There was always a sense with Hitchcock then, which I am still willing to extend to him now, that he's more like another daffy rolling wordsmith in debt to Bob Dylan and essentially harmless. But these songs don't always feel harmless, and that's one of the album's enduring strong points.

Notorious (1946)

USA, 101 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Ben Hecht, Alfred Hitchcock, John Taintor Foote, Clifford Odets
Photography: Ted Tetzlaff
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: Theron Warth
Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, Leopoldine Konstantin, Reinhold Schunzel, Ivan Triesault, E.A. Krumschmidt

I count Notorious as one of director and cowriter Alfred Hitchcock's best, though time has marred it some for rancid attitudes. It's another movie from 1946 that is not entirely sure World War II is over, and still measuring the effects. It's a spy story but full of Hitchcock's ingenious tricks, with a nicely matched pair of glamorous performances in Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman, the disgraced daughter of a German-American Nazi given a chance to redeem herself on an undercover assignment—she is this movie's alarming drunk—and Cary Grant as Devlin, her handler. They are on the track of Nazis who are hiding out in South America and unnaturally fascinated with uranium. (As a matter of historical interest, the American CIA did not exist until 1948, when it was created under the direction of former Nazis by President Truman.)

But this movie and the US spy agency in it are from 1946, and if things are murky in terms of the ongoing perceived threat from German Nazis, they are perfectly clear in terms of doing right things. Alicia Huberman drinks like a fish and pretends to be cynical about everything, but secret recordings reveal that she despised her father's Nazi sympathies and treasonous actions and she actually loves America—loves it fiercely. Devlin shows up shortly after her father is found guilty and sentenced to prison, at the beginning of the picture, and recruits her for the assignment. At first all they know is that it is in Rio de Janeiro. While they wait for the specific details, of course they have a beautiful romance. But then comes the assignment.

"An Invitation to the Hunt" (1960)

George Hitchcock, author of the short story "An Invitation to the Hunt," is no relation to Alfred, though I discovered the story originally in one of Alfred's story collections. George is listed in Wikipedia as an actor, poet, playwright, teacher, labor activist, publisher, and painter (though not to be confused with George Hitchcock the Rhode Island artist). He was the editorial and publishing force behind Kayak, a poetry magazine based in San Francisco and then a book publisher, putting work into print by Margaret Atwood, Robert Bly, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver, and many others. He died in 2010 at the age of 96.

Though "An Invitation to the Hunt" has many elements of genre commercial product, it was published first in a literary magazine called the San Francisco Review, which also published Albert Camus, Cynthia Ozick, and others. (Note: much of this from internet sources.) So the story appears to come with a certain literary pedigree. This is also apparent in the quality of its language and its precision. Still, in many ways it's also typical of the rote shock twist endings popular in mystery, science fiction, and other short stories and TV shows at the time. "An Invitation to the Hunt" is now obscure. It's not online and can only be found in a few out-of-print anthologies, with titles that give you the drift: When Evil Wakes, Realms of Darkness, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories My Mother Never Told Me. That's most of what I know about this story and author.

For this piece, it's obviously necessary to give away the ending, so if that's a problem you can come on back and revisit this piece a few weeks from now or whenever you like after you read the story. I'll be here.

Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015)

Being literal-minded, I halfway expected this documentary to be reenactments of passages from the book first published in 1966, which was composed of a memorable and influential series of interviews conducted by Francois Truffaut in 1962 of Alfred Hitchcock. Well, this movie is about the book, but mostly only as an excuse for director, cowriter, and film maven Kent Jones to work up wonderful appreciations of their work as filmmakers (mostly Hitchcock). My favorite parts were the long sections on Vertigo and Psycho, carried by an army of usual-suspects talking heads: Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Olivier Assayas, Richard Linklater, David Fincher, Paul Schrader, etc., etc. I loved it, especially on Vertigo, where it affirms for me again how strange and powerful that particular movie is—how hard it is even to describe what it is. A woman's picture? This documentary sets up a wonderful clip of the Vertigo reveal shot, glowing in the green of the hotel's neon sign, and it's fun to feel like you're seeing it in the company of people at least as gobsmacked. There are clips from all eras of Hitchcock pictures, from the silent and early talkies into his late failures. It's essay filmmaking in my favorite form—about filmmaking. The clips are great, nicely picked and used. The interview subjects are great too, sympathetic and knowledgeable. The Truffaut book and connection is interesting as well. There are some nice clips from The 400 Blows and other Truffaut pictures. There's also audio from the week-long interview sessions, which were conducted via a translator. All-day sessions must mean there are hours of audio. What we hear is often through the muddled filter of both subtitles and the translator. Reviewing it all must have been a herculean task, though it's exciting to hear both of their recognizable voices. The audio clips tend to be overly set up with heartwarming tales of the connection and lasting bond between the two (which at least have the advantage of being apparently true). Sometimes it starts to feel like a celebration at one remove—a celebration of Truffaut's celebration of Hitchcock—and sometimes it tramples Truffaut a little getting to Hitchcock. That's probably the way it should be, and a straightforward appreciation of Hitchcock might not have had as much of a pitch intrigue for producers as something to do with the book: the friendship that came of the interview, the sad proximity of their deaths, only four years apart, though Truffaut was a much younger man, their shared preoccupations with movies and moviemaking. Well, why not? I'll take those good sections any way I can get them because they're just about perfect. It also does a nice job on some of the Hitchcock titles from the '30s, such as the original Man Who Knew Too Much, which this picture calls the first true Hitchcock movie. There's also a nice discussion of The Wrong Man, another strong outing from the '50s. This is a great show.

North by Northwest (1959)

USA, 136 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Photography: Robert Burks
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau, Jessie Royce Landis, Adam Williams, Edward Platt

Something about North by Northwest epitomizes for me everything that is great about movies. It has always seemed to exist outside of time somehow, whirling out of my undifferentiated past to make the bill on repertory house double features, brash and colorful and vivid as ever, every time. In fact, for the longest time I was surprised again and again to learn that it came out so late in the decade, when it seems to belong more in the mid- or early '50s—indeed, in the gusto with which Cary Grant leads the cast, the strapping good spirits of it, it belongs even perhaps all the way back to wartime joie di vivre, when sunny optimism ruled the day.

Yet at the same time, arriving in the same year as the birth control bill, North by Northwest is at pains to establish its cheesy sexual sophistication bona fides. It's liberally sprinkled with lines like, "Now what could a man do with his clothes off for 20 minutes?" and has a famously lascivious last shot. The plot, in fact, turns on a frank and very delicate issue of sexual ethics—that is, within an elaborate and fanciful context of Cold War spy games. Underneath that, the motivations are as corny as anything Frank Capra ever did. As if to underline the point, the movie is equally liberally sprinkled with potent and modern symbols (for 1959) of apple-pie America: the United Nations General Assembling Building in New York, a cross-continental train trip, and ultimately a visit to Mount Rushmore in western South Dakota. Among other things it's a tourist's-eyes view of America, like in Lolita.

Soft Boys, "I Wanna Destroy You" (1980)

(listen)

The rockin' side of Robyn Hitchcock often comes as a bit of a surprise in these old Soft Boys songs—could it be that Kimberly Rew has more influence than I know? Dunno. But the big attack of this is formally up to the implications of the title. It's reaching for ringing anthemic heights, however ironically, and hits some nice peaks, particularly at the top of their lungs, in harmony. Hitchcock is speaking metaphorically, of course, as he typically does, but he's also serious that he wants to destroy you. Has he positioned himself with yippies attempting to levitate the Pentagon, feeble blows against the empire, making small cracks in the foundation, some figment of Greil Marcus research streaming from past centuries into Johnny Rotten and the (no) future? More likely he's mad at a girl, who may not even know he exists at all, although the general drift is more on the lines of really bummed about war: "They feed your pride with boredom / And they lead you on to war." That was a popular route at the time, with various world events going on such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. hostages held in Iran, and general Cold War strains. You could get a lot of aggression out by being against war. And who isn't against war (besides Dick Cheney)? But the capper sounds more like a spurned lover: "And when I have destroyed you / I'll come picking at your bone / And you won't have a single item / Left to call your own." And then the band shakes up the whole house knocking it down on the way out. This is a good way to construct rock songs.

North by Northwest (1959)

#10: North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

Alfred Hitchcock looms large for me as the film director who helped me understand what a film director is in the first place—I guess I used to think that a bunch of actors more or less got together and recited lines and, oh yeah, somebody must have brought a camera too. But I started figuring out how much more there was to it when I noticed that the episodes of the Hitchcock TV show actually directed by Hitchcock were noticeably better. (As a kid I was into the whole brand—watched the show, subscribed to the magazine, and read many of the books of stories, which is where I first encountered, among many others, Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life.") On the repertory theater circuit, the Hitchcock double features were always must-sees for me, most of them worth seeing again and again, simply because he was the director I could most rely on to deliver the engaging story that grabbed hold and didn't let go.

Later, in film classes and random reading, I came to better understand the kinds of deeper themes with which he was playing—the insinuations of paranoia and control in people's lives, the sly mockery of convention, and texturing it all with a disquieting, even creepy fear of women—alongside the clockwork technical aspects, which are most manifest in his gimmick movies, such as Rope, with its ostensible one long take (although you will notice that it does have a handful of old-fashioned cuts), or Rear Window, which is entirely set in a small studio apartment. I hasten to add that I count even his gimmick movies as worthwhile, sometimes even among his best, such as Rear Window (and also that it's probably possible to make an argument that all of his movies are gimmick movies).

Sonic Youth, "Shadow of a Doubt" (1986)

(listen)

This fascinating sound sculpture is mysteriously focused on Alfred Hitchcock movies—named after one, with plot points from at least one more woven into the whisper-chant from Kim Gordon. In my YouTube travels I found a nice homemade video (here), made out of this song and scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It is an inspired mashup as indeed is this song itself, potent with popular culture imagery and currents. Yes, the strange tunings, it's always the strange tunings with Sonic Youth. I love them, they always sound evocative and insinuating and lovely to me. I'm convinced it's the basis more than anything else of where people fall on this band. Here it is distilled to one of its purest forms, jewel-hard and gleaming. Compare "Providence" on Daydream Nation. As musique concrete the open spaces are similar but the sense of a narrative is stronger in "Providence." In "Shadow of a Doubt" there is only the sense that a narrative might exist. Or narrative itself—the sense that narrative might exist. "I swear I didn't mean it / I swear it wasn't meant to be / Must a been a dream ... He said / 'You take me and I'll be you' / 'You kill him and I'll kill her' / Kiss me." This is a similar way of looking at things to what one finds in David Lynch movies, dreams and fragments and an idea that narrative might exist, which is probably why the video mashup works so nicely. To close the loop on this, you also find this way of looking at things in Alfred Hitchcock pictures, notably Vertigo, which doesn't so much eschew narrative as grow absent-minded about its existence, distracted by ... something. And Sonic Youth wraps it all up in a beautiful strange noise that goes down easy and lingers to effect. It's as if they knew, as I said once in another context (here). And that guy doing the mashup? Him too.

Rear Window (1954)

USA, 112 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: John Michael Hayes, Cornell Woolrich
Photography: Robert Burks
Music: Franz Waxman
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy, Sara Berner, Frank Cady, Jesslyn Fax, Rand Harper, Havis Davenport, Irene Winston

To say that Rear Window is Alfred Hitchcock's greatest gimmick movie, with Rope and Lifeboat and the other examples of his playful formal experimentalism embedded throughout his catalog, is to risk reducing and ghettoizing one of his greatest achievements to its self-imposed constraints—in this case, confining all the action to a small apartment and what can be seen from it. It's not just that Rear Window is a dandy (if inevitably somewhat dated) edge-of-the-seat thriller, but also it's so neatly positioned to explore one of Hitchcock's enduring themes, voyeurism and the simultaneous power and impotence of "the gaze," which we take with us to the movies every time we go.

It shouldn't be surprising how good it is—any number of Hitchcock's greatest strengths are in play. It looks good, sounds good, plays like clockwork. It was made in the '50s, when he was arguably at the peak of his various Hollywood powers. It stars James Stewart, perhaps his greatest alter ego (though I'd be inclined to put Cary Grant just a tetch ahead of him on that score), and Grace Kelly, an archetypal Hitchcock blonde (as with any of them, she is required only to hit her marks and get her lines out and anything else is lagniappe; and stiffness appears to be a plus). You almost don't need to know any more than that. The result is a picture that many flatly single out as his best.

Underwater Moonlight (1980)

The second album by the Soft Boys was pure revelation when I finally caught up with it, a few years after Robyn Hitchcock was fully embarked on his solo career, with and without the Egyptians. Already Hitchcock's trademark wry European surrealism cross-pollinated with New Wave sonics is fully on display: "You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching out under my chin / Now there's tiny insects showing through / And all them tiny insects look like you," he casually tosses off on "Kingdom of Love." The album opener, "I Wanna Destroy You" is an ostensible anti-war sentiment that sets out to flatten you with all its might. The expressions of love, as on "I Got the Hots" or "Insanely Jealous" (which reports jealousy of, among other things, the people that you see, the people that aren't me, the places that you go, the people that you know, the hairs upon your back, the spiders in your path) are just barely this side of unhinged. The context, the primary feature, and the raison d'etre all through is crunchy, pile-driving, Brit-derived rock 'n' roll at full propulsion, the sound of guitar strings snapping on open chords played hard, with Hitchcock's adenoidal boarding-school twit vocals riding the top with variously sweet melodies. The original vinyl LP was nearly perfect, one to flip over and over and over. Some 20 years later came a reissue with seven or eight extras (one, a cover of Syd Barrett's "Vegetable Man," had previously appeared on some of the LP editions) and a whole second disc of live performance/rehearsals from the time, known as ...And How it Got There. I'm rarely one to complain about excesses of the things I like, but the reissue has never hit me with the same force as the original, which just means, I suppose, that I need to learn how to apportion my things more carefully. Because actually, taken on a case by case basis, a number of the added tracks are among those I enjoyed most in revisiting the album recently: "Strange," with its eerie and beautiful harmonies and spare arrangement, "Where Are the Prawns?," which rocks a good deal, and "Black Snake Diamond Rock," which also rocks a good deal (and is not to be confused with an early solo album, Black Snake Diamond Röle). This is good stuff, bringing interesting variety to an already impressive set. But the original 10 remain as fresh and weird and potent as the day I first heard them, raving up at will and putting themselves across effortlessly.

Psycho (1960)

USA, 109 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Joseph Stefano, Robert Bloch
Photography: John L. Russell
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland, Frank Albertson, Patricia Hitchcock, Mort Mills

Alfred Hitchcock’s full-tilt stab at horror must have come as something of a shock to those who had grown used to the technicolor antics and capers of all those sparkling Hollywood stars in Hitchcock’s ‘50s productions, whatever weird trails they might have gone down, such as Vertigo. But Psycho remains a classic horror show to this day, one of the pictures most associated with Hitchcock and one by which he may be best remembered. It came at the tail end of arguably his greatest run, after Vertigo and North by Northwest, and it heralded the dawn of the kandy-kolored tangerine dream decade that was to follow with the grit and harsh contrasts of a movie that was black and white on multiple levels to its core.

It takes a number of chances, most notably in the single-minded way it goes for the look and feel of a tawdry low-budget shocker as well as in the relatively brief screen time given to its female lead, Janet Leigh. In many ways, and in spite of its feature length, it operates as a particularly meticulous installment of his TV show, complete with story twists and surprises and a clumsy everything's-all-right-after-all coda, grounded in the reassuring avuncular tones of a professional psychiatrist. Because of those story twists and surprises, and how artfully the picture manages to husband its secrets, I feel obligated at this point to mention that spoilers are ahead.

Vertigo (1958)

USA, 128 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Alec Coppel, Samuel A. Taylor, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Maxwell Anderson
Photography: Robert Burks
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones

It's interesting that Vertigo continues to safely occupy its position as consensus choice for Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece—Psycho has its loud (and persuasive) partisans, of course, and a clutch of other titles might be mentioned for the running as well: Rear Window, North by Northwest, Notorious, The Birds, sometimes even my own two favorites, Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt.

Vertigo was never much of a commercial success, which is neither here nor there in the scheme of things. More interesting for me, in light of its status, is that it's not much of a suspense or mystery film either; more of a melodrama, if anything, and at that doesn't always seem to bear strictly recognizable human motivations. Even as it's said to be far and away Hitchcock's most "personal" film, it occupies a landscape that exists almost entirely in a baffling moral vacuum, a bizarro world of (literally, in some cases) up-is-down norms not always easy to parse.

The 39 Steps (1935)

UK, 86 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Charles Bennett, Ian Hay
Photography: Bernard Knowles
Cast: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, John Laurie, Helen Haye, Frank Cellier, Wylie Watson

Positively straining at the limitations imposed by the stodgy '30s talkie technology, it's probably fair enough to characterize this as a cracking good yarn. Marked by paranoia, murder, intrigue, the usual gang of Hitchcock's mysterious spies, and a setting that sprawls across the UK, from London to Scotland and back again, there's not much you could do to improve the bold strokes of this script—unlikely coincidences, outlandish resolution, and all. It gets off to a brisk start as a strange London music hall performance is interrupted by gunshots. Leaving the venue, Richard Hannay, played by Robert Donat, appears to find himself getting picked up by a Garbo-like woman. played by Lucie Mannheim, who asks if she can go home with him. There she drops hints of an incredible spy plot in which, she says, she has now involved him. He politely feeds and listens to her. It's all quite chaste—we know from earlier Hitchcock fare such as Blackmail that he wasn't afraid to veer toward the sordid if it suited his purpose—and Hannay never believes a word. Later that night she reappears with a knife in her back, clutching a map, and collapses across him (as a gentleman, of course, he had put her up in his bed while he took the living room couch). This would seem to bolster her story, and in any case he's now likely to be accused of the murder, so he does what any sensible character in a Hitchcock film would do: flees, and tries to makes sense of the cryptic clues that she left behind. Along the way he finds any number of close shaves along with true love, neither of which comes without their various difficulties. Will he evade the police? Will he ever get to the bottom of this mystery? What do you think?

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

UK, 98 minutes, silent
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Marie Belloc Lowndes, Eliot Stannard, Alfred Hitchcock
Photography: Gaetano di Ventimiglia, Hal Young
Cast: Ivor Novello, June, Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney

Very few silent movies that you see nowadays, particularly those with the greatest reputations, are ever actually silent—some, such as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, with its score written by Chaplin himself, never were. And when you do happen to see one, the silence becomes positively intrusive, engendering a distracting kind of anxiety, which has to say something for how much music (leaving aside dialogue) contributes to the action of films, or at least our understanding of them now, and also makes one wonder about how the various live accompaniments back in the day colored the perceptions of a single film as it traveled from place to place. This Hitchcock silent, which I saw with its 1999 scoring, is no exception. Even if the music is a bit repetitive and not always synched perfectly to the action, it's charming enough and soothing for me just to have it there. I suppose this is all somewhat off the point. The Lodger is clunky as only a silent film from a director still learning his craft could be. At the same time, it's not hard to recognize the Hitchcock touches that would continue all the way to Psycho and beyond: screaming, terrified dames; a brutal serial killer who roams the streets of London knifing his victims (he strikes on Tuesdays); suspicion, anxiety, mistaken identities, questionable motivations, lust, jealousy, and a cameo by the director. The print I saw, transferred to a DVD for a circa 2004 product, was doubtless restored to some extent but remains old and damaged, losing detail to the point where occasionally faces are hard to make out. But it's worth seeing for anyone even casually interested in Alfred Hitchcock.

Sabotage (1936)

UK, 76 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Charles Bennett, Ian Hay, Helen Simpson, E.V.H. Emmett; based on The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Photography: Bernard Knowles
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder

Hitchcock's work in the '30s, most of it based in the UK, often strikes me as a bit stodgy, if not outright soporific. But I put most of that off on the film technology of the time, particularly the studio-centered requirements of the early sound era for static cameras. Setting that aside, this one seems remarkably modern, its focus on mysterious agents with German accents who infiltrate the UK for purposes of "sabotage" standing in surprisingly well for today's ultra-conservative Islamist agents who infiltrate the U.S. for purposes of "terrorism." (The dictionary definition that opens the movie could apply as well to either term.) More surprising perhaps are its refreshing elements of heartlessness—you will see a bomb handed off for delivery to a young boy who encounters all kinds of nice people along the way, including a friendly street salesman, a kindly woman with a devilish cute puppeh, not to mention a whole freaking parade, even as the clock ticks toward the fatal hour. That's pure Hitchcock. The whole production is beautiful, murky black and white set in high-relief contrast, shot frequently from unexpected angles. If the proceedings here grow occasionally clunky, they are as often enlivened by Hitchcock's burgeoning sensibility, which we would come to know so well in subsequent decades after he had relocated to the U.S.