Hitchcock on Politics in 1972

Internet browsing, I found an interview/profile on Hitchcock from October 29, 1972 by Richard Schickel, then the Life magazine film critic en route to Time. It is is entitled "We're Living In Hitchcock's World, Alright."

As a 1972 profile, this was written in the year of Frenzy, which had come out in June but was still generating ink months later. One thing to remember about Frenzy -- for those of us who lived that year -- is that Hitchcock had rather been "brought out of a recluse's life" to bask in lots of interviews because the movies from Marnie through Topaz had been movies he rather had to hide from...and he took YEARS off between them, self-exiled to his home, his office, and travel.

But Frenzy was a comeback. Schickel here hedges a bit to admit that Frenzy MIGHT not be as good as Hitchcock's best, but contends mainly that the world postulated in Frenzy(and Psycho) is "Hitchcock's World" and that is why the title of the piece is "We're Living in Hitchcock's World, Alright." which had also been Schickel's case in his initial Frenzy review: that we were living in 1972 in a world where horrible things happen all around us and we just move on, impervious to the possibility that everything could fall apart, or the bad people could find us and that(as in Frenzy), our screams would not be heard.

Somewhere in the middle of the interview, Schickel says this of Hitchcock:

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politics represents, to him, “one of the meanest forms of man's attitude toward his fellow man.”

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An interesting quote, I'd say, and a reminder that whatever the organizational needs of a governmental structure -- and of politics to formulate it -- the political trade is, at heart, MEAN. Today's politics has gone a bit further as political opponents seek not only to defeat their foes at the ballot box but to...imprison them, bankrupt them, trace them and their families to their very homes for confrontation.

Politics remains far more horrifying than Psycho or Frenzy.

While the interview was done in 1972...Psycho certainly comes up in it. Perhaps Frenzy was more on point to "urban murders in broad daylight, with unfeeling, not-hearing crowds all around, but Psycho spoke to the fact that our lives could be ended "just like that" by a crazed individual whose only interest is in killing for killing's sake. (See: today's mass shootings -- that Vegas one above all recently.) Schickel also links -- as many have since -- the brutal murders in Psycho, Torn Curtain and Frenzy as expressing Hitchcock's dark view of what human beings are capable of. (Which is why lots of people prefer Rebecca and To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.)

Outside of Hitchcock's "food for thought" comment about politics is this, I think: here is an interview from almost 50 years ago and its overall theme -- how horrible and treacherous the world really is -- remains relevant today.

Even as -- both in 1972 and 2021 -- that theme is NOT relevant. To the extent that most of us will escape the horrors, and do just fine.