Alfred Hitchcock as a World War II Filmmaker

aka ecarle.

One very interesting thing about how and when Alfred Hitchcock came along in FILM history is when he came along in WORLD history: both before, during, and immediately after WWII. Hence , a significant slice of his films had Nazis as villains(and easy villains they are) WHILE THE WAR WAS ON(mostly.) Whereas the Nazis as villains in Raiders of the Lost Ark were "historical and long vanquished" the Nazis during Hitchcock's time were very real and possibly poised to win and take over the world. If that happened, Hitchcock surely would have been executed for his "propaganda":

The Lady Vanishes(be careful, England, the Nazis are coming)
Foreign Correspondent(be careful, America, the Nazis are coming)
Saboteur(be careful, America, the Nazis are already among us)
Lifeboat(be careful, everybody -- you must join together to defeat the Nazis)
Notorious(be careful, everybody - the Nazis moved to Rio and they want to come back with nukes.)

That's a lot of Hitchcock's films.

Came the Cold War and the shift to Communism as the threat, Hitchcock couldn't name the Communists as the bad guys in Man Who Knew Too Much '56 or North by Northwest. One reason was that Hollywood was being torn apart via the anti-Communist Congressional investigations. "The Man Who Knew Too Much '56" was intended to be about Hungary trying to break from Russia, but it was turned into a mythical country that might as well have been the Marx Brothers Freedonia.

Came the 60s, lots of movies were NAMING the Communist countries as villain countries, but there were left wing sentiments among American critics and so when Hitchocck made "Topaz" in 1969 with Castro named as a villain -- it didn't quite play in a time when students were wearing Che Guevera tee-shirts.

Some of the bad reviews for Torn Curtain(about the Iron Curtain dividing East and West Germany) and Topaz (about the Cuban Missile Crisis) came from leftist critics who "dug" Castro and maybe Russia(and East Germany) a little bit too. Hitchcock stuck by his guns: totalitarianism was something to be fought from any source.

The problem with the turn of the tide from Nazism to Communism was that Hitchcock's bread and butter -- the spy film -- suddenly became controversial. Even James Bond shifted from the Russians as villains(via SMERSH) to an international organized crime group called SPECTRE.

Hitchcock eventually figured this out and his final two films -- Frenzy and Family Plot --weren't about spies at all.

But Hitchcock's historic run through "the movies before, during and after World War II" had a coda decades later: Hitchocck had been assigned to collect and assemble footage by the Allies of what they found at the WWII Concentration Camps in Germany. This became a bleak documentary in the 21st Century and a reminder that "man's inhumanity to man"(as demonstrated in not only Hitchcock's war films but his films about brutal killers such as Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Psycho and Frenzy) had a very real-life counterpart.