THE trouble with the movies is that they so seldom get below the surface of a story and its characters, that their whole is rarely as good as the parts, and the characters of their players—Gary Cooper or Margaret Sullavan, for instance—are usually more powerful than the characters they play. The movies don’t have any Tom Joneses, Raskolnikovs or Natashas. What you remember about Sergeant York is Gary Cooper. Script writing has been rare that could make the whole equal to its good parts, as were “Alice Adams,” “Wuthering Heights” and “The Lady Vanishes.” The reason I mention this now—it being always true—is that I have seen four movies in the last week dealing with the resistance to Nazism in the conquered countries, none of which came anywhere near to revealing the nature of such resistance.
They missed the point because they were governed by the traditional attitude of characters subordinated to plot. There are three fundamentals of a traditional movie plot: it is composed of spectacular events, the spectacular part is all that’s shown of the event, the events run on one level only, and in one direction as far as time is concerned (the flashback is a beginning toward breaking down this attitude, but it too has become stylized).
It is the use of the literary writer’s technique of storytelling (rather than a technique developed especially for movies) which results in scripts that miss the essential fact that the camera medium is enormously fluid: having a voice, eyes and legs, it is more fluid than any other medium. Like the mind, it is physically unbounded and can paint; the least thing mentally ill Charlotte did in “Now, Voyager” was to suffer the symptoms of mental illness; the least thing first baseman Lou Gehrig did in “Pride of the Yankees” was to play first base. Necessarily, when so little real character is written into their roles, the actual personalities of Sanders, Davis and Cooper must make up the difference.
“Shadow of a Doubt” is an example of what the movies might do in breaking with the idea that the story is more important than the movie. It was not the plot that Hitchcock projected, it was the sense of doubt seeping through a certain number of people. He was solely concerned with their behavior and effect on one another as shown by their actions within this doubt. Hitchcock has stopped being dictated to by the necessities of a plot, as he was in “Foreign Correspondent,” and is filling his movies with what he is really interested in, and what is interesting to an audience—the use of the camera to tell more about people and a situation than that a muddle arose and was straightened out at the end.
April 19, 1943