Disenchanted with Hitchcock

Rating: 5/10 (21 December 2014)

I watched "Rear Window" again last night. Seeing it again only serves to confirm this growing sense I've had for quite a while. It's the feeling that, actually, for all his innovation, Hitchcock, by today's standards was a sloppy, inattentive, rigid and formulaic director. His movies cause me more annoyance than anything else.
The egregious and prolific cinematic "goofs" in this movie are beautifully itemized elsewhere on this site. It was the same sort of embarrassing inattentiveness in "North by Northwest", "The Birds" and many other Hitchcock movies. He would miss little details from scene to scene which are much less frequent in movies directed by today's top-tier counterparts.
Hitchcock's well-known abhorrence for outdoor shots resulted in the creation of painfully artificial indoor sets - to the point of looking rank amateur.
I'm sure he thought his camera angles at critical moments of his movies contributed to the dramatic intensity of the scene: the camera looking down into the shower in "Psycho", the camera looking down again at Stewart as he is approached by Raymond Burr - it gets repeated in several movies. By today's standards, frankly, the shots are rigid, routine, predictable and boring.
Hitchcock's principal actors are interesting which, I suppose, is why he used them again and again. But many of the other relatively minor characters in his movies are wooden, silent, under-developed and under-utilized to the point of being quite dispensable. They are nothing more than interchangeable props: the two thugs in "North by Northwest" for example or the honeymooners in "Rear Window" illustrate my point.
Nope, I've made-up my mind on this: compared to a Spielberg or Ron Howard, Hitchcock, for all of the praise he has received comes across to me as a so-so director who really didn't have the eye for detail and precision required of directors today and expected by their more technically sophisticated audiences.