I would agree with Ken that Hitch appreciated actors and certainly recognized good acting when encountering it. However, and with reference to the notorious 'cattle remark,' one could argue that Hitch was not really at ease with Hollywood's star system, and in some ways preferred to work with his long-standing character actors in supporting roles. I recently watched Foreign Correspondent again, and two things struck me in particular: in the scenes where the Edmund Gwenn character is trying to bump off the protagonist (Joel McCrea), viewer engagement – as elsewhere in Hitchcock - tends to be on the side of the quite endearing murderer rather than the somewhat flat protagonist. Secondly, as a kind of avant la lettre to Psycho, where the heroine is killed almost halfway through the narrative, in the second half of the film the McCrea character is completely displaced as main protagonist by George Sanders. So one could say that regarding actors and their roles, Hitch liked to go against the grain of Hollywood.
H
> Henry wrote:
>
>> deep-focus/deep staging requires far MORE directorial control than would be the case with analytical editing.
>
> For some reason, Henry's words prompted Mike to launch a gratuitous attack on Alfred Hitchcock:
>
>> hitchcock’s directorial control – of which he was zealous and for which he was famous/notorious – required that actors be treated like cattle, and that only through his putting the pieces together would the meaning emerge [classic kuleshow --- there are many instances in which the actors themselves did not know what a specific required gesture was supposed to represent or mean]
>
> First, surely the above IGNORES the spirit and logic of Henry's observation (which is about deep-focus/deep staging AS OPPOSED TO analytical, Kuleshov-type editing)?
>
> But worse, Mike's statement represents a populist view of Hitchcock that is far from the truth. (More on that in a moment.)
>
> Worse still, Mike couldn't resist a final ad hominem, un-sourced put-down of Hitchcock (note his parenthesis in the following):
>
>> the kind of control henry alludes to in his comment thus has to include control over the actors – or more faith in them [something of which hitchcock had virtually none]
>
> Well I'm sorry, Mike, but it's my understanding that Hitchcock had enormous respect for the majority of the actors with whom he worked. He treated them as professionals - had faith in them - and gave them parameters within which they were free to be and invent their characters, including improvising bits of business that he, Hitchcock, might happily incorporate in his mise-en-scene. There were many far more despotic and far less pleasant directors than Hitchcock, and his ability to pre-conceive an entire film in his head (while still leaving the actors the freedom I have indicated) was a mark of genius, and a valid cinematic methodology. (Read Bill Krohn's 'Hitchcock at Work', for starters.) To my mind, Robert Bresson was just as much or more of a 'tyrant' than Hitchcock.
>
> What does Mike make of this from Bresson about film performers:
>
> 'Models who have become automatic (everything weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty times) and are then dropped in the medium of the events of your film - their relations with the objects and persons around them will be RIGHT, because they will not be THOUGHT.' (Bresson, 'Notes on the Cinematographer', p. 32)
>
> - KM
>
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