Hitchcock/Truffaut Is a Smashing Supplement to Its Source

Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’s documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips. It’s a smashing supplement to Truffaut’s classic study.

It’s a thrill to hear the directors’ voices, recorded fifty years ago. Hitchcock, in that clipped and finicky rumble of his, describes the precise moment in Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart’s character is worked up at last to a full erection. Jones and editor Rachel Reichman layer the talk over the scene itself: Stewart’s frayed-nerve detective Scottie, almost panting in a hotel room lit the green of lime Jell-O, while Kim Novak’s Judy at last ducks out to put her hair up in the manner of the dead woman he loves. To his credit, Hitchcock’s matter-of-fact commentary makes a deliciously sick moment even more so.

But don’t expect many such thorough explications. Hitchcock/Truffaut, which comets through Hitchcock highlights before getting caught up in the gravity of Psycho and Vertigo, is no substitute for the book itself, which examines each of the director’s movies, at some length, from the rarest of perspectives: that of working artists. In that epochal conversation, Truffaut and Hitchcock engaged in an elevated sort of shop talk focused on the techniques chosen by the latter to achieve his artistic ends, whether narrative, visual or psychological.

Accordingly, Truffaut published fascinating shot-by-shot and beat-by-beat examinations of key sequences: Stewart (in the second The Man Who Knew Too Much) confounded that his fingers are streaked with paint from the face of a man murdered in a Marrakech marketplace; Martin Balsam ascending — and then flailing back down — the staircase in Psycho. Jones, too, shows us these scenes, but it’s different to see them on the screen again than it is to regard them on the page, to puzzle out the logic of pacing and cutting in your own mind. Truffaut also reproduces Harold Michelson’s storyboards — laying out the accumulation of ravens on that playground in The Birds, for example — but Hitchcock/Truffaut notes few of the talented souls who worked on these films, more often presenting Hitchcock as a singular visionary than as a technician, craftsman or collaborator.

Jones has assembled today’s directors of note to chip in. They tilt his film from shop talk to awed appreciation, and too many rhapsodize about Hitchcockian generalities rather than the director’s specific intentions and choices in individual films. Some, though, justify the decision to bring in more voices. David Fincher is amusing on the perversity of both Vertigo and its creator’s handling of the actors — whom, speaking to Truffaut, Hitchcock once characterized as “cattle.”

James Gray illuminates the museum scene in Vertigo, and Martin Scorsese is — as ever — alive to detail. He occasionally takes over Hitchcock/Truffaut, but since the film only rarely slows down and lets us hear artists pick apart approaches and technique, his sustained arias win the day.

Scorsese speaks of film as being incantatory, but of filmmaking as a series of practical decisions. That captures the spirit of the book, even though it’s at odds with that long-ago interview’s un-elevated tone. But it fits: Truffaut’s book revealed for critical audiences what should have been apparent all along — that Hitchcock, though working in studio Hollywood, was as much an artist and master as any of the greats of world cinema.