Contribution of Hitchcock to the Suspense Genre

The contribution of Alfred Hitchcock to the suspense thriller genre has been in essence to define it so that all subsequent films in the genre will aspire to the standards he set and will be compared to the films he made. This has indeed been the effect, so that films that have nothing to do with Hitchcock's style, themes, or interests are said to be Hitchcockian thrillers by those seeking a superlative. An example playing at the present time is The Crying Game, a film compared to Hitchcock though it is not a Hitchcock-style film at all and only touches on Hitchcockian themes in terms of generic elements that are difficult not to have in a thriller.

Hitchcock's contribution has been much broader than merely to the thriller genre, however, for he influenced a generation or more of filmmakers who learned from his films how to manipulate material, manipulate the audience, and satisfy that audience at the same time. He was meticulous in developing his films, storyboarding every shot and showing an understanding of both camera movement (in the Murnau tradition) and montage (in the Pudovkin-Eisenstein tradition) that makes his films useful as "textbooks" of technique. He started in the silent era and never forgot the power of the image, but he also adapted to the use of sound in a way that showed he regarded it as an essential element in film thereafter (witness his experimentations with sound as in the scream that turns into a train whistle in Murder or the musical experimen

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in an uncomfortable fashion, repeating over and over again as it echoes through the embassy halls. Eva Marie Saint's position is undercut by the nature of her "job" as seductress - she plays a role that separates her from the rest of the world, from her past and future, and from the other star in the film, Cary Grant. This undercutting contrasts with the image projected by the women so that the viewer is again kept off guard with expectations raised and expectations thwarted. Even when the expectations are fulfilled - as when Doris Day sings, something the audience would expect, especially as she is playing a singer - the fulfillment is off-center, here with a song that never allows Doris Day to sing openly and freely. Indeed, her character's inner tensions would have the same effect. Hitchcock toys with audience expectations in a number of films and bends and twists the narrative structure as a way of freshening the genre as well as addressing certain thematic concerns that could not be approached any other way. The audience always has certain expectations based on narrative schemas they have absorbed through countless repetitions of narrative patterns over the years, and Hitchcock evokes the schema and then shatters it, u

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