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Silence appears as both a" thematic and formal element in almost every Hitchcock film. As in The Birds, it is usually associated with control, a concept which, as I showed in chapter 4, is at the heart of the tension between the need for social order and the need for individual expression. This same tension between order and expression also underlies all art, of course, and Hitchcock's work is no exception. Nowhere is his association between silence and control clearer than in his montage sequences, his moments of greatest suspense and audience manipulation. Like a murderer, Hitchcock seems to think that these are most effective when done silently. For a villain murder is the act requiring greatest control. Hence, Hitchcock's stylistic and thematic interests intersect precisely at the point where a crime or murder is committed by a silent villain and is shot as a silent montage sequence. Other than in the montage sequences, silence is more an idea than a literal ploy. That is to say, when Hitchcock or most writers refer to a silent passage (e.g., the extended sequence in Vertigo in which Scottie pursues Madeleine by car around San Francisco), they are actually speaking of a sequence without dialogue. In most cases the absence of dialogue in such sequences pertains to the use of silence as motif, which is the central subject of this chapter.

As a motif associated with control, silence is the common end point of several different continua of behavior. At the other end of each continuum is some form of oral expression—garrulity, a confession, a scream—each of which I shall examine in turn. I have already introduced some of the antinomies implied by the continua: emotional paralysis versus spontaneous expression (The Man Who Knew Too Much), oral ellipsis versus self-honesty (Secret Agent), the suppression versus the confession of guilt (Blackmail). In addition, an important continuum that involves a character's manner of speaking ranges from taciturnity to glibness. Hitchcock does not

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consistently endorse or condemn any given mode of behavior; indeed, he suggests that flexibility is necessary to survival. What is consistent throughout his work, however, is a vision of behavior in terms of such continua. Because so much of the behavior of Hitchcock's characters falls along parallel lines, a pattern emerges that invites comparisons between characters. These comparisons are essential to Hitckcock's central aim of revealing the continuities between good and evil, sane and insane behavior.

Although villains are agents of social chaos in Hitchcock's universe, their efficacy depends on personal control. Hence, the silence that usually characterizes Hitchcock's murderers defines both their temperament and their method of killing. Many of them keep a low profile, like Mr. Verloc, the saboteur of Sabotage, who is described by his wife as a "quiet" man who "doesn't want to draw a lot of attention" to himself. The German villain of Lifeboat, not revealing that he speaks English, keeps silent until he gains the upper hand. In Dial M for Murder the murderer instructs the man who will strangle his wife for him that "there must be as little noise as possible." Hitchcock usually characterizes his government agents as quiet killers barely if at all more humane than the enemy they are chasing; in North by Northwest the sight of Mount Rushmore prompts an agent's remark that "Roosevelt's head is saying 'Speak softly and carry a big stick.'" Bruno, the murderer of Strangers on a Train, tells a captivated audience of party guests that strangling is the best form of murder because it is "simple, silent, and quick—the silent part being the most important." Bruno's strangling of Miriam is indeed swift and silent, but he himself is very glib. He belongs to a class of charming villains (such as Abbott in The Man Who Knew Too Much and the murderers of Shadow of a Doubt and Frenzy} whose glibness is part of the personable facade they maintain in order to befriend their potential victims.

The distinction between silent killing and bumbling, talkative inefficiency is at the heart of the contrast between the two couples of Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot (1976). Indeed, it is the comparison of the two couples that would seem to have most intrigued Hitchcock when designing the film.[1]The more villainous couple is Arthur and Fran. Arthur is a perfectionist. He finds

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[IMAGE: Family Plot. William Devane versus Barbara Harris. The two couples contrast silent killing with talkative inefficiency.]

fulfillment in planning and executing perfect crimes (kidnappings) in exchange for a ransom of perfect gems (diamonds). He succinctly characterizes his method of operation when he says, "Let me do this in my own quiet way." Most of the time he assigns Fran to make contact with outsiders. Arthur insists that the kidnappings be carried out wordlessly. When Fran, in disguise, communicates with the police, she remains mute, expressing her wishes in writing or pantomime. After her first such escapade Arthur tells Fran, "I told you you could learn to keep your mouth shut if you try." Yet Fran is not so controlled or ruthless as is Arthur. When he first informs Fran that they must kill the other, snooping couple, she abandons her low, sedate whispers in a jewelry shop and yells,

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"Stop it!" Later, when they are carrying out their plans, Fran complains, "If I'm talking too much it's because you're not talking at all. That's because murder doesn't agree with me." In short, the lessening of Fran's professionalism as a criminal is indicated by the increase in her talking.

By contrast, Blanche and George, two petty, but not malevolent, con artists, are nonstop talkers. Blanche spends most of the film nagging George, a would-be actor. Whereas Fran in her professional (criminal) role must remain mute, Blanche must talk in hers: she is a spiritualist who speaks in the voices of her contacts. Both couples are introduced with the woman partner acting in her professional capacity, the one mute, the other speaking in a strange voice.

There are even parallel scenes in which the women alternate between their professional and their private voices. George comes to see Blanche at her home while she is holding a seance.[2] She talks with George in the kitchen using her own voice while occasionally projecting out a loud phrase in her contact's voice, for the benefit of her client in the next room. Similarly, when Fran visits Arthur in his jewelry shop, she alternates between using a loud voice that can be heard by other customers (she pretends to buy a necklace) and using a whisper with which she and Arthur discuss their kidnapping problems.

The contrast between the couples is emphasized whenever their plots intersect. The first time, George and Blanche are so busy talking in George's cab that they almost run over Fran, who is crossing the street. We cut from the garrulous couple, who have just halted their car with a screech, to the silent Fran, whom we follow on her mute visit to the police. The plots intersect a second time in a cathedral, where George goes to talk to a bishop, whom Fran and Arthur abduct during services. Whereas a priest cautions George not to talk so loudly, Arthur and Fran execute their abduction in total silence—the sequence is filmed as a silent montage that emphasizes their quicker-than-the-eye efficiency. With typical irony Hitchcock has George scolded for a minor impropriety while the criminals get off scot-free.

In order to win out over the more silent, efficient couple, George and Blanche finally learn to control their voices and to work

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efficiently rather than at cross-purposes with each other. Together they free Blanche and trap Fran and Arthur (in their own cellar prison) by first keeping quiet—George tiptoes around with his shoes off and Blanche feigns unconsciousness—until the right moment, when Blanche startles her captors with an Apache yell and eludes their grasp.

On a lesser scale of criminality than murderers whose silence signifies cold control and ruthlessness are those characters who simply do not speak up at the proper time. At its worst this behavior constitutes withholding of evidence and is legally as well as morally culpable. This is the case in Blackmail, for instance, when Alice delays telling the police that the suspect they are chasing is innocent of the artist's murder. The crosscutting between her hesitation and the suspect's death puts the blame properly on her. In Shadow of a Doubt Charlie's silence about her uncle's identity similarly allows the death of a wrongly accused suspect being pursued by the police. (Conversely, the withholding of evidence can save a life in those films requiring a heroine to trust in the innocence of a falsely accused hero.) The connection between the silence of professional killers and the silence of heroines whose reticence causes deaths is one more instance of the linkage Hitchcock likes to show between the obviously criminal and the apparently innocent—it is only a distinction between active and passive murder.

Most often reticence is an emotional rather than a legal matter. In this case a character's silence represents an avoidance of emotional commitment to another person. In Notorious the hero, Devlin, a CIA agent, is characterized as almost wordless. He is introduced as a silent silhouette, his back to the camera, while the heroine, Alicia, prattles away at him and her other guests at a party. When Devlin finally does speak, he typically uses short phrases. Devlin's reticence extends to his behavior as a lover. After he and Alicia fall in love, Alicia tries to elicit some verbal acknowledgment from Devlin but must be satisfied with his saying, "When I don't love you, I'll let you know." As Alicia becomes more and more involved with Sebastian, a German spy whose activities she is assigned to monitor, she hopes that Devlin will tell her to stop, but he will not assume that responsibility for her actions.

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"One word," she scolds him, after committing herself to a dangerous marriage to Sebastian, "if only you had said one word." Devlin insists throughout most of the film that "actions speak louder than words" (he says just this before kissing Alicia, when she asks if he loves her). Yet, while rescuing Alicia from Sebastian, he finally prefaces his confession that he loved her all along with the concession that he could not abandon her in Brazil because he "had to speak [his] piece." Devlin's change of heart about speaking to Alicia is paralleled by his change of attitude when speaking about her. Whereas during his first visit with his CIA colleagues he raises no objections to derogations of Alicia's character, during the second visit he defends her behavior.

Cary Grant, who plays Devlin, is at the other end of the rope in his role as Roger Thornhill in North'by Northwest. Here he plays the civilian very much hurt by an American spy (Eve Kendall) with whom he falls in love. She cannot confess her love for him because it conflicts with her duty as a double agent. Thornhill is extremely glib; he is a Madison Avenue executive who lies readily. (Grant's role here is much closer to his usual suave persona.) Like Devlin, Thornhill confesses to a basic fear of women. In Thornhill's case glibness rather than silence is a means of avoiding real conversation. Thornhill's superficial chatter, like Devlin's taciturnity, is a defense mechanism that must be destroyed before he can enter into a genuine relationship with a woman.

The initial verbal reticence on the part of agents Devlin and Kendall is in part a commitment to their professional rather than personal lives. Erica, the heroine of Young and Innocent, also distinguishes between love and duty when she chooses to be silent, but in her case learning to express feelings of love is seen as a process of growing up. In the course of the film Erica learns to trust a young man who is a fugitive from injustice. The film's action can be seen as a journey that is a metaphor for Erica's growth from childhood to maturity. From the beginning of the film Erica shields the fugitive, Robert, from the police who seek him, by refusing when interrogated to reveal his whereabouts. However, she will also not reveal her feelings for Robert to the young man himself. During a romantic interlude in which Robert tenderly encourages Erica to be brave in the face of danger, he finally begs her, "Erica,

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[IMAGE: The Birds. Jessica Tandy. A silent scream in the face of unspeakable horror.]

dear, do say something," only to be told, "I can't; I just can't." Yet as soon as he takes his leave, Erica, who has appeared to be asleep, whispers tenderly to the absent young man, "I don't want anything to happen to you, either." It is important that the chief of the police hunt is Erica's own father; her refusal to tell him about Robert is an essential step of growing up—the transference of affection from a father to another man. In Hitchcock's world, reticence at its extreme is emotional paralysis, a psychological state indicated by total silence. In Vertigo this is the form of breakdown exhibited by the hero, Scottie, who seeks total withdrawal after feeling responsible for the death of

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[IMAGE: Vertigo. James Stewart and Barbara Bel Ceddes. Hitchcockian heroes who are emotionally paralyzed are often reduced to total speechlessness.]

a woman. His complete withdrawal after a traumatic experience is the logical extension of his previous tendency to avoid reality. As in Rear Window, Hitchcock enables the audience to "see" a character's state of mind by finding a literal situation that expresses his emotional state. Speechlessness can also indicate a more temporary impotence to which Hitchcock reduces characters who confront horrors too awful to articulate. The adjective unspeakable is made literal in The Birds when the hero's mother discovers a neighbor whose eyes have been gouged out by invading birds. She runs out of the house and opens her mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. Then she drives home and confronts her son with her mouth agape, but she is still unable to speak of what she has seen. The use of speechlessness to indicate shock occurs most frequently

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on a smaller scale. For example, in Family Plot, when the hero discovers his girlfriend's blood-smeared pocketbook, we hear his, "Oh, my God!" as we see the pocketbook with him. But the more eloquent indication of his shock is the cut back to a close-up of his speechless staring. Of course, this kind of reaction shot is by no means unique to Hitchcock, but it is consistent with his more salient extensions of speechlessness in whole scenes or films.

Paralysis, too, is a literal extension of an emotional problem in Hitchcock's films. In Rear Window (1954), Jeff's immobility (his leg is in a cast up to his waist) symbolizes his emotional paralysis (he is engaged to but will not marry Lisa). Hitchcock treats this situation in expanded form in both his first half-hour television film Breakdown (1955) and his first hour-long television film Four O-Clock (1957). In each case a man's inability to communicate with others is translated from a figure of speech into a literal situation in which he must communicate to save his life.

In Breakdown a businessman's emotional paralysis is introduced in a prologue showing the callousness with which he treats the tearful pleading of an employee he has fired. Soon afterward, the businessman breaks his neck in an automobile crash. Because he is paralyzed, he is nearly interred before he manages to let people know that he is alive. It is not words that finally save his life, but a tear welling in his eye. The tear is an especially appropriate form of communication because it means that the man is finally exhibiting the genuine feeling he had scorned in his employee.

In Four O'Clock a paranoid clockmaker prepares to murder his wife and her supposed lover by exploding a bomb in their home at the time of the presumed daily tryst. However, shortly after he sets the bomb to go off at four o'clock, two boys break into the home and, finding the man in the cellar, bind him, gag him, and leave him to become the victim of his own bomb. The rest of the film consists of his overhearing that his wife's male visitor is merely her brother and of his attempts to communicate his presence to his wife upstairs before the bomb goes off. At first Hitchcock is rather flexible about aural and visual point of view. Although he gives us a stream-of-consciousness narration of the man's thoughts, he also feels free to cut upstairs to reveal the wife's activities. As the tension increases, however, the camera becomes confined to the

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cellar. Shots of the clock become progressively closer, and the sound of ticking becomes progressively louder, to correspond not only to the man's intensified concentration on the clock but to the intensification of his heartbeat. Through a subjective style Hitchcock makes the audience suffer the agonies of impotence, as the man fails to make himself heard.

The speechlessness of characters reduced to impotence might seem to be just the opposite of the silence that typifies effective villains. However, both sets of characters are emotionally paralyzed; as I showed in chapter 4, Hitchcoc's murderers deliberately suppress their feelings in order to maintain control. Hence, Hitchcock often pairs a strong villain with a weaker partner who shows and sometimes breaks under the strain (e.g., Abbott in the British Man Who Knew Too Much, Mrs. Drayton in the American version, Sebastian in Notorious, Fran in Family Plot). If Hitchcock shows that his heroes are not altogether good, he also shows how hard it is for his villains to be altogether bad.

The eruption of guilt that causes a character to break his silence in the majority of Hitchcock's films usually comes in the form of a confession, a ritual Chabrol sees as an acceptance of responsibilities and "the supreme exorcism and the principal condition of Man's final triumph."[3] His metaphysical reading is supported by the fact that the director's most disturbing films are often those which deny a character the release of confessing. Such a character may enter into an uneasy companionship with the only other person who shares his guilty secret. Sabotage is a perfect example of the film that describes the psychological and moral state of its heroine in these terms. At the start of the film the heroine, Mrs. Verloc, is a talkative, extroverted, innocent person, unlike her uncommunicative husband, who, without her knowledge, is a saboteur. How-ever, once the husband allows her brother to be killed, she refuses to speak to him. Her accusing silence forces an apologetic confession from the guilty husband, who prefaces his confession with the frustrated complaint, "You might answer a fellow." Mrs. Verloc's silence is at first one of impotence, but it also suggests something sinister about her. Indeed, she soon stabs her husband—in a typical silent montage of murder. Except for a cry emitted as she knifes the husband, the heroine emits no sound during or after the

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murder in reaction to the heinousness of her own actions. When she finally does decide to confess to the authorities, it is her detective friend who, like the detective-fiances in Blackmail and Shadow of a Doubt, interferes with her attempts. Once more a film ends with a hero and heroine uncomfortably facing a future with the shared knowledge of the heroine's unconfessed guilt.

I Confess actually contains a whole series of confessions. The murderer. Otto Keller, gets off relatively easily by confessing his crime to his wife and to his priest, Father Logan, both of whom suffer acutely from the transference of the guilty secret. Father Logan stands trial for the murder of which Keller is guilty because as a priest he cannot betray the confidence of the confession. The most purgative confession is made by Logan's friend, Ruth. In order to establish an alibi for Logan's whereabouts during the time of the crime, she confesses (in a complicated flashback) to the police in front of her husband that she had loved Logan before and even after she married her husband. Her confession is not altogether true (she romantically implies adultery, which did not, in fact, take place), and it does not clear Logan. But its psychological benefit to her is suggested in the film's final sequence, a deadly showdown between Logan and Keller. Ruth turns with her husband to leave before Logan's problems are resolved. The gesture indicates that she is at last psychologically disengaged from her romantic illusions that her postmarital love for Logan was requited; Ruth and her husband are now ready to begin a more open and healthy marriage.

Feather Logan's unconfessed knowledge puts him in the worst position of the characters. First, he feels obliged to martyr himself because he is unwilling to betray Keller's confidence. Then Hitchcock puts his silence in a more ambiguous context: his refusal to speak becomes a cause of death to innocent people. Inspector Larrue makes this idea explicit when he reminds Logan that his silence has cost the lives of Keller's wife and a hotel worker. However laudable Logan's motives, his silence is once more a passive form of murder.

The short distance between good and evil characters can also be seen by comparing how different groups use oral ellipsis to describe their activities. Just as the "good" spies in Secret Agent

avoid saying the word murder, so also the Nazi spies in Notorious speak bluntly about their research but not their killing. They may speak in polite circumlocutions. For example, they inform a scientist colleague that he will pay with his life for a small indiscretion by referring to a car trip from which he will not return. (He remonstrates that they should not go to so much trouble to drive him home.) Or they may simply stop short of finishing their sentences. For example, just after Sebastian discovers that his wife is an enemy agent, he tells his mother, "I stood looking at her while she was asleep. I could have. ..." The Germans' elliptical use of language is yet another indication of their hypocritical gentility. At work here is a paradox that reveals Hitchcock's bleak view of the possibility of human communication. On the one hand. Hitchcock seems strongly in favor of characters' speaking their feelings (e. g., that Devlin and Erica should acknowledge their love to, respectively, Alicia and Robert). Yet, on the other hand. Hitchcock justifies his heroes' distrust of language by confirming their suspicions that it will be used against them. In Young and Innocent Robert learns that the police twist his innocent words when charging him with murder, so that his payment from an actress for writing a script, for example, becomes "received money from her on former occasions."

Hitchcock himself appears to have distrusted words. He carefully cultivated a public persona who used language guardedly in order to conceal his real opinions or feelings. He also always insisted that in his films actions reveal more than dialogue. Godard has pointed out in his analysis of The Wrong Man that its hero, Manny Balestrero, distrusts language.[4] Here, too, the police use Manny's own language against him, when he is forced to read an implicating note he writes. (It misspells the same word as did a note for the holdup of which he is accused.) When Manny simply tells the truth to establish his alibi, the police inform him that he will have to provide "a better story" if he wants to defend himself. The Wrong Man may be based on a true incident, but even in his totally fictional films Hitchcock similarly puts his characters into such incredible situations that the sane bystanders or policemen to whom they invariably appeal for help will never believe their stories—unless they see the evidence for themselves.

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[ IMAGE: The Thirty-nine Steps. Disdain for language: Robert Donat's double-talk succeeds at a political rally. ]

The disdain for language that Hitchcock reveals in the absurd telephone conversation of Blackmail is repeated in later comic situations. Hitchcock often places his characters, during comic interludes, in hotel lobbies where the babble of several foreign languages is heard as sheer chaos. Spoto sees in Foreign Correspondent the theme that "ordinary language, at a time of international crisis, can conceal and reveal hidden meaning."[5] However, Hitchcock's most satiric comment about the deceptiveness of language comes in The Thirty-nine Steps, when the hero finds himself mistaken for the guest speaker at a political rally. Surrounded by pursuers, the hero fakes a speech combining pompous generalities with references to his own problems. His double-talk is cheered

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and applauded by his audience as eloquent support for their candidate.

At the furthest end of the continuum from silence there is usually a scream, an outburst of pure, noncognitive feeling. If silence is the common denominator of most sorts of control, the scream is the common denominator of most extreme emotions. Hitchcock deliberately plays with the multiple reasons for a scream by confounding our expectations. I have already mentioned that in Secret Agent screams of terror turn out to be responses to sexual attack. Similarly, in Strangers on a Train the scream that we hear shortly after Bruno nears his intended victim, Miriam, in a Tunnel of Love turns out to be sexual. By reversing our expectations Hitchcock emphasizes the sexual undercurrents of his murders (a great many of his murderers have sexual problems). After Miriam's (silent) death. Hitchcock cuts from the screams of the man who discovers the corpse to the screams of riders on a Ferris wheel. Their screaming, like that of an audience watching a Hitchcock thriller, is half in fun and half in terror. I have shown that in Psycho Hitchcock inextricably mingles the screams of his audience with those of his characters. It is precisely by using the scream to link various kinds of experience that Hitchcock makes us appreciate, in a direct, emotional way, his central tenets that the connections between sexual, murderous, and voyeuristic impulses are closer than we usually care to admit.

Because screaming is just as frequent as its antinomy, silence, and considerably more perceptible, it is to this thematic constant of Hitchcock's career that I shall turn for a final survey that, among other things, recapitulates the evolution of Hitchcock's aural style.

As I mentioned in the preface, the very first image of the film that Hitchcock considered his first personal picture, [6] The Lodger (1926), is a close-up of a girl screaming. Hitchcock thus announces from the start of his career the double nature of his films: his interests will be both sensational (the scream will be a staple of the thriller genre when sound arrives) and metaphysical (because the scream here is silent, its primary aural function is eliminated, and it must have some other meaning). By opening with a scream (screams also begin Murder, Rope, and To Catch a Thief) the

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director also initiates the action in medias res with a victim's announcement that evil (chaos) has entered the community.

In The Lodger the scream creates tension; in Blackmail the heroine's (second) scream relieves tension, for both the audience and the girl, because it functions as a cathartic release of previously suppressed guilt. Here Hitchcock's expressionist heritage is clearly at work. In The Writer in Extremis Sokel writes that "Herrmann Bahr, the Viennese critic, playwright, and essayist, singled out the shriek as the chief characteristic of Expressionism."[7] For expressionists, psychological, reality took precedence over mere external appearances, and the scream became an essential manifestation of inner anguish, as in Edvard Munch's influential lithograph, "The Scream."

Hitchcock's most famous scream is a transitional device of The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) that merges a woman's scream with a train whistle. The standard film histories often cite this transition as an innovative use of sound, but, oddly enough, this is one sound innovation for which Hitchcock does not deserve credit. The effect can be found in Pett and Pott, an experimental General Post Office film promoting the use of the telephone, which was released the year before Hitchcock's film. (In 1934, Grierson, writing in Sight and Sound, boasted of Pett and Pott: "Notice how the sound strip invades the silent strip and turns a woman's cry into an engine whistle."[8])

For the rest of the thirties the equation of human and mechanical screams is a favorite Hitchcockian device. In Sabotage, for example, the villains think that the scream of a window fan has come from a screen character in an adjacent movie theater. Then in The Lady Vanishes Hitchcock repeats the merging of human and train screams. In each case the scream is a bravura effect that typically obtrudes on the otherwise more subdued classical style of the film. By contrast, train noises in the subjective films (especially Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, and North by Northwest) are much more subtly orchestrated to heighten tension and extend the feelings of the main characters. Hitchcock eliminates the introduction of the human scream and simply gives us the train whistle as the correlative of human emotion. It is the equivalent of a shift from a simile (which announces an equation

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with like or as) to figurative language that couches the analogy without proclaiming its cleverness.

The thrust of the subjective films is to reduce the hero to a state of utter vulnerability, and so it is significantly the hero himself who utters a scream at the film's climax. In Under Capricorn (1949) the heroine screams for help after she discovers that the housekeeper has been poisoning her. The housekeeper arrives first, but for once the wife refuses her help and insists on waiting for her husband. This choice is the turning point other fortunes. The wife's rejection of the villainous housekeeper represents a rejection of her own weaker, passive nature and her renewal of trust in her husband. Whereas in Rear Window the hero's scream marks his dependence on other people, in the American version of The Man Who Knew Too Much the heroine's scream paradoxically marks her declaration of independence. The earlier part of the film reveals the wife to be the victim of a subtly domineering husband. He has forced her to abandon her professional identity (by refusing to move his medical practice to a large city where she could resume her career as a famous singer), and he has pacified her with sedatives when their child is kidnapped. In the two climaxes of the film it is the wife who, with her voice, first saves a diplomat and then rescues her son. The prolonged presentation of the Albert Hall sequence from her anguished point of view makes this version of the film subjective because the action is essentially a working out of her identity problems (so that ultimately the family can be reunited spiritually as well as physically). In Hitchcock's last subjective film, Mamie, the heroine "hears" a scream when her horse is injured. She runs to a nearby house and begs, "Get me a gun; my horse is screaming!" Only later do we understand that her shooting of the horse is a reenactment of her childhood killing of a sailor, while screaming hysterically. When she relives the original traumatic experience, she ends by trying to soothe her victim; she pats him on the head and says, "there, there," in the voice of the little girl to whom she has regressed. We then recall that she did the same thing with the horse.

In Psycho and The Birds Hitchcock introduces us to horror through the perceptions of his characters, but he ultimately dissociates the screams from their sources as he moves beyond the

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subjective experience to a more direct presentation of horror. In the late films (Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot), Hitchcock shows little interest in either subjectivity or character development. Ernest Lehman, the scriptwriter of both North by Northwest and Family Plot, reported that Hitchcock actively resisted character exposition in Family Plot: "Here and there he sort of dropped things in to pay lip service to who these people are, but he really didn't want the explanations in the picture. I pleaded with him, so he put them back in the script and shot them, then edited them out of the picture."[9] Because Hitchcock is less interested in having the audience identify with the characters in the late films, he has less need to depend on the sound track as a resource for unobtrusive, subjective distortion.

Hitchcock also has less need in the late films for sound effects that assault the audience; the tone of his last four films is more meditative, and the director invites the audience to share his detachment. LaValley has succinctly defined Hitchcock's approach in these films: "He draws us away from what is happening to make us think about what it implies, about the relationship of one event to another, of event to character, of the expectations of genres to reality. He ponders his patterns."[10] Instead of probing the psyche of one character. Hitchcock encourages us to judge behavior by comparing characters; hence, the large number of principals (who are all spies) in Topaz or of mismatched couples in Frenzy.[11] When he does use sound to emphasize the contrast between characters, he can be openly stylized; hence, the extreme and abrupt alternations in Family Plot between the noisy couple and the silent couple.

In the late films Hitchcock still sees his characters as struggling in a largely hostile, impersonal world, but he invites us to share his ironic (though no less sympathetic) perspective rather than their anguish. Whereas earlier he waited inside with his characters as their private spaces were threatened by the aural intrusion of reality from outside, now he stays (or moves) outside. Nowhere is his exterior view of human destiny clearer than in Frenzy, where he literally shifts from interiors to exteriors in two sequences built around our expectations about the extremes of silence and screams. After showing the rape and strangling of the hero's ex

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[IMAGE: Frenzy. A stifled scream. Hitchcock builds two sequences around our expectations about the extremes of silence and screams.]

wife in her business office, Hitchcock cuts outdoors to a shot of the doorway and alley leading to her building. Hitchcock plays here with the cliched expectation that a scream will be heard by deliberately holding the shot for a very long time with no noise and no motion. Finally, the victim's secretary returns from lunch, and, after still another wait, we hear her scream. Two women who are walking by at the time hear the scream, glance around perfunctorily, shrug, and keep on walking. The pessimistic implication is that even if the victim had managed to scream, no one would have helped anyway.

Having shown us one rape. Hitchcock does not bother to show the second, even though the victim is the most sympathetic woman in the film (she plays the familiar role of the woman who trusts a wrongly accused man). Hitchcock shows her going upstairs with

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the rapist, who repeats to her the words he told his last victim. However, when the couple enter his apartment, the door is closed in the viewer's face, and in one long, slow camera movement Hitchcock withdraws back down the stairs, out the front door, and across a busy, noisy Covent Garden street. Hitchcock said of the shot: "I brought the sound up three times its volume, so that the audience subconsciously would say, 'Well, if the girl screams, it's never going to be heard.'"[12]

As a measure of the continuities and changes in Hitchcock's style over nearly half a century of filmmaking, it is instructive to compare the sequences in which victims do or do not scream in Hitchcock's three rape films. The Lodger, Blackmail, and Frenzy. Each example reveals Hitchcock's distinctive stylization and perversity. In the silent Lodger, with its opening close-up of a woman shrieking, Hitchcock gives us a scream where we would expect silence. (The shot is a paradigm of Arnheim's contention that a visualized sound in a silent film can be more effective than a real sound in a talking picture.[13]) By contrast, in the above shots in Frenzy Hitchcock gives us silence (or traffic noise) where we would expect screams. It is most useful to contrast the two shifts in Frenzy to the perspective of the oblivious outside world with the cut to the oblivious policeman in Blackmail during the rapist's attack. In the earlier film, it will be recalled, the shot, photographed through a window, maintains the perspective of the screaming victim. All, four of these sequences typify Hitchcock's approach to the sound track. His sounds (and silences), like his images, are seldom merely functional; they not only further the narrative but also embody the director's basic attitudes and ideas. The most striking of these aural (and visual) concepts often crystallize Hitchcock's overall view of the human condition. Such is the case with the two.postattack sequences in Frenzy, sequences that, by comparison with their earlier counterparts, suggest how far Hitchcock's art has developed since his earliest films. The sequences in Frenzy are more elaborate in conception and execution but also much more profound in implication. The mature Hitchcock has become highly aware and highly confident of his style. His vision is no less profound for having moved from the depths of the soul to the heights of social perspective. As Andrew Sarris has said, "When Hitchcock

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described how he had adjusted the sound in two sequences in Frenzy, once downward to convey nothingness and once upward to convey a cosmic outsideness, he revealed himself once more to be one of the greatest of all film poets, at once lucid in communicating with others and lyrical in expressing his own feelings. And above all selective in shooting less than he knows so that we can feel more than we see."[14] I would amend that to read "more than we see or hear"

Notes (p 167 - 168)

1. The contrast between one couple's control and the other couple's sloppiness extends to their relative styles of eating, dress, and housekeeping but is most thoroughly worked out in terms of their speaking styles.

2. He attracts her attention by tinkling a glass wind chime. Even the decor for the garrulous couple is noisier than that for the silent couple, whose most conspicuous piece of furnishing is an immobile chandelier.

3. Claude Chabrol, "Hitchcock Confronts Evil," Cahiers du Cinema in English, no. 2 (1966), p. 69; originally published as "Hitchcock devant Ie mal," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 39, (October 1954), pp. 18-24.

4. Jean-Luc Godard, "Le Cinema et son double," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 72 (June 1957), p. 39.

5. Donald M. Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976), p. 105.

6. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967; originally pub-lished as Le Cinema selon Hitchcock [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1966]), p. 31.

7. Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Stanford, Calif.: Standford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 4.

8. John Grierson, "Introduction to a New Art," Sight and Sound (Autumn 1934), p. 104.

9. Quoted in Chris Hodenfeld, "Murder by the Babbling Brook," Rolling Stone, 29 July 1976, p. 42.

10. Albert J. LaValley, in his Focus on Hitchcock (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 13, is speaking only of Torn Curtain and Topaz, but his comments apply as well to the films released after the publication of his work.

11. The couples in Frenzy are compared by T. J. Ross in "Aspects of Hitchcock," December 18, nos. 2 and 3 (1976): 85-89.

12. Quoted in Eric Sherman, ed., Directing the Film: Film Directors on Their Art (Boston; Little, Brown, 1976), p. 21.

13. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1957), pp. 106-9.

14. Andrew Sams, "Films in Focus," The Village Voice, 22 June 1972

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