Hitchcock's view of love from "Beauty's Plan"

Leif 2022-04-19 09:01:55

For the film "Beauty's Plan", most domestic fans have polarized comments. Some people put it in the ranks of "Gone with the Wind", "Blue Bridge" and "Casablanca", calling it a classic love movie. Some people think that Hitchcock in this film is out of standard, the sense of suspense is too poor, and the protagonist's behavioral logic is questionable, which cannot be compared with Hitchcock's later works. For these two viewpoints, I think some integrated analysis can be done to some extent, which needs to start from the creative style of director Hitchcock himself.
Hitchcock is a well-known "suspense master". He is a typical director who pays more attention to the story than to the shaping of the characters. In his films, the plot and the information conveyed through the plot are always important, and the shaping of the characters often seems Indifferent, this involves an interesting phenomenon. Hitchcock likes to use big stars very much, and he is a superstar at that time. Naturally, his purpose is not to chase stars, nor is it entirely for the box office, such as some of his experimental films such as "Reaper of Souls" still uses superstars, his real purpose is that these big stars usually have their own inherent image, no need to create characters (such as Cary Grant is a humorous gentleman, Stuart is a righteous American, Grace Kelly is terrified Little Women, etc.), the star has a fixed personality, and it can be used immediately. It can save the link of shaping the characters and directly enter the plot that Hitchcock wants, so what everyone sees in "Beauty" is not two classics Love role, and more is the shadow of Grant and Bergman himself.
Then it is very important that Hitchcock himself did not like the plot of love stories very much, he even felt that "sex is above love" (see "Trüffaut in Conversations with Hitchcock" in his book Chapters of "Confessions", "Beauty's Plan" and "Vertigo"), it can be seen that he was influenced by a lot of Freud's thoughts at that time. However, in Selznick's big studio films in the 1940s, out of consideration for the box office and the aesthetic sentiment of the people at that time, there must be a love as beautiful as "Gone with the Wind", which led to Hitchcock In the movies of the big studios in the 1940s, there were often descriptions of love that Hitchcock himself did not like. Hitchcock himself was also perfunctory in his descriptions. The portrayal is very in line with Hitchcock's aesthetics, that is, "love is due to the possession and desire for sex", but this is probably not liked by fans who like "Roman Holiday"-like love. Therefore, the essence of Hitchcock's films lies in suspense, and the love story in the 1940s was only forced by the pressure of the studio. It has become a compromise movie of a love movie, and a movie with this attitude will naturally look weird. Therefore, watching a love story in a Hitchcock movie is actually buying a tree and returning a pearl, or it is more pure to watch "Roman Holiday".

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    Alicia: I have a feeling they're very slow.

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