In 1995, on the 100th anniversary of the film’s birth, an authoritative British film magazine selected a series of the best characters in the century since the film’s birth. Among them, the name of the best director is Alfred Hitchcock, who is known as a master of suspense in the history of film. This film master, who was born almost at the same time as the movie, has continuously brought endless excitement and joy to thousands of audiences around the world with tense plots, suspenseful atmosphere and brilliant suspense throughout his life. He has always been exploring the unique and charming film language and life in accordance with his own artistic ideals and philosophy. The film "Mystery" is one of the most iconic classics in Hitchcock's crime mystery films. At the same time, it also uses Hitchcock's own favorite film to appear in the master's series of famous works. Extraordinarily eye-catching.
The title of "Mystery" easily reminds people of the type of film that Hitchcock is best at—thriller and suspense. It is indeed a typical Hitchcock-style masterpiece. The film depicts a murderer, Charlie, who hid at his sister's house in Santa Rosa in order to escape the police after killing several widows in a row. There, Charlie's simple and kind niece, Charlie, turned from admiration to fall in love with him. But soon, Charlie discovered his true identity, and a thrilling Hitchcock movie about murder and escape began again.
Thrills and suspense have always been Hitchcock's magic weapon to capture the audience, and this Hitchcock-style film element probably has been injected into his heart since childhood. When he was just five years old, his father asked the naughty little Hitchcock to bring a note to the local police chief. As a result, the police detained Little Hitchcock in the prison for five minutes in accordance with the request written by his father on the note. For Hitchcock, who didn't know a word, the five minutes of waiting in fear was enough to make him forget the word "suspense" for a lifetime.
Hitchcock-style suspense is diverse. Sometimes he never reveals the identity of the criminal, allowing thrilling scenes to happen again and again. The audience and the characters in the film do not know where the danger comes from, and the audience always keeps a guess and mind about who the criminal is and what is about to happen. Suspenseful. Sometimes it is to let the audience know the existence of danger in advance, but the protagonist in the film does not know it, so that the audience is always holding a sweat because the characters in the film are in danger. They can only hold their breath and watch. How does the criminal commit the crime step by step and how the victim finally escapes the disaster.
In this regard, Hitchcock once famously said: Knowing where the bomb is but not knowing when it exploded is an even more disturbing suspense. In this film, Hitchcock's method of creating suspense and tension is obviously the "time bomb method" that "makes the audience become an insider before the protagonist, thereby causing them to fall into nervous anticipation". As soon as the film opens, the audience actually knows Charlie's killer identity. Although Hitchcock used a cinematic method here-through the shadows in Charlie's room, radio reports about the serial killer, and a newspaper news about the case hinted to the audience. Then, as Charlie came to the small city of Santa Rosa, when the Emma family, especially the innocent and kind Charlie, welcomed Charlie's arrival with all their hearts, people actually had a foreboding of the subsequent danger.
Since then, from the conspiracy on the dining table, the floor incident, the murder in the garage, to the climax of the last train, Charlie discovered that his niece had some knowledge of her true identity, and then she secretly attacked her several times. I don't know that his discovery has been spotted by this fierce uncle, and he has been tried repeatedly. In the development of this series of ups and downs and dangerous stories, the contrast between evil and purity, insidious and good constitutes an obvious imbalance in power. The simple and kind-hearted Charlie as a woman is not only weak in strength, but her "unknowing" position makes the kind-hearted audience on her side and "knowing" in advance have to be in the development of the whole plot. Suffering from the "torture" of suspense.
In the film, Hitchcock not only mobilizes the nerves of the audience with the helpless heroine and suspense, but also creates a suspenseful and tense atmosphere through his skilled film language skills. From the beginning of the film, the shadows shrouded in Charlie's room to the unique composition formed by the use of stairs, furniture, etc., create a nervous and uncomfortable atmosphere of horror. At the same time, Hitchcock also showed through this film that he is not only a master of suspense who can continuously entertain and tense the audience, he also tried to express a long-awaited theme in the film: that is, sin exists every time. On an ordinary person, crime and death can happen in our daily lives at any time.
From the perspective of its creative motivation, the film "Mystery" seems to be Hitchcock's accidental result. At that time, Hitchcock, who was about to leave the United States and return home, was forced to stay in the United States due to the war, so he decided to film this story that had been put on hold for a period of time. This is also his sixth film made in the United States. The material of the story comes from a real crime in life. The original protagonist was a serial killer named Earl Leonard Nelson in the 1920s. Like the protagonist in the film, he successively killed many wealthy widows in the wealthy district. He was called " Happy Widow Killer".
However, Hitchcock did not look for the suspense and horror factor of the story in the original crime of the killer (in the film, Charlie’s previous criminal record was only expressed by hint), he just borrowed Nelson’s The criminal background constitutes a threat of "crimes happening around us and the shadow of death in daily life". He puts the story of another murder of a series of killers into the peaceful environment of a warm middle-class home in a small town, while at the same time making the killer the closest person to the threatened object. This well embodies the theme of "threats from around us" often expressed in Hitchcock's films, thus making the horror of death he strives to create more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
In fact, this theme that Hitchcock loved was also derived from an unforgettable experience in his childhood. At that time, there was a beautiful girl living near his home, and Hitchcock often saw her on the way to school. But after a while, the girl disappeared. Later, Hitchcock learned from his mother that the girl who impressed him had an incurable disease and had passed away. This experience left a deep impression on Hitchcock. He later told his friends that from then on, he felt that the threat of death could come from his side and could come at any time.
Therefore, in this film, Hitchcock took a different approach from what he had used in Hollywood movies in the past, which is to strive for the accuracy and truthfulness of every detail of life. Before filming, he deliberately chose an ordinary American town and went there to inspect it in person; and selected a house of a bank clerk as the murderer’s sister in the film as the real scene of the story; Some of the characters also use real people in life. All this is to put crime and threats back into our real lives. But obviously many people cannot understand his painstaking efforts.
For example, the homeowner who provided the scenery site made Hitchcock laugh with his excessive enthusiasm-when he prepared everything, he led his crew back to the house he chose to prepare. When filming the film, Hitchcock discovered that the owner of the house was excited because he knew that he was going to make a movie in his house, and he had repainted the whole house, completely losing the effect that Hitchcock had originally seen. . As a result, Hitchcock had to let his people restore it to its original state. This little episode probably once again let the master of suspense know what "suspension" is.
In addition, for the killer Charlie in the film, Hitchcock also tried to get him close to an ordinary person in life. Through the mouth of his sister Emma and Charlie's admiration for him, we can know that Charlie used to be a smart, sensible, gentle manner and even a little bit shy person, rather than a natural murderer. The target of his crime also revealed his cynical hatred and even abnormal psychology towards the inequality of the rich and the poor in the society. At the same time, Charlie is fully aware of his mental state, but he has no ability to overcome it. In the film, the conversation between Charlie and his sister's family at the dinner table about the murdered widows shows Charlie's uncontrollable mental illness as a serial killer in ordinary life.
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