Hitchcockesque films

Over here, we have people listing best and worst Hitchcock films. In the middle of it, a couple people suggest films that are similar to Hitchcock’s style.

The two suggested were Charade and Mirage. I’ll add Arabesques to the list (even though it’s somewhat too happy and bright).

But let’s not just limit it to films that came after Hitch–Hitch didn’t do Double Indemnity, but he could have (and I’ve always thought that Double Indemnity as well as The Third Man inspired Hitchcock for his later works).

So…category: suspense, style: Hitchcock-esque.

Suggestions?

More recently, I always thought M. Night Shyamalan’s *Unbreakable *had some very Hitchcockian elements, at least in the directing and building of suspense in certain scenes.

How about Wait Until Dark?

I thought the French film Tell No One had some Hitchcockian elements to it. Wonderfully suspenseful.

Another French film, Diabolique of 1955, was excellently suspenseful and quite Hitchcockian. I could see it again.

The Bride Wore Black was a homage to AH, including the score by Bernard Herrmann.

Brian de Palma’s *Dressed To Kill *and Sisters.

Also, de Palma’s Body Double and Obsession. In fact, for much of his career Brian de Palma was notorious for copying Hitchcock to the nth degree.

Cry Wolf is like Hitchcock for teens.

The Crucible, though the historical aspect is a bit of a departure.

Devil (five people trapped on an elevator, one is a killer demon) and* The Collector* (thief breaks into a house, but there’s psychotic killer holding the family hostage) are Hitchcockian in concept but not in execution. Devil could pass if the supernatural part of the story was more understated, and The Collector had too much unnecessary gore.

**The Machinist **deserves mention.

In addition to the plot and use of suspense, the music is very Hitchcockian as well.

The film title is Arabesque, singular, and it belongs in this group because of shared people with Charade and Mirage (It stars Gregory Peck, again, it has a common director with Mirage. And, even though Peter Stone didn’t write the screenplay thi8s time, he did do an uncredited rewrite. Not enough to save it, though. The film also has opening titles by the same guy who did them for Mirage – Maurice Binder, better known for doing almost all of the James Bond title sequences up until License to Kill)

Hitchcock had actually stated that this was one of his own favorite films and wished he had directed it.

Hictchcock was actually the first choice to direct Rosemary’s Baby, but turned it down. But it’s not hard to imagine Hitch directing it - secret conspiracy, a blond ingenue who receives abusive treatment, paranoia & suspicion especially toward “authority” figures (the doctor who turns out to be a secret Satanist.) All the classic Hitch elements.

This is the one I came in to post. Not only did Truffaut do it in Hitchcock’s style, and get Bernard Hermann to do the score, but the film is based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, the same guy who wrote the story Rear Window, upon which Hitchcock based his film of the same name. To my mind, this makes TBWB the ultimate Hitchcock tribute film.
Of course, if you’re talking Hitchcock tributes, you have to include Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety, even if that is tongue-in-cheek.

If somebody had told me Hitchcock directed The Manchurian Candidate I wouldn’t have questioned it.

I sometimes hear George Cukor’s Gaslight mistakenly referred to as a Hitchcock movie. It’s a psychological thriller similar in style to Hitchcock’s Suspicion, albeit with a period twist.

Body Double was the first thing that came to my mind.

The scene where the camera pans, in an unbroken shot, around 360 degrees from the ladies at the garden club back around to the Chinese and Russian spectators does seem like something he’d have done.

No love for Silver Streak?

However, there’s one thing in Rosemary’s Baby that Hitchcock mostly avoided and was probably the reason why he turned the project down: the story turns out to be explicitly supernatural. In films like **Rebecca, **Vertigo, or Psycho, Hitchcock often teased us with fantastic or otherworldly elements but, with the major exception of The Birds (which was quasi-science fiction), everything had a rational real-world explanation behind it.

As for Hitchcockesque films, I’ve always thought Marathon Man had a lot of the elements that were present in many of his movies.

The authors of the book that Les Diaboliques was based upon also wrote the novel Vertigo was based on, and wanted to imitate Hitchcock.