Three of Hitchcock's movies are allegories:
"The Lady Vanishes" is an allegory of Western reaction to Nazi aggression as Europe crept to the second World War. On the train there is an appeaser and a pair of know-nothing sportsmen of the British ("Hello, what's this!") sort. Not coincidentally the appeaser is a two-timer in his romantic entanglements, and an indecisive one at that. He is a casualty of the incipient conflict. The sportsmen, good-natured and far from quick to leap to arms, line up on the right side.
"Lifeboat" is an allegory of the allies uniting to defeat the Ubermensch.
"The Birds" is an allegory of nature -- which is either angry and unforgiving, or unpredictable and indifferent to mankind, or possibly even diabolical.
These summaries leave out the love affairs in each of the movies, but in each it is of less significance than some odd detail.
In "The Lady Vanishes," it is the tune the lady sings and makes the young couple memorize.
In "Lifeboat" it is the expensive bracelet that Tallulah Bankhead donates to the cause of landing a fish.
In "The Birds" it is the birds and how quickly they can become menacing, they, the most poetical of creatures if Keats and Shelley and Whitman are to be believed.
Nevertheless it is always useful to remember that Hitchcock had a Catholic upbringing and worked out his guilt issues with the same vexed but poker-faced countenance as Montgomery Clift in "I Confess."
The character who gets clobbered and humiliated in "The Birds" is Tippi Hedren, who, as any TV summary of the movie will state, plays a "San Francisco playgirl," a woman of easy virtue with magnificent hair and a beautiful face.
Sex is a punishable or guilt-inducing offense except when there's legitimate issue (the offspring in "The Man Who Knew Too Much"), and the beautiful blonde in a Hitchcock movie will be poisoned almost to death (Ingrid Bergman in "Notorious"), will leap to her death from the top of a church tower (Kim Novak in "Vertigo"), or will have to fight off a murderous husband's hired killer (Grace Kelly in "Dial M for Murder").
The fate of Farley Granger's wife in "Strangers on a Train" demonstrates Freud's theory that the wish is equal to the deed as far as its potential for producing guilt. It is tempting to regard the characters played by Granger and Robert Walker as split sides of a divided personality, with Walker as more interesting than Granger (whereas Mr Hyde is less interesting than Dr. Jekyll).
There are times when the prankster in Hitchcock prevails, as when Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane fight in "Saboteur" and an onlooking couple comments that they must be very much in love -- or when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climb to the upper berth and the train penetrates the tunnel at the end of "North by Northwest."
The test of a true Hitchcock fan is whether you like Joel McCrea's speech at the end of "Foreign Correspondent."
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