I’ve been meaning to discuss here for some time; I’ve finally applied myself to it, late as always I’m afraid.

I’d be reluctant to play off one director against another (it’s pretty meaningless, and both the directors here were great) were it not for the fact that this post (and your email to Norm) contain significant errors that should be corrected, so I’ll respond to your points as listed above.

1. The argument that Hitchcock was a genius in only one genre can equally be levelled at Wilder whose works as a director are all to varying degrees cynical satires – it is this that marks him as an auteur. In fact, one of the features of Hitchcock’s work is that he generally incorporates more than one genre into a single film in a way that Wilder never attempts.

2. Wilder certainly wasn’t the creator of film noir which originated in Europe, primarily in 1930s French gangster movies. They exerted enormous influence, and the style was well established by the time Wilder made Double Indemnity. Visconti’s Ossessione for example, made a year earlier is as archetypal a noir as one could wish for, far better than Tay Garnett’s 1946 version, let alone Bob Rafelson’s poor remake. Most of Hollywood’s great films in the genre were made by European emigré directors. As to impact on the way films are made, what Hitchcock brought to the table was the ‘Point of View’ shot, a technique that is now so universal that we are inclined to take it for granted.

3. You significantly underestimate Hitchcock’s role in scripting his movies, although your comments about Wilder suggest that you haven’t taken on board the fundamental collaberative nature of filmmaking. Hitchcock ceased to credit himself as a scriptwriter as soon as he was sufficiently established to be the main draw for his films. The general public (as opposed to cinéastes) understood that they were going to see an ‘Alfred Hitchcock film’ in a way that they never did with Wilder. A specific example of where you are wrong in your credit is with the “Leg or breast?” line in To Catch a Thief, which is quite definitely one of Hitchcock’s. It is actually visually prefigured by the chicken crossing the road which causes the chasing police car to crash, surviving where the one Kelly offers Grant clearly hasn’t. It is one of the recurring features to Hitchcock films, his riffing off the Hollywood convention (designed to circumvent the production code) that when people talk about food, they are really thinking about sex – one desire replaced by another.

More importantly though, you considerably overstate Wilder as scriptwriter. Before he emigrated, he wrote (unassisted) scripts for German films which were all light romances, devoid of the caustic dialogue that marked his subsequent work as a director. Of his own films, with all the ones you mention bar Sabrina he used scriptwriters, and Sabrina of course is closer to his pre-war work than any of his other Hollywood films. It is difficult of course to be certain who actually wrote what with his collaborative scripts, but what is easily observable is that where his work radically switches tone he uses a different scriptwriter. It would for example be difficult to tell whether Wilder added much to Raymond Chandler’s script for Double Indemnity, which in content and style is entirely consistent with the scripts Chandler wrote for other directors. And Wilder’s truly great comedies were all co-scripted by IAL Diamond; they contain a humour not found in the rest of his canon. Indeed, Wilder’s best known line (“Nobody’s perfect”) was undoubtably written by Diamond; Wilder famously didn’t like it.

4. It’s not easy to argue with this one in so far as Hitchcock came from an English-speaking country and Wilder didn’t, but that is no more than an accident of birth. Wilder used American screenwriters quite as much as Hitchcock though, and that somewhat negates your argument. It’s worth pointing out though that Hitchcock’s earliest films were shot in Munich and that his work was popular in Germany, to the point that when he filmed Murder! he made both English and German versions; the German version is somewhat different with a script that is not a direct translation; I believe that Hitchcock wrote both.

None of the above negates in any way from Wilder’s greatness, merely from the arguments you use as justification for your preference. If you pushed me in a corner, I would have to say that I would plump for Hitch, for the following reason: Wilder’s films are almost entirely dialogue driven, frequently short of the real characterisation his dialogue demands (although he’s generally saved by his actors). His films inevitably derive from the scripts, and there is little creative use of the visuals of cinema that the medium demands. That could never be levelled at Hitchcock, whose films operate at a significantly more complex level.

Hi, Stephen.

I’m always happy to take corrections, and you’re right that I should have said of Wilder that he wrote or co-wrote his own scripts. As my text stands, it gives the impression that Wilder wrote all his own stuff, which is wrong. However in my defence…

1. Wilder did not just make cynical satires. Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, Stalag 17, Witness for the Prosecution. Ace in the Hole: some are cynical and some are not, but not one is a satire. Also, Wilder did mix genres — the opening scenes of daffy comedy Some Like It Hot include a cold-blooded mass murder that could have come straight out of White Heat.

2. I never claimed that Wilder created film noir; I said that Double Indemnity (1945) was the first definitive film noir, that is, the film that put all of the elements together for the first time. Film historians like to argue about what was the first true film noir, and for myself I’d probably choose Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Also, while Hitchcock was a master of the POV shot (one of his shots from The Birds is widely regarded as an historical highlight of the technique), he hardly created or popularised it. Ernst Lubitsch (yet another German!) constructed an entire scene out of multiple POVs in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) to show how Mrs Erlynne is perceived by the people around her.

3. How do you know that “leg or breast” was Hitchcock’s? How can you be certain that it wasn’t the work of Hayes (script) or Dodge (original novel)? And how do you know that the “Nobody’s perfect” line was Diamond’s? Both Wilder and Diamond credited each other. (This may sound odd, but I have had the same experience with some of the stories I wrote with Simon Brown where there are passages that we are both certain were written by the other). And neither Wilder nor Diamond liked the last line. They both intended to replace it during filming but never came up with a better one. I guess they were both as surprised as each other that it became one of the Great Lines in Cinema.

Having said that, I agree that Hitchcock took a big hand in developing the scripts. One of my grumbles about William Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell? is a passage where he tries to credit all the shots from the famous North By Northwest cropduster scene to scriptwriter Ernst Lehman. Goldman’s evidence is that all the shots are laid out in the script, and Goldman’s conclusion is that Hitchcock was just shooting Lehman’s script like a trained monkey. Goldman, being the whiny insecure writer that he is, wants to give all the credit for one of cinema’s greatest sequences to the writer. What astonishes me about this is that Goldman himself starts this tale with the fact that Lehman wrote that scene after sitting down with Hitchcock and hammering it out over several hours. So I’m with you on the collaborative process of cinema (but I still maintain that Wilder was a great scriptwriter and Hitchcock wasn’t).

5. I strongly disagree that Wilder was not interested in the “creative use of the visuals of cinema.” Double Indemnity is probably the best counter-example. It is stuffed full of inventive camera work and arresting visuals. One of the most important scenes in cinema history is the murder that takes place just off-camera — a long, emotionally gruelling shot where you know exactly what is happening and see nothing but Barbara Stanwyck’s face and her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as her plan is enacted. You won’t convince me that Wilder didn’t care about visuals!

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with preferring Hitchcock to Wilder. There’s a whole heap of personal preference wrapped up in any such argument. I would also tip my hat to people who would argue about the relative greatness of Fritz Lang or Martin Scorsese or Buster Keaton or Akira Kurosawa or any of dozens of other great filmmakers. There are few recreations as delightful as arguing over great films.

Chris

My response has I’m afraid been delayed; work, the impending approach of Christmas and the dark cloud of the credit cruch have all conspired to keep me otherwise occupied. Want to buy a painting for Christmas by any chance?

I’m not going to answer all your points right now (I’m pleased to see that the closing date for comment seems to have been extended) but I’ll pick off one or two.

Scriptwriting. Raymond Chandler wrote scripts for both Wilder and Hitchcock. Double Indemnity is my favourite Wilder film, while Strangers on a Train is one of Hitchcock’s better efforts, although certainly not the best. James M Cain’s story needed no rescuing, but Patricia Highsmith’s poor debut novel certainly did. It is interesting that most of the elements added by the film found their way into Highsmith’s later work. Chandler walked out on Hitchcock, complaining that Hitch was wanting too much input into the final script. That he stayed the course with Wilder suggests the ‘Indemnity’ script was primarily his work.

Noir. I’d have said that archetypal Production-Code-era film noir was not ‘created’ by any one filmmaker; the pre-war arrival of many European directors in Hollywood (for obvious historical reasons) brought a different aesthetic and moral perspective to Hollywood’s output. Lang sustained the genre over a significant period, and arguably represents a greater influence as a body of work.

I wouldn’t argue that Psycho is Hitchcock’s greatest film, but I’d certainly say that its influence has proved far more long lasting than Double Indemnity. ‘Hitchcockian’ is a staple of the film critic’s vocabulary, but you don’t often hear ‘Wilderian’.

I haven’t the time to prolong the “Leg or breast?” debate right now (although there’s a fourth suspect, Alma Hitchcock) other than to say that determining the scriptwriter is an irrelevance when it comes to assessing a filmmaker’s worth. That he retains final control over the script, and that it is a good one, is important, and Hitchcock and Wilder managed that in equal measure.

I’m sorry you didn’t mention Hawks and his broad range of excellent films, many shot in a Hollywood less in thrall to directors than became the norm.

Hi Stephen,

I think we can argue about the weight of contributions to a collaborative effort all day — after all, even the people involved can have wildly different recollections of who contributed what. The only reason I talked exclusively about Hitchcock and Wilder was because that was the way the original question was phrased. Personally, I think Hawks was about as good as a director can get. I still think his original Scarface was one of the greatest movies of all time (and the di Palma remake is absolutely appalling despite its ascendancy to pop culture reference). I’d also add Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, and on a good day, John Huston. I have a great deal of affection for Vincente Minelli’s work as well — he made the only Hollywood potboiler/melodramas I can sit down and enjoy watching.

And since this was started by a comparison of quotes, here’s some of my favourites from Hawks’s films:

1. “In this business there’s only one law you gotta follow to keep out of trouble: Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it. ” (Scarface, 1931, but could have come straight out of Goodfellas)

2. “Go state your business!” (Scarface, 1931 — needs context, but damn it’s a good line)

3. “All right, quit. Nobody’s trying to stop you. You wanna quit, quit! Go back to the bottle, get drunk. One thing, though. The next time someone throws a dollar into a spittoon, don’t expect me to do anything about it. Just get down on your knees and get it.” (Rio Bravo, 1959)

4. “I can be smart when I need to be.” (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953 — the whole movie is a quote mine)

5. “I’m not working for the world. I’m working for the Air Force. ” (The Thing From Another World, 1951)

6. “Now wait a minute, Quo. You really ain’t gonna take a man’s only set of teeth, are you?” (Red River, 1948)

And that doesn’t even touch on Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was a Male War Bride, The Big Sleep, or many many others.