Hitch onto TCM.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Turner Classic Movies

STARTING JULY 26, Turner Classic Movies will be showing, in chronological order, more than 40 Alfred Hitchcock films over a six-week period. Through a special arrangement between TCM and my parent university, a national online not-for-credit class (orchestrated by Richard Edwards, executive director of iLearn Research at Ball State University) has been established. It will mirror a comparable Slapstick series done last year. As with that program, I again am honored to be one of the commentators for the series.

Like most great auteurs, Hitchcock's catalog of movies, even single films, embrace numerous genres. Usually, the knee-jerk response to his work is the groundbreaking horror film "Psycho" (1960). This movie, coupled with British director Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" (1960), radically changed how viewers think of horror. Prior to this same-year duo, horror was most synonymous with a foreign past, whether it was the late 19th-century London of Jack the Ripper or Transylvania's centuries-old vampire Count Dracula.

"Psycho" and "Peeping Tom" suddenly made horror films just as likely to be about that quiet contemporary American boy living next door. All of this is not to say no previous memorable horror films had existed in a contemporary American setting. For instance, one need go no further than writer/producer Val Lewton's remarkable 1940s RKO "B" movies. Plus, horror moves never have stopped periodic forays into the boogie boogie past. Still, a shift had occurred.

Yet, ironically, horror was not Hitchcock's metier, despite "Psycho," or later works like "The Birds" (1963) and "Frenzy" (1972). The majority of his best films are better described as political and/or psychological thrillers. Classic examples would include "The 39 Steps" (1935), "Rebecca" (1940), "Suspicion" (1941), "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943, his favorite), "Notorious" (1946), "Strangers on a Train" (1951), "Vertigo" (1958, with 2012 Sight & Sound critics voting it the best film ever made), and "North by Northwest" (1959). "The Master of Suspense," though, felt most of his pictures were dark comedies. To illustrate, even in "Psycho," Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) spews black humor: "Mother ... isn't quite herself today"--dam straight; through the magic of taxidermy she is preserved and stuck in the basement.

So, is there a new twist with which to consider some of Hitchcock's work? One could contend that three of his films have farcical screwball comedy tendencies. Indeed...