![]() Like Lang and his compatriots, Hitchcock watches dispassionately, though with more deadpan humor than the Germans could summon, as a terrible pre-ordained destiny overtakes his characters. Awful things happen to them-the Hitchcockian world is a series of traps for unsuspecting victims. His typical posture is one of amusement-what fools these mortals be-as he masterminds the often catastrophic fates that confound his protagonists. Like the traditional noir director, Hitchcock maintains a decided distance from his characters, looking down on them as they become entangled in the nets he carefully spreads. And yet, as he continued working in that narrow vein of the thriller that he has made distinctly his own, Hitchcock is pre-eminently a noir stylist: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), The Wrong Man (1957), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960), are richly, demonstrably noir. Hitchcock, in fact, is seldom labeled as a noir director-certainly he is not linked with the genre to the same degree as Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak or early Jules Dassin. Since he is neither a German expatriate with a penchant for Expressionism nor an idiosyncratic American, Alfred Hitchcock, the most renowned director of thrillers, does not belong to any group prominently associated with noir.
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