Gave them a second chance and they improved.

Thirty years ago I watched the first half hour of A Streetcar Named Desire on TV and fell asleep.
Watched it all a few years ago and loved it. I wouldn't have been ready to accept Tennessee Williams into my heart back then anyhow, but now I am able to appreciate his words and characters so much more. I moved on to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth and loved those too.

But the thread is not about what has not improved for you.

Thanks for your reply. What I was unsure of was whether it was the specific surprise element you found to be the most significant departure from Hitchcock's more typical construction, or the broader one of the film being essentially a whodunit, something the director made a point of saying he avoided. But he wasn't above inserting the occasional surprise mid-plot (Frenzy, Vertigo, Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, for instance) or as a climactic revelation (Psycho, Stage Fright, Spellbound, among others).  

Hitchcock once said, "Some films are slices of life; mine are slices of cake." With TCAT, he has his cake and slices it too: the whodunit aspect is obscured under the frosting of his most oft-repeated suspense formula, the Wrong Man Thriller. The identity of the actual thief - the MacGuffin - is of little interest to the audience and any suspense, although uncharacteristically de-emphasized, is concerned with Robie's efforts to unmask the thief and clear himself before the law closes in on him. It's perhaps worth noting that Hitchcock once stated that his Saboteur Statue Of Liberty climax represented something of a mistake, musing that it should have been the hero rather than the villain dangling, and yet he repeated that scene structure as the culprit is found in a similar position at the climax of TCAT.

So on some levels, it's typical Hitchcock; on others, not. And as you suggest, the primary interest is in the development and resolution of the push-pull of the romantic relationship, just as it had been in Notorious, to cite another example.       

 


      

... good point. I had sort of forgotten about some of those long tracking shots.

And I appreciate your "recommendation" on the other one.

Hitchcock certainly inserts surprise in the middle of Vertigo, but he still lets the audience in on the secret long before Jimmy Stewart's protagonist learns of it, thus rekindling the suspense. He really balances surprise and suspense beautifully—and daringly—in that film. (Some viewers, however, find Scotty Ferguson's naivete and failure of recognition implausible. For me, it works because Hitchcock cast the right actor for the role.) 

Psycho offers a climactic revelation, but in terms of the film's visceral experience, one could argue that it is beside the point. I suppose that a full-fledged "surprise" would have been to not reveal (or strongly suggest) that Norman Bates was his "mother" until the very end. 

Given his more typical pattern, it might have been expected that Hitchcock would reveal the thief's identity much earlier in TCAT in order to generate trademark suspense, but as we've seen, there were themes and devices to which he'd regularly return, yet which he felt free to rearrange from one revisitation to the next. Take the cases of Suspicion and Rear Window as examples: in both, we're led to suspect to the point of belief that a man is a killer, but don't know for certain until the climax that one isn't and the other is.

As much or more than with any other director I can think of, audience expectations had become part and parcel of his appeal by the mid-'50s, but rather than become a slave to them, he was able to subvert them when he cared to, making them work to his advantage as simply one more item in his bag of tricks. I'm only guessing, mind you, but perhaps this is what he'd set out to do in TCAT.

As opposed to a straightforward, traditional whodunit, in which the audience knows both that the culprit will ultimately be revealed and that it won't happen until the final ten minutes, Hitchcock could mischievously play with what was expected of him - and generate suspense - by deliberately delaying the revelation: "I know he's going to tell us who's committing the robberies, but when?" After all, isn't that what's at the heart of suspense: delaying that which is expected, and could this simply have been what he was after with TCAT?