Eric Ambler & Alfred Hitchcock

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is the father of the modern thriller novel. He took the pulp thrillers of his day and with appropriate changes wrote thrillers that were in effect, literature. The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) became the first literary thriller and thirty year old Eric Ambler was unanimously accepted as a master of his craft. Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is the father of the film thriller. The MacGuffin, voyerism, suspense and point of view in pure cinematic terms were mostly developed by him. Hitchcock with his fifty odd films, and a successful ten year TV series, was well known but not considered important. It took a frenchman, film director Francois Truffault, and his book Hitchcock (1966), to elevate him to one of the great movie directors of all time.

Joan Harrison (1907-1994) a graduate of Oxford and the Sorbonne was hired as Alfred Hitchcock's secretary in 1933. Soon she read various books and screenplays to help him choose his future projects, and even wrote the screenplays of his films Jamaica Inn (1935), Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Saboteur (1942). In 1958 she married Eric Ambler. She was a major collaborator to Hitchcock's success, and it is hard to imagine that she had no say in Ambler's later novels. But as much as we would find it intriguing to think that it was a woman who pushed the two men to greatness, she wasn't. Ambler had made his fame well before he met Harrison, and she was but one of Hitchcock's collaborators. What united the two men and contributed to their success was not a woman but the concept of an innocent man who is wrongly accused.

The basic idea is that an innocent man is accused of a crime he did not commit. Instead of going to the police (which would immediately end the film or novel) he runs away from the scene of the crime and so further incriminates himself. He then attempts to find the real guilty party himself, only to discover that he is an amateur pitted against professionals. Instead of proving his innocence, his actions incriminate him even more. Yet, in spite of his considerable fumbling, he manages to single-handedly prove his innocence, unmask and quite often capture or kill the villain(s). The law simply turns up to verify his innocense and arrest the guilty.

A thriller scares the reader in that something bad is going to happen, then it allows for a narrow escape, hence it thrills. (See The Fear Conspiracy). Fear is most effective if it is immediate, that is we are more scared when something is happening to us rather than someone else. The protagonist, in most of Ambler's novels or Hitchcock's films, is an innocent man. When he is wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit, we (the readers or movie audience) immediately identify with him because we are also innocent and can understand his predicament. To attach us strongly to this identification both Ambler and Hitchcock wrote the story or viewed the film from the innocent man's point of view.

Ambler wrote his stories in the first person or a strict third person point of view in which the person whose actions, thoughts or emotions we follow are those of the innocent man. This way it is difficult for us to share the thoughts or readily sympathize with anyone else because all other characters are at a distance. We are literally forced to wear the innocent man's shoes because those are the only ones that are available to us.

Hitchcock used a simple but very effective movie editing technique to accomplish exactly the same thing. First he showed us a close-up of a person's face as he was looking at something. This was the person he wanted us to identify with. Next he showed us what this person saw from where he stood--his point of view. It is important that in this second shot the camera is located exactly where the protagonist is and that the camera is wearing a normal lens. It must not be placed higher or lower, closer or further back. If the person is moving, then the camera must move along with him. In the third and final shot of this sequence we are again shown a close-up of the person's face and observe his reaction.

This sequence of three shots (a person observing something, exactly what he is observing and his reaction) is repeated over and over in all of Hitchcock's films. In fact, his film Rear Window (1954) is largely made-up of these three shot sequences. Simple as this technique is, it is interesting to note that other directors have botched it. Ralph Thomas in his 1959 remake of Hitchcock's The 39 steps (1935) claimed to have copied Hitchcock's every shot. Yet in several key sequences, his second shot included close-ups of the characters the protagonist was observing. This in effect shifted the point of view from the protagonist to the persons being observed and the identification of the audience with the innocent man was weakened. Needless to say that the film failed both as a work of art and at the box office.

This strong identification of the reader, or film audience, with the protagonist's point of view coupled with the idea of an innocent man wrongly accussed are still the two key elements in almost all thrillers today. There may be different characters, settings or themes but they can usually be condensed to these two simple ideas. Ambler's and Hitchcock's claim to fame is still being copied seventy years later.

Unfortunately for the thriller genre, although Ambler and Hitchcock have been successfully copied, they have not been surpassed.