Cinema: The Ghost of Alfred Hitchcock

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The question nags at directors of suspense movies: What would Hitch have done? Like Walt Disney with cartoons, Alfred Hitchcock was thought not just to have invented a film genre but to have patented it. His trademarks -- the mortician's wit, the danse-macabre pacing, the elegant economy of his editing -- entertained moviegoers and enlightened moviemakers for a half-century. It's not that nobody did it better, but that everybody did it his way. Everybody still does. Almost seven years after his death, Hitchcock's bluff majesty continues to influence and intimidate all those who would make crime pictures. The master is dead; long live the mystery film -- but in his portly shadow. He is the ghost of thrillers past and thrillers yet to come, and he haunts his successors as surely as Mother Bates kept spooking poor Norman.

For a time after his death, Hollywood fell into a reverent silence on the subject of thrillers. The few bright children of Hitchcock's style, such as Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill) and John Carpenter (Christine), were toiling in the fetid cellar of shock tactics; they took their cue from the gore and funereal fun of Psycho, not the narrative crisscrossing of Strangers on a Train. De Palma and Carpenter were only serving their audience. The music- video generation was disinclined to track the intricacies of a well-made plot. Those tame pleasures were best left to TV sleuths and their fogy fans.

Then, in 1985, Jagged Edge appeared. It was predictable and crudely made, but it was an old-fashioned mystery movie with courtroom dueling, shifting romantic allegiances, an imperiled heroine and the lure of suave menace. More important, Jagged Edge was a hit, which convinced Hollywood that the thriller genre could once again be a moneymaker. So here are three new mystery movies in a familiar tradition: Arthur Penn's Dead of Winter, Curtis Hanson's The Bedroom Window and Bob Rafelson's Black Widow.

All three films are tales of an innocent person drawn into a web of complicity and accused of murder. All three trade in multiple female identities and tease the viewer into hoping the heroine will take one more step in the dark. Now for the differences. Winter is a dud in a handsome shell. Window has a cunning plot but not much craft. Widow rides smoothly on Hitchcockian tracks until it finds its own detours of style and psychology.

Hitchcock's Rope begins with a brutal murder performed by two homoerotic psychopaths. Dead of Winter could be the events leading up to that crime. Dr. Lewis (Jan Rubes) is an elderly psychiatrist; Mr. Murray (Roddy McDowall) is his aide-de-camp in blackmailing. As part of their scheme to defraud a wealthy ( woman, they hire an actress, Katie McGovern (Mary Steenburgen), to impersonate the woman's dead sister. Katie doesn't realize she is taping a video ransom note. Ever conscientious, she tells her sly captors, "I'm gonna take a beat after the line 'There was blood everywhere.' "