Being such a visual medium, it often surprises me how rare it is to come across a movie scene that dispenses with dialogue and instead leans on visuals (and soundtrack) to tell the story, often with more impact than any amount of character blabbing could ever achieve.

None other than Alfred Hitchcock agreed, once complaining that…

“In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.”

Sadly, Hitchcock’s sound (oof!) moviemaking advice—think of all those indelible moments from Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest and Psycho, elongated sequences in which all we need to know or feel is revealed by a passive camera, emotions playing across the actors’ faces and Bernard Herrmann’s memorable score—seems to have fallen mostly on deaf ears (I can’t help myself!).

Let’s face it; scenes like the cemetery standoff in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the last moments of The Graduate or, more recently, the opening of There Will Be Blood are few and far between. (Yeah, yeah, there was 2013’s All Is Lost with Robert Redford that was pretty much dialogue-less. And quite few earlier Brian De Palma thrillers (he was, after all, an acolyte of Hitchcock). But you get the point.)

That said, there is one director who seems to revel in what Hitchcock termed “the cinematic” and his name is Sam Mendes.

Mendes, as you may or may not know, achieved quite a bit of fame in the 90s, breathing new life into somewhat tired musicals (Cabaret, Oliver!) and directing daring works by some of Britain’s most talented playwrights (The Blue Room, Three Days of Rain).

Despite the scenery within the proscenium, theater is, of course, a dialogue-driven art form. And so, for his first foray into the film world, Mendes didn’t stay much from his wheelhouse, which just so happened to win him the Best Director Oscar for the dialogue-heavy suburban-angst drama, American Beauty (1999). (Ed. Note: I would’ve given best picture/director to The Insider/Michael Mann but who am I, right?)

That’s not saying that the film lacks visual panache—it was, after all, lensed by Conrad Hall, one of the all-time great cinematographers. But it really didn’t feature forays into Hitchcock’s take on the “cinematic.”

With that first feature under his belt and, consequently, much more fluent in the language of film, Mendes started flexing his cinematic muscles, seemingly taking to heart Mr. Hitchcock’s advice on withholding dialogue to create tension, beauty and poetry “through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.”

One needs to look no further than his most recent feature, 1917 (2019), pretty much a 119-minute exercise in the visual over spoken. And then there was this classic Shanghai scene in Skyfall (2012), in which with Bond tracks his quarry, the assassin Patrice, to an office building and eventually engages in a fight to the death at the edge of a broken window hundreds of feet above the street. The sequence runs nine minutes and twenty-three seconds and yet not a word of dialogue is spoken, just a succession of incredibly beautiful widescreen shots by DP Roger Deakins. The “cinematic” indeed.

Another terrific example, and the one I’d like to focus on for the rest of this post, comes towards the end of Mendes’ second feature, the criminally under-seen Road to Perdition (2002).

For those unfamiliar with the film, Tom Hanks stars as Michael Sullivan Sr., a hit man in the service of John Rooney (Paul Newman), an Irish mobster operating out of Rock Island, IL. The two share a tender relationship, much more father/son than boss/subordinate due to a) Rooney having adopted and raised Sullivan, who was orphaned as a boy, and b) the fact that his biological son, Connor (Daniel Craig before Bond!), is a complete and utter turd.

Things get complicated, however, when (SPOILERS AHEAD!) Sullivan’s oldest son, Michael Jr., witnesses Connor assassinating a disillusioned business associate. A mortified Sullivan Sr., who also witnessed the execution, insists that his son will keep quiet. But the unhinged Connor isn’t so sure. And so, to cover his tracks, he puts a hit out on Michael Sr. (which fails, of course) and personally murders Sullivan’s wife and younger son (but not Michael Jr., who isn’t home at the time).

John Rooney is now faced with a moral dilemma: support his idiot son, Connor, who he really doesn’t like much, or side with Sullivan Sr., his favorite, who is now demanding restitution in the form of putting a bullet in Connor’s brain. I won’t tell you what choice Rooney makes, nor will I spoil much more of the plot but, suffice to say, don’t watch the following clip until you’ve seen the movie. (Or don’t give a crap either way.)

So here’s how it plays out, in vague terms: A group of men leave a restaurant after an evening meal. Outside, in a driving rain, they approach their car only to notice something odd about the driver. One of them struggles to open the locked door, which does nothing but jostle the driver face-first into the steering wheel, apparently dead. The man at the door slowly stands erect, the look on his face relaying the dawning of some terrible facts: he about to be killed, he know who will pull the trigger, and he probably deserves this fate. The men around him pull their guns and scan the street for trouble. In the distance a muzzle flash cuts through the darkness and one of the men surrounding the car goes down. The man at the car door, his back to the gunman, doesn’t turn to the gunfire, rather just stands in the rain, waiting. The other men fire blindly, each eventually going down in a heap on the soaking street. The gunman finally emerges from the gloom, a Tommy gun at this side. He stops short of the last man standing, the man at the door, who eventually turns to face his killer. “I’m glad it’s you,” he says before the assassin tearfully raises the gun and unloads.

I can just about imagine Hitchcock clapping his chubby hands together and giggling as he watches the scene unfold in a dark theatre. This, quite simply, is a masterclass in the “cinematic.” Because what I didn’t mention in the above description is that the scene is devoid of sound other than Thomas Newman’s evocative score. No rain or thunder, no guns being discharged, no broken glass or ricochets, no bleating car horn. Just “a succession of shots and bits of film in between.” Until, of course, that one heartbreaking spoken line at the very end.

Who needs dialogue or overloaded sound design when the essence of a scene can be communicated via the score, beautiful widescreen compositions (DP Conrad Hall returned for Mendes’ second feature and died soon theafter), mise en scene, blocking, lighting, camera movement and atmospherics (rain)?

I’ll end with this: Despite the emergence of sound in the late 1920s, movies remain a visual medium. Here’s hoping that directors other than Mendes go back to the basics and let the image do the talking.