Alfred Hitchcock: modest exhibitionist

From The Times Literary Supplement
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September 5, 2008
Alfred Hitchcock: modest exhibitionist
Why Hitchcock is so appealing to theorists, historians and trivia buffs

Will there ever be an end to the supply of books about Alfred Hitchock? The deluge began with his “discovery” in the 1950s by the French New Wave. Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut were followed by Britain’s Robin Wood, whose more balanced perspective established Hitchcock’s gifts as a craftsman, creative innovator and social critic. From then on, the number of books, essays and conferences on the filmmaker have rivalled the quantity devoted to such august literary figures as Henry James and James Joyce. Indeed, James makes for a particularly felicitous comparison, since he and Hitchcock marked a sort of terminus for their respective forms – James, for the Victorian novel; Hitchcock, for classical narrative film. Both also pointed forward – one to modernism, the other to independent film and postmodernism. (A symposium on James and Hitchcock was in fact held in May this year at Dartmouth College.) As with James, Hitchcock has been the subject of elaborate hermeneutical analysis. Queer theorists have parsed him, and feminist theorists have had a field day. His work has been characterized both as emblematic of the “male gaze”, and subversive of it. There is even the cinematic homage represented by Gus Van Sant’s Psycho – less a remake than a kind of visual dissertation. No one would be more pleased by this outpouring of serious attention than Hitchcock himself. He was flamboyantly modest or, perhaps better, a self-deprecating exhibitionist. His understated preening is evident in his famous interview with Truffaut and in the cameo appearances he insisted on making in all his films.

The trajectory of Hitchcock’s career is well known to most film enthusiasts. Born in 1899 into a lower-middle-class London family, he was an overweight boy with an interest in maps and train timetables who watched from the sidelines as others played. His first film job, for the British arm of an American film company, was making title cards for silent movies. Through his willingness and ability to do almost anything whenever it was needed, he soon graduated to being an assistant director, then a director. He would make his country’s first talking picture, Blackmail, in 1929, notable not just as a technical landmark but as a creative one. By the late 1930s, he was the most acclaimed director in England.

In 1939, the wunderkind Hollywood producer David O. Selznick brought Hitchcock to Hollywood. It is hard to think of two sensibilities more different than those of the thriller-oriented British director and the American producer with a taste for romantic melodrama. But what first may have looked like a mismatch became a creative collaboration, at least on Hitchcock’s side (the relationship has been superbly explored in Leonard Leff’s Hitchcock and Selznick). It was the beginning of Hitchcock's enormously successful American career, though it did not at first translate into critical acclaim (Rebecca won an Oscar for Best Picture for Selznick, but not one for Best Director for Hitchcock). For many years, his American films were seen as commercial sell-outs, a falling off from his “purer” British period. It took the French to readjust the lens.

The appeal of Hitchcock to the theorist and historian of film is impossible to overstate. To study him is to find an economical way of studying the entire history of cinema. His work spans most of the twentieth century (he died, still working, in 1980). It traverses every point of change and hits every significant landmark: from silent to sound, from black-and-white to colour, from small-scale to large. His films evolved from action thrillers to character-driven ones. He employed the biggest stars so adeptly that they became associated with him, rather than the other way around. He had an unerring grasp of the cinematic – on the technical level of understanding lenses and camera angles, and on the conceptual level of visual storytelling. He was able to make suspense into a metaphor for life and to use the theme of mistaken identity as a source of rich existential meaning. He understood the popular audience, was a master of studio politics and a genius at publicity, and yet he managed to hold to his own vision.

The books under review are emblematic of the different styles and approaches that Hitchcock has inspired over the past fifty years. Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony is a dense academic tome. Richard Allen explores the films by way of a complex trope: “Romantic irony”, he writes, “accounts for both vertical and horizontal form . . . for both the inscription of authorial self-consciousness and the organization of narrative meaning . . . it is a concept that allows us to understand Hitchcock’s relationship to romanticism, one that is mediated by fin-de-siècle aestheticism and by European modernism, German expressionism in particular”. There are many “isms” vying for our attention here, but Allen’s point seems to be that Hitchcock moves between the ideal and the real, the conventional and the perverse. Paradox and uncertainty subvert narrative closure, complicating the idea of suspense, even penetrating the visual components of the films through the use of colour, design and stylistic technique.

In dealing with narrative form in Hitchcock, Allen makes a distinction between films of “romantic renewal” and those of “romantic inversion”. Romantic renewal is epitomized by North by Northwest, in which the real yields to the ideal. The shot of the hero holding the heroine dangling by the arm over Mount Rushmore is followed by a shot of him pulling her up into the berth of an overnight train: “Formally, the sequence contrasts a high-angle, open-frame long shot down into the void over which the characters are suspended in a state of paralyzed limbo, with a slow-angle shot that signifies ascent into the cozy nestlike space of the bunk”. Allen concludes that the two aspects – of the woman, dangling from the man’s hand, on the brink of death, and of the couple joined in happy union – are both part of Hitchcock’s vision, and that the order of the shots could just as well be reversed. They are in a film of romantic inversion like Vertigo, as the hero, about to accept the heroine into his saving embrace, sees her plunge to her death as she is frightened by the sudden appearance of the nun at the top of the tower. Now, the romantic ideal, instead of being magically affirmed, is tragically dashed. In whichever direction a Hitchcock film moves, Allen claims, perversity lingers and death lurks, unsettling the embrace of the romantic couple and the resolution of the plot. Although Allen’s theoretical terminology is often cumbersome, his knowledge of Hitchcock’s films is impressive, as is his ability to match and contrast scenes across the filmmaker’s career.

Quentin Falk’s Mr Hitchcock represents the other extreme of Hitchcockiana: an entirely accessible narrative, generously illustrated with black-and-white publicity shots and stills from the films. Falk pleasantly rehashes all the old stories about Hitchcock: there is the filmmaker’s lifelong suspicion of the police, presumably engendered by his father’s sending him as a child to be locked up in the local jail; his meticulous planning of his films, down to the last detail, so that actually shooting them became something of a bore; and his interest in icy blondes, whom he enjoyed seeing reduced to fits of hysteria or passionate desire.

Falk also trots out some lesser-known anecdotes: how, for example, Carole Lombard engineered a surprise on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith that consisted of three cows with the name tags “Carole Lombard”, “Robert Montgomery” and “Gene Raymond” – an unsubtle allusion to the filmmaker’s famous remark equating actors with cattle (almost as famous was his correction of it: “I would never be capable of such a thoughtless, rude and unfeeling remark . . . what I probably said was that actors should be treated like cattle”). Although Falk has few original sources for his book and much of what he writes is well known, he manages to flesh out a portrait of his subject that is sympathetic and admirable, if not always amiable.

Hitchcock was eccentric, brilliant, vulnerable, testy and, in the final analysis, human. To reinforce that humanity, indeed to show its darker side, is the purpose of Donald Spoto’s Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and his leading ladies. Spoto’s book involves some recycling of material from his two previous books, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976) and The Dark Side of Genius: The life of Alfred Hitchcock (1983). This time, however, there is a new emphasis on the women in Hitchcock’s films. This allows for the inclusion of photographs and short biographies of the famous Hitchcock blondes: Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren, among others.

According to Spoto, Hitchcock’s casting of the Nordic type was connected to his general interest in a secret to be uncovered – in this case, of sexual desire masked under a cool elegant exterior. Spoto invokes as the theme of his analysis the filmmaker’s early declaration (borrowed from the playwright Victorien Sardou): “Torture the women!”. He concludes that Hitchcock followed this injunction not only in the plots of his films, but also in his behaviour towards the women in them. This behaviour grew more extreme as he became more successful and ensconced in Hollywood, and culminated in his grossly sadistic treatment of Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds.

Despite a good deal of supporting material, Spoto’s conclusions lack critical shading. It is true that Hitchcock’s treatment of women would not be tolerated today, but times were different then, and the stories that Spoto was told must be filtered through the reality of another era, the possibility of unreliable witnesses, and the understanding that what is hurtful can often be subjective. We cannot know whether the filmmaker was a childish prankster or a genuine sadist, though it might have helped had we learned more about those who knew and tolerated what went on. Spoto makes tantalizing but undeveloped reference, for example, to Lew Wasserman, head of Universal Studios, who seems to have stood by when some of the worst behaviour was allegedly taking place.

Although Donald Spoto has written some two dozen biographies of actors, writers and directors, Alfred Hitchcock has been the central focus of his professional life. In gathering material, he has become friendly with many of his sources, embracing some of their causes and adopting some of their grudges. This makes his book a mixture of stargazing and muckraking alongside solid commentary. The recipe seems fitting given that Alfred Hitchcock himself embodied such a curious mixture of qualities.

Richard Allen
HITCHCOCK’S ROMANTIC IRONY
224pp. Columbia University Press. Paperback, £14.50 (US $24.50).
978 0 231 13575 7

Quentin Falk
MR HITCHCOCK
200pp. Haus. £18 (US $24.95).
978 1 904950 75 2

Donald Spoto
SPELLBOUND BY BEAUTY
Alfred Hitchcock and his leading ladies
229pp. Hutchinson. £20.
978 0 09 179723 2
US: Harmony. $25.95. 978 0 307 35130 2



Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: The legacy of Victorianism, 1995, and Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth, 2001.