Portrait of a Shallow Genius

...The plot of many a Shakespearean play is reducible to Hitchcockian horrors, but what Shakespeare (or a much lesser yet genuine artist) does with such a plot is what makes for poetry, profundity, universality The dreadful things in Hitchcock always befall (to quote one of his own titles) the wrong man, in art, the sufferer is always, in some deep sense, the night man That is what makes the suffering tragic and the story ecumenical Still, if you read the concluding chapters of The Dark Side of Genius as a cautionary tale of a lecherous Ebenezer Scrooge unredeemed by a hortatory ghost, the experience may be—not moving, for the man brought it upon himself and deserved no better—let's say, sobering and instructive, even awesome The loneliness, the fear, the pitiful crawling to friends for companionship while not making any effort to earn it, the unreconstructed sadism that reduced, near the very end of Hitchcock's life, a woman typist to hysterical flight and need for medical treatment—such things make for a story worthy of Bufiuel, the only other director for whom Hitchcock expressed some grudging admiration...

...Or that "Empedocles on Etna" (the verse playlet's correct title) "insists" that we wear spectacles to see the world more clearly and partially disguise ourselves9 Did you ever perceive the slightest similarity between George Eliot's and Hitchcock's sensibilities9 Is that shopworn piece of writing from Under Capricorn remotely comparable to Dickens...

...but the name of a director should stay clear in the minds of audiences " -\nd, indeed, he was the first, and tor a long time only, English director moviegoer knew by name He w as going a lot to the I heater, and he read some serious books But he was also ardently reading the yellow press, frequenting museums of crime, following murder trials at the Old Bailey, and haunting the fledgling cinemas What he lacked was social or sexual intercourse Directing his first movie at age 25, he couldn't understand why an actress wouldn't enter the water as instructed It turned out that he had never heard of menstruation, and was proud of it But into the first film where he could truly express himself, The Lodger (1926-7), he was already introducing some of his particular sexual preferences The dark leading lady had to wear a blond wig, there were hmts of bondage and sadism, and the hero was possibly Jack the Ripper—the conclusion was supposed to leave this open That was too much for the studio, and the hero had to be cleared in the end When Ivor Montagu helped save The Lodger with a few improvements (initially acknowledged by Hitchcock), he experienced the fate of many a Hitchcock collaborator little or no credit, and less gratitude Throughout his career, the director would deny praise, due recogmtion, even adequate payment to his scenarists and other co-workers This omnipotent director was to be a walking auteur theory Yet with the advent of sound, Hitchcock, who could polish dialogue but not write it, had to suffer writers, however ungladly Following a long, unromantic courtship, hemarned Alma Reville, who had to give up her career for Alfred Her sole j ob from then on was to help in various ways with her husband's movies, though eventually she was phased out there too, after giving birth to a daughter, Pat, she was demoted even from sexual partner to mere hausfrau and sporadic adviser on minor film matters Yet Bernard Shaw, one of the literary celebrities the Hitchcocks would invite to dinner, showed his preference by inscribing a first edition, "to Alma, who married Alfred Hitchcock " With The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock's mastery was established But as his directorial abilities and business acumen became evident, so too did the fundamental ugliness of his personality His scatological and sadistic bents could now be indulged on a grander scale He bet a movie prop man that he would be scared to spend a night chained in the dark studio After handcuffing him to the camera, he generously allowed him a beaker of brandy that would put him to quick sleep The drink was laced with a strong laxative, and the victim was found next morning befouled, weeping, thoroughly humiliated Similarly, Hitch handcuffed together Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, who had never met before, ostensibly to practice up for a scene from The 39 Steps Then he claimed to have misplaced the key to the manacles and disappeared for some six or seven hours...

...Only after a while did it dawn on me that "oaks" was Truffaut's way of pronouncing Hawks, and that he now regretted having conducted his book-length series of interviews with Hitchcock rather than Howard Hawks But I somehow never found out why The answer emerges from Donald Spoto's biography The Dark Side of Genius The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, partly because of Spoto's sedulous research and scrupulous (or is it unscrupulous9) outspokenness, and partly because of his subject's pecuhar character and life Although its thinking and writing are far from distinguished, the book is a considerable improvement over Spoto's earlier The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, a piece of crude hagiogra-phy posturing as criticism Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (1899-1980) was the second son of an East London grocer of humblest plebeian background The boy was to be both saved and damned by his Catholicism He received thorough Jesuit schooling, but was also saddled with lifelong guilt feelings Indifferent to his father, brother and sisters, he was closely involved with his doting and demanding mother, who obliged him to perform evening confessions at the foot of her bed even after he was already earning his own living Young Hitchcock was a fat, unprepossessing boy with no real friends, and noted mostly for his cruel practical jokes He gravitated from engineering work to commercial art and was hired by Famous Players-Laski to do title designs Industnous and extremely ambitious, he was soon assistant director, finally, Michael Balcon sent him to Germany to direct his first picture He took along as cutter (editor) Alma Re-ville ("my severest critic"), a \oung woman whose talent impressed him Full of himself, young Hitchcock declared "Actors come and go...

...Portrait of a Shallow Genius_ The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock By Donald Spoto Little, Brown 594 pp $20 00 Reviewed by John Simon The one time I had lunch with Francois Truffaut-must after the publication of his book on Hitchcock—he remarked "[should have done the book on oaks " Oaks, 1 wondered, those tall trees that trom little acorns grow...

...The idea was to cause the actors intense embarrassment with their bodily functions In a sense, Hitchcock was making others live out his private fears, for although he was always telling bathroom jokes, he was embarrassed about using bathrooms He left them compulsively clean, and once even gave Sam and Suzanne Taylor a noiseless guest toilet as a house gift Hitchcock knew himself to be an extremely unappealing man who lusted for beautiful women, besides his ugliness, there were his Catholic notion of sin, his all-round cowardice, and his lifelong fear of any kind of exposure to curb him As he grew richer and richer?and he was to acquire what Spoto, in his not exactly spotless prose, calls "fabulous wealth"—he could easily have satisfied his abnormal cravings with prostitutes, but either his pride or his cravenness forbade it So he exercised his hidden desires in his films and in his cruel treatment of actresses—shooting, for instance, a scene in which Phyllis Konstam or, years later, Kim Novak had to be dunked in the studio tank deliberately over and over again When his daughter, during her bnef acting career, played in Strangers on a Train, he found a way once to scare her nearly out of her wits These tortures grew steadily worse, reaching their apogee with the ordeals Tippi Hedren had to undergo in The Birds and Mamie On a milder level, there were his soph-omonc pranks At parties, he would have cushions that emitted embarrassing noises when guests sat on them For the fastidious Joan Harrison—one of his most gifted co-workers, after whom he also lusted—he kept a copy of Joyce's Ulysses on his desk, and repeatedly read out loud to her what Spoto calls (rather naively) "the notorious toilet scene " At a later time, he would summon in a prudish secretary, confront her with his respectably married set designer Henry Bumstead, and ask her how she would like to "screw Henry Bumstead " Meanwhile he found ways of screwing others out of money (he paid John Michael Hayes a total of $75,000 for four screenplays), of cheating impoverished authors like John Trevor Story out of rights to their books for a pittance, of inveigling set designers like Bumstead into redesigning his private property free of charge (and without so much as a word of thanks) He took credit for scenes other men directed (e g , William Cameron Menzies' work on dream sequences in Spellbound) or edited (e g , Saul Bass' history-making montage of the shower murder in Psycho) Much of Hitchcock's so-called art was, m fact, compensation for a former poor boy's hunger for luxury, and an ugly fat man's need to be surrounded and toadied to by beautiful women As for his Rabelaisian overeating, it was not merely, as Spoto notes, a way of eliminating himself from sexual competition, it was also one form of sexual substitute, the other being sadistic aggression Hitch acquired wealth and power the better to victimize, and his stinginess went so far as to prevent nun even from paying his collaborators well-earned compliments It could be argued that his entire "genius" was only a barely sublimated sadism Spoto should have asked himself just what it means to be the supreme master of suspense, of nothing but suspense Among other things it means (this much he recognizes) to manipulate the spectators "The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing," Hitch told one of his scenarists, Ernest Lehman "At one moment we play this note and then get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way And someday we won't even have to make a movie—there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains " Innocently, Spoto adds, "The desire to manipulate an audience's sensibilities to the utmost was, Hitchcock always insisted, the root of his love of cinema " But to keep in suspense, on tenterhooks, is, in a milder form, to have absolute control over, to rack, to torture It is not, by and large, what an artist wants As Charles Thomas Samuels noted in Mastering the Film, "Admiring interviewers seeking to pluck out the secret of Hitchcock's meaning forget that the secret is the absence of meaning, the absolute identification of meaning with effect " The book follows Hitchcock's British career as he gets ever grander "Hitchcock supervised scnpt sessions from the center of his sitting-room comfortably installed on a velvet Renaissance throne and usually in black silk pajamas "At the same time he was getting ever bigger, his five-foot-eight frame often weighing as much as 300 pounds And he was getting shrewder, realizing that to be able to throw his weight around, the director had to become the producer as well Moreover, he founded his own publicity firm to beef up his reputation By the late '30s Hitchcock was eyeing America as the place to work When David Selzmck eventually signed him up, Hitch was able to satisfy not only his self-esteem, ambition and greed?what with the greater scope, prestige and remunerativeness of American movies—but also his need for absolute safety, what with World War II threatening Europe The Selznick-Hitchcock relationship, a serio-comic contest of tyrannical megalomaniacs, is well narrated by Spoto, and we get profuse examples of Hitchcock's still growing technical resourcefulness and proficiency The director worked out his films in his head and on paper—many times with several scriptwriters concurrently or consecutively employed—whereupon the actual shooting proceeded smoothly as planned, generally bonng the master Sometimes he was helpful to his actors, but as often he sat there uninterested, leaving those "cattle" to their own devices Nevertheless, his technical innovations were many and generally impressive (though some werestenle, show-offy self-indulgences), and he knew how to coax fine results from his technicians Yet as the gifted novelist Brian Moore, who briefly worked with Hitch on Torn Curtain, was to remark, "He had absolutely no conception of character—even of two-dimensional figures in a story ' Moore further observed that Hitchcock's preoccupation with trivial details was a way to cover up "a profound ignorance of human motivation " Earlier on, Robert Boyle, his frequent art director over four decades, described Hitchcock discussing his films "Only the technique interested him, and references to themes and motifs and concerns made him uneasy and inarticulate " Spoto deals adequately with the human failings, such as the cowardice that prevented Hitch from returning to war-torn England where his beloved mother was dying Perhaps not so purely beloved, after her death, the mother figures in his films became more ambiguous, threatening, and occasionally evil, as in Notorious and Strangers on a Tram And Hitch is the monster who kept promising those two extremely useful helpers who each gave him about a quarter century of devoted service, Peggy Robertson and Suzanne Gauth-ler, that they would be provided for in his will, only to leave them, out o f an estate that ran into millions, not a cent The biographer does not neglect genuine Hitchcock achievements For example, he notes the effective omission of music from the Lifeboat soundtrack, and the useful advice Alfred gave to his adored Ingnd Bergman when she found a line or gesture awkward "Fake it'" But how does Spoto document his subject's alleged genius9 The main critical method throughout is gilding by association A lengthy passage about mirrors and eyeglasses in connection with Psycho, tor instance, reads in part "The mirror is not only...

...Elsewhere, Spoto tells us that "Hitchcock's temperament was very like that of Henry James," because, it seems, both were Anglo-American puritans Spoto continues "As Leon Edel wrote of Henry James, so it was with Alfred Hitchcock a "spiritual transvestism'?which fascinated the director in its literal and figurative senses " How, one wonders, can "spiritual transvestism" have a literal sense Did Henry James' psyche frequent drag parties' The passage, belie\e it or not, leads up to the notion that the heroine of I ertigo is like one of James little girls who endure and grow wiser by experience, and that just as James identified himself with such little-girl heroines so did Hitchcock with the kirn No\ak character in I cuigo Spoto is somewhat better in his discussion of films as films, but not much Without the slightest explanation, he pronounces the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much a masterpiece The writing consistently leaves a great deal to be desired Spoto repeatedly resorts to cheap potboiler tricks, including portentous foreshadowing "At once there began an exchange of telegrams that would make American cultural history " (with reference to Selznick's engaging Hitchcock's services) or "Five years later the tendency would reach its saddest and most destructive expression in an obsession [note the jingle1] from which he would never recover" (refernng to the maniacal attempt to take over the married Tippi Hedren body and soul, prefigured by numerous infatuations with and bullyings of other leading ladies) In general, the writing tends toward things like "All conjoined to put him in touch with the darker and deeper caverns of his own spirit," or "A devout homage was being offered to Hitchcock by the young directors who were splashing up a new wave on the shores of film culture " In a would-be parallel between Hitchcock and Hier-onymus Bosch, Spoto informs us that "both loved mystery stones " Were they both habitues of Oberammergau, do you suppose, or avid Agatha Christie fans7 Yet the real problem is that Spoto does not discnminate He ridicules the perfectly justified objections to the lack of resolution in The Birds "What was a startling virtue in the European cinema was apparently a sign of weakness in Amenca " He evidently does not fathom that the permanent quandary of the protagonist of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, as captured in that famous freeze-frame ending, is germane to the boy's existential impasse, and consequently altogether different from, and vastly supenor to, Hitchcock's merely cutting off his nasty and nonsensical film arbitrarily The crucial factor that distinguishes Hitchcock the gifted craftsman from a true artist was perfectly perceived by Sean O'Casey, who had a brief friendship with the director when Hitchcock perfunctorily transposed the Abbey Theater's production of Juno and the Pay cock to the screen In his last essay, "The Bald Pnmaqueera" (1964), O'Casey wrote "Without seeming to see any difference between fear and fright, [Hitchcock] told us that people like to be frightened, that they came to the cinema to be absolved from some kind of psychic fear " Everything is contained in that fine distinction between fear and fright One is a primary emotion and mainspring of motivation (cowardice, terror of death, etc ), the other is a mere frisson, the meaningless titilla-tion of horror films, slick thrillers, and the like But Spoto simply does not grasp the trashiness of a directorial and human sensibility that could declare, "The trouble today is that we don't torture women enough" or, about Dial Mfor Murder, "A murder without gleaming scissors is like asparagus without the hollandaise sauce—tasteless " Most revealing, though, is Spoto's summation for the defense Hitchcock "created images not of what all life is, but of what some life is all the time, everywhere, and what all life is in constant danger of becoming " Does this mean that somewhere on earth someone is always being murdered in a motel shower by a psychotic, or hanging on for dear Iifeto the faces on Mt Rush more or the Statue of Liberty, or being hacked to death by flocks of mystenously maddened birds...

...Is there the faintest resemblance between Spoto's irresponsible agglomeration, his imaginary parallels, and the art of criticism...

...as in gothicism, a prop suitable tor the representation of the split personality—it also marks the need for introspection, as Hitchcock knew from his earlier reading of Tennyson's The Lady ofShalott, Matthew Arnold's Empedocles, George Eliot's Adam Bede and Middlemareh, and Dickens' Our Mutual Friend Required in his school years, these works presented to Victorian society the mirror as an image of self-awareness To see the world more clearly and to partially disguise ourselves, insisted these books and Hitchcock's films, one wears eyeglasses But for a true glimpse of our divided selves, one consults a mirror ('I'll buy you a new mirror,' Hitchcock had added for Michael Wilding to say to Ingrid Bergman in Under Capricorn, "and it will be your conscience ')" Did you know before reading this that the poem "The Lady of Shalott" (here referred to as a book) was about the mirror as an image of self-awareness...

...Or that, even if such things are not happening to us now, they are inevitably lying in wait for us around the corner The stuff of melodrama can, and sometimes does, impinge on our lives, but the real question is how and to what end does an artist—or nonartist—employ it...