Hitchcock's Mystery
LAST, JONATHAN V. & BOTTUM, J.
Hitchcock's Mystery What makes the films of Alfred Hitchcock great? BY J. BOTTUM & JONATHAN V. LAST There's a well-known story told about Alfred Hitchcock—one of those anecdotes of a famous man's...
...BY J. BOTTUM & JONATHAN V. LAST There's a well-known story told about Alfred Hitchcock—one of those anecdotes of a famous man's childhood that are supposed to reveal the origins of all his later work...
...You could certainly say he loved them...
...Free at last from the studio system, Hitchcock was set to produce his own movies...
...Loyal watchdog, infallible judge of good and evil, and the devil's companion: Hitchcock uses that one dog to create three distinct canine clichés in as many minutes...
...But his independent company lasted for only two pictures, Rope (1948), his first color film, and Under Capricorn (1949...
...And that points to yet another element in his movies...
...In Strangers on a Train, while the falsely suspected tennis player is desperately trying to finish a match so he can chase down the real murderer, that murderer has accidentally dropped down a storm drain the cigarette lighter with which he's going to frame his friend...
...The director made only one explicitly Catholic film, I Confess, and it was a flop...
...In 1960, he made Psycho, his most famous work...
...Hitchcock's choice for the lead, the Swedish beauty Anita Bjork, arrived on location with her illegitimate baby and was promptly replaced with the better behaved but miscast Anne Baxter...
...So too, every one of his films has a shot whose primary purpose is to show off...
...The tennis match...
...But when Granger puts out his hand, the dog lowers his head and accepts a pat, recognizing the intruder's peaceful intentions...
...He seems to have had a fat man's hatred of food, and, for forty years, from the awful Scottish meals offered the hero in The 39 Steps to the inedible French dinners cooked by the detective's wife in Frenzy, Hitchcock's films contained a distaste for eating...
...Under the old Hollywood system, however, a studio executive would assign the cast and crew to a movie, and for Saboteur, Hitchcock was given Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, two decidedly inferior actors...
...The hand pawing for the lighter...
...After completing Family Plot in 1976, he retired, dying quietly in Los Angeles on April 29, 1980...
...Alfred Hitchcock had something higher and something lower than that to give his audience...
...With World War II in full swing, Hitchcock made a trio of sensational propaganda films, Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), and Lifeboat (1944...
...You have to use one idea after another, and with such rapidity...
...He frequently clashed with Selznick, and though Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946) were hits, his final Selznick picture, The Paradine Case (1947), was a box-office disappointment...
...And, if you think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense at all...
...ting with his star, Tippi Hedren...
...But in the Hitchcock formula, the secondary male lead is always the criminal, and the secondary female lead is always left humiliated...
...Janet Leigh is a thief in Psycho...
...And from the false nun's high-heels in The Lady Vanishes to the Spanish mission that dominates Vertigo to the kidnapped bishop in Family Plot, the Church made innumerable appearances in Hitchcock's work...
...Publicity photos for 1963's The Birds featured Hitchcock sitJ. Bottum is Books & Arts editor and Jonathan V. Last is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...It may have been Rope's origins as a stageplay that limited the action to a single apartment...
...And what could possibly explain the director's treatment of women...
...The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), The Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938) all found great success, critically and commercially...
...Mrs...
...Lacking the modern Steadicam, he nonetheless filmed parts of Rope with a handheld camera...
...Lacking modern stop-action, he filmed the carousel scene at the end of Strangers on a Train by having his actors move in slow motion...
...When he merged a woman's scream into a train whistle in The 39 Steps, he was the first to break the talkies' connection of sound and picture...
...Between the ages of twenty-three and sixty-one, he averaged more than one film a year...
...He created or definitively confirmed the careers of Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Shirley MacLaine, and Tippi Hedren...
...We sometimes forget just how much an outsider being a Catholic made someone born in London in 1899, and his films often contain characters who don't quite belong in their social situations, who are comically desperate to seem just like everyone else even though they aren't...
...Eva Marie Saint is a kept woman in North by Northwest...
...But once you start thinking this way about his films, you're forced back on the question of why they work at all...
...The plot holes and inconsistencies in North by Northwest flash by far too quickly for anyone to notice...
...The tennis player sneaks off to catch a train, and the murderer sits down to wait several hours for night to fall...
...And in nearly every movie, he put some moment of comic relief that exposed the same sort of humor...
...In Foreign Correspondent, it's a chase through a crowd of people waiting in the rain, filmed from above to show the disturbed umbrellas...
...He never defeats or circumvents our desire to see justice done...
...But that's the thing about Hitchcock...
...The second half of the 1950s were good for Hitchcock...
...But, from Leslie Banks in The Man Who Knew Too Much to Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the archetypal Hitchcock character is a man who wishes nothing exciting would happen...
...If Hitchcock did have a single formula, this is it...
...And in the grand sweep of simultaneously teasing audiences with suspense and assuring them of the ultimate triumph of cosmic justice, he conveyed the largest reaches of traditional epic...
...Grace Kelly is a Peeping Tom in Rear Window...
...Perhaps his obesity is the origin of those odd, neurotic moments that occur in nearly every movie...
...The only unique thing about Hitchcock's use of prayer in The Wrong Man is that for once he offered an explanation of his fortuitous coincidences...
...But his professionalism didn't strip him of directorial vanity...
...But it really takes a lot of work...
...He never rewards crime...
...Part of the answer is the sheer speed with which he moves...
...Hitchcock's films don't always end happy...
...He thought of the process as a science rather than an art...
...Slowly moving up in the industry, he was hired in 1923 by Gainsborough Pictures and by 1925 had finished his first film...
...In truth, the story of his childhood experience of jail does explain a lot about Hitchcock's movies...
...But what coherence they have is usually of the "If only I had known" variety: There almost always turns out to have been a simpler way for the hero to have found out the truth...
...In all the little peculiarities that mark his films, he showed the smallest elements of classic storytelling...
...And then, finally, there was Hitchcock's famous humor...
...But you could equally say he hated women...
...Five years later—after directing seventeen minor silents and talkies— Hitchcock began the string of major pictures that established him as a star...
...Take, for example, the scene in the 1951 Strangers on a Train in which Farley Granger comes late at night to warn the father of Robert Walker that his son wants to have him killed...
...In Notorious, it's the reflection of a horse race in Ingrid Bergman's binoculars...
...Hitchcock's father once gave his son a note and sent him down to the police station—where an officer, following the note's instructions, locked the child in a cell...
...Lean too hard on them, and they fall to pieces...
...Ingrid Bergman in Notorious is possibly a Nazi collaborator and certainly a party girl...
...They all give up their principles, and that cold beauty always ends up melting in orgasmic imagery: Hitchcock cuts to a shot of a long train entering a tunnel as Cary Grant climbs into Eva Marie Saint's bunk at the end of North by Northwest, pans to fireworks exploding as Grace Kelly is lowered to the sofa in To Catch a Thief...
...Hitchcock would have the last laugh: In the 1954 Rear Window, he cast Raymond Burr, a Selznick look-alike, as the evil murderer...
...What I liked about The 39 Steps were the sudden switches," Hitchcock said...
...The athlete straining to win quickly...
...And that, at last, is why they work...
...Vertigo in particular ends with the death of Kim Novak...
...The storm drain...
...But there's so much else in Hitchcock that needs explaining...
...This is what we do to boys who are naughty," he explained when he released the young Hitchcock ten minutes later...
...It may have been merely the plot of Lifeboat that confined filming to a fifteen-foot rowboat...
...Not a single, straightforward, unquestionable murder is committed by a woman in any Hitchcock film...
...Of course, there's often something ambiguous about his female characters...
...And when it isn't a policeman, it's pure happenstance...
...And the camera always wants to stare down—as it does in The Para-dine Case and Frenzy—on a falsely accused man banging from wall to wall in a narrow cell...
...Though François Truffaut would celebrate him as an auteur, Hitchcock was really just a director...
...He was first a professional, of course—concerned to get his movies out the door...
...Psycho had genuine horror and a good marketing gimmick, but it marked the beginning of the end...
...And then...
...Poor Barbara Bel Geddes loves Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, but when she makes the mistake of teasing him about his obsession with Kim Novak, he stalks out, and Hitchcock cruelly zooms in on Geddes beating herself with her fists, crying, "Stupid, stupid, stupid...
...Most often, however, the female lead in a Hitchcock film is a prim, well-behaved lady whose unaccustomed sexual excitement draws her into helping a man prove his innocence...
...It may have been dramatic necessity that made all of Psycho seem to occur in rooms too small...
...There's a sense in which The Wrong Man, a semi-documentary of Henry Fonda's incarceration for the crimes of a look-alike, is the archetypal Hitchcock film...
...Think of all those Hitchcockian performances in which a cold but beautiful woman is drawn against her will into adventure with a chance-met man: It's Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps, Nova Pilbeam in Young and Innocent, Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes, Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound, Priscilla Lane in Saboteur, Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, Tippi Hedren in The Birds...
...In his fifty-four films—thirty-seven from the modern era—he cast the most beautiful women in the world...
...By the end, it was hard to tell how much had been ossified into a public persona...
...Kim Novak is a murder accomplice in Vertigo...
...The director of fifty-four movies, he defined an entire genre, and nearly every moment in his work is so distinctive it cannot be mistaken for anyone else's...
...He was reared in a devout household, sent to Jesuit schools, and married at London's Brompton Oratory...
...Back and forth the camera switches...
...It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking...
...Born a hundred years ago, on August 13, 1899, Hitchcock is one of the few film figures who deserves the attention they've received...
...He ranks among the tiny cadre of directors who achieved a marquee status trumping even his actors...
...In the master bedroom, however, waits Robert Walker instead of his father, and he rises up to denounce Granger for trying to betray him, while the dog slavers by his side...
...Of course, Hitchcock always did manage to make them look beautiful...
...And yet, Hitchcock's Catholicism seems to explain just as much...
...Laid on top of everything else, there is a joy in pure cinematographic technique...
...In addition to launching his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he turned out such work as Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry (1955), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959...
...And all the plot holes and wild coincidences occur somewhere at a middle level that doesn't seem to matter...
...If a certain middle level of coherence and plausibility was lost along the way, who could possibly complain...
...In 1929, the Hitchcocks had their only child, a daughter named Patricia...
...His credits began to pile up quickly...
...Hitchcock was a technical innovator long before complex special effects...
...It may have been simply the limited technology of 1938 that compelled Hitchcock to shoot The Lady Vanishes on a set only ninety feet long...
...Hitchcock would make only six more movies, with the 1972 Frenzy alone deserving good notices...
...The fact that this story is well known stands as proof of the almost universal desire to find a unifying explanation for the man's art...
...The shoddy treatment of Brigitte Auber, the smitten French girl in To Catch a Thief, culminates in Cary Grant's threatening to drop her off a roof unless she confesses his innocence...
...The combination of all this—the claustrophobia and the Catholicism, the disgust at food and the peculiar use of women, the joyous professionalism and the humor—ought to have made his films incoherent...
...But an implicit Catholic sensibility explains moment after moment in Hitchcock's films, culminating in The Wrong Man, when Henry Fonda's falsely convicted character is delivered solely by the power of prayer...
...But after decades of such accidents, the viewer has to assume there was something about claustrophobic confinement that Hitchcock couldn't leave alone...
...It planted a seed of discontent in the director's mind...
...A better part of the answer, however, concerns the one sort of lie that Hitchcock never told...
...Audiences couldn't warm to Montgomery Clift, nor could they understand why a priest accused of murder wouldn't violate the secrecy of the confessional to save himself...
...In Young and Innocent, it's the long sweep across a ballroom to focus on the blinking eyes of a drummer...
...The tension builds and builds—until, at almost the same moment, the match is over and the hand grasps the lighter...
...He doesn't give you a moment to think about it...
...But mean as Hitchcock was to his secondary women, he was even meaner to his main female characters...
...As Granger first sneaks into the house, a large mastiff appears, growling to protect his master's family...
...Madeleine Carroll in The Secret Agent is a spy...
...Offering Hitchcock a five-picture deal for $800,000, the American producer David O. Selznick drew Hitchcock to Hollywood, where his first American movie, Rebecca, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1940...
...It is an extraordinary record: Of thirty-seven films, perhaps five had a real heroine...
...The prison always looms in his movies, especially for the innocent...
...Before production began, he would draw pictures of the camera shots, often second by second, and the drawings reach down to the detail of how an actress should turn her head...
...Think for a moment about one of the most famous scenes of suspense...
...He never lets the guilty off...
...Each tense moment makes sense, and the whole makes sense...
...Perhaps Catholicism explains even more about Hitchcock's work...
...He returned to the major studios (and to black and white) for Strangers on a Train and I Confess (1953...
...Smith, only because his closest woman friend, Carole Lombard, begged and begged him to make a film she could share...
...And here's the great secret: Hitchcock's films are incoherent...
...It was while he was working in an advertising department that Hitchcock first heard about a film studio opening in London, and he wrangled a job designing title cards...
...The peak comes in To Catch a Thief when Jesse Royce Landis, looking down in disgust at her breakfast tray, carefully extinguishes her cigarette in the runny yolk of an egg...
...Except for The Paradine Case, the 1950 Stage Fright, and the 1964 Marnie (all failures), the 1954 Dial M for Murder (whose straightforward, stagey direction, he said, he could have "phoned in"), and possibly Rebecca, he didn't make a single movie in which the main character—the real center of the audience's attention and excitement— was a woman...
...What makes Hitchcock a great director...
...Of course, Hitchcock's plots are not always so hopeless...
...Despite a distrust of the police in his movies—after all, if a man is going to be wrongly accused, he has to be accused by somebody—Hitchcock was often forced to rely on a semi-omniscient policeman to tidy up the story...
...By the time he married Alma Reville in December 1926, he had completed his first thriller, The Lodger, a box-office smash about a man mistaken for Jack the Ripper...
...To his secondary romantic characters, the director could be quite mean...
...Beginning with Naughton Wayne and Basil Radford as the cricket-loving Englishmen in The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock filled his movies' minor roles with lovingly filmed character actors: the circus freaks in Saboteur, Edmund Gwenn as the old hunter in The Trouble with Harry, Lila Kedrova as the impoverished countess in 1966's Torn Curtain...
...The director's imitators often made films in which trouble is born from a character's wish that something exciting would happen...
...But he consistently listed as his favorite film The Trouble with Harry, a black comedy about a corpse that keeps popping up in a small Vermont town...
...You don't have time to notice the inconsistencies and implausibilities as he roars along...
...There's the frightening Judith Anderson who tries to drive Joan Fontaine to suicide in Rebecca, the evil Leopoldine Konstantin who sits in bed and plots Ingrid Bergman's murder in Notorious, the cruel Marlene Dietrich in Stage Fright, and the grasping Laura Elliot in Strangers on a Train—and the latter two are both murder victims...
...But then, she had connived at murder, and Hitchcock's stories do always end justly...
...He wrote none of his major pictures, but his direction was so relentless that all his films feel as though he alone constructed them...
...Only rarely did Hitchcock allow women to appear positively wicked...
...He undertook an uncongenial screwball comedy, the 1941 Mr...
Vol. 5 • September 1999 • No. 1
