Alfred Hitchcock; showman or psycho?

[DB7]

Sir Alfred Hitchcock: Giant with a taste for bondage

Hitchcock is known as the master of suspense, but the novelist and film buff Jonathan Coe believes the director’s true genius, revealed without words, shows how we live in a world of pain.

Jonathan Coe





We all think we know what a “Hitchcock film” consists of. More than 30 years since the release of his swan song, Family Plot, the phrase still conjures up the same images; and if a modern Flaubert were to compile a new Dictionary of Received Ideas, the entry under Hitchcock would read “Master of Suspense”. The 39 Steps, released in 1935, set the template: a cool blonde under pressure; a suave Cary Grant type plunged into bizarre and dangerous situations.



At the peak of the director’s fame and popularity, the associations surrounding his very name were so precise and saleable that it was used to market books, a television series, even a magazine. Hitchcock was more, at that point, than just a celebrated director: he became a brand.



The only other film-maker of whom that could be said, I think, is Disney; and, when you think about it, the similarities and connections between Disney and Hitchcock are intriguing. Both men enjoyed the sort of public recognition you would expect from people who starred in films, rather than just making them. Needless to say, they knew each other and admired each other’s work. Hitchcock, in particular, kept a watchful eye on whatever was going on at the Disney studios. He first paid tribute to Disney in one of his British films, Sabotage, during the uncharacteristically moving scene when Sylvia Sidney, horrified to have learnt not only that her young brother has died, but that her husband was responsible for the death, walks into a cinema auditorium where one of the Silly Symphonies cartoons is playing and can’t help but find herself laughing through her tears, caught up in the audience’s shared joy. Years later, whenever Hitchcock needed a particular special effect, it was usually from Disney that he would borrow it. The sodium process that made The Birds possible, for instance, or the fake bucking horse towards the climax of Marnie: both effects were supplied to him by Disney’s technicians.



Perhaps the most important thing Hitchcock and Disney had in common, however, was their virulent streak of sadism. After all, they were both great film-makers, and therefore, almost by definition, they were both committed sadists of the first order.



There are different kinds of sadism at work in Hitchcock’s films. One kind - the least acceptable kind - rose closer and closer to the surface as his career progressed. He always knew that the best way to keep an audience interested was to show characters in distress, and that female characters tended to attract more sympathy than men: hence his mantra, “torture the heroine”. Eventually, this instinct got the better of him. You can trace a line from the brutal staging of Janet Leigh’s death in Psycho, through the real-life brutalisation of Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds, to the showdown Hitchcock had with the screenwriter Evan Hunter over the rape scene in Marnie. Hunter argued passionately that the Sean Connery character should not rape his wife on their wedding night in that film, and in his memoir, Hitch and Me, gives a chilling account of Hitchcock’s response: “Hitch held up his hands the way directors do when they’re framing a shot. Palms out, fingers together, forming a perfect square. Moving his hands towards my face, like a camera coming in for a close shot, he said, ‘Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!’ ” A few years later, when he was making Frenzy, censorship relaxations finally allowed Hitchcock to film a rape in all its protracted glory; and very nasty viewing it makes, too.



This, I suppose, is the kind of cinematic sadism practised nowadays by the likes of Eli Roth and Darren Lynn Bousman: the torture and mutilation of women (and, occasionally, men), staged realistically, for entertainment purposes. It takes no particular skill or imagination on the film-maker’s part, so we cannot blame Hitchcock for suggesting to future generations how it might be done (they would have got there anyway). Nor can we regard it as an important part of his legacy. Moreover, his own peculiar brand of wry misogyny was merely an offshoot of a more deep-rooted sadism that is inseparable from his genius as a film-maker.



It must be an extremely sadistic impulse, after all, that makes someone want to gather together an audience of strangers, hold them captive in the dark for two hours and manipulate their emotions as uncompromisingly as possible – trying, in particular, to instil fear and dread into them at every turn. Viewed in this light, the relationship between film-maker and audience looks distinctly sado-masochistic, and both Hitchcock and Disney grasped this fact and revelled in it.



In Disney’s case, because his targets were children, there is also something sinister and uncomfortable at work. I still shudder whenever I read Disney’s reported expression of delight as he imagined the effect the death of Bambi’s mother would have on all those youngsters: “You know she’s dead, but the little guy just comes back to that thing and the snow begins to pick up and he’s crying, MOTHER!, and it would just tear their hearts out if you could get that little guy crying MOTHER.”



Even Hitchcock was never as obviously cruel as that (and his audience, in any case, did at least consist of consenting adults), but people flocked to his films in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s - and still buy them now, on DVD - because they knew they were going to be put through the emotional wringer, and they couldn’t wait. Early on, in what is now considered to be the first run of “classic” Hitchcock films (from The Man Who Knew Too Much, in 1934, to The Lady Vanishes, in 1938), suspense is nearly always leavened with humour. The most striking exception, perhaps, is Sabotage, his free adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Its most famous sequence sends an unsuspecting young boy off on a seemingly harmless errand - to deliver some reels of film and a brown paper parcel to an address on the other side of London. The audience alone knows what the parcel contains: a bomb timed to go off at exactly a quarter to two.



In some ways, this sequence now seems rather crude in its generation of suspense. Repeated shots of clock faces alternate with close-ups of the parcel and the boy’s trusting, wide-eyed expression as a double-decker bus carries him through London, while Louis Levy’s score feels strident and overemphatic. But it’s undoubtedly effective. Sound, montage and music combine to instill in the audience a mounting, inexorable sense of dread. And, apart from a few inconsequential snatches of conversation between the boy and the bus conductor, there is no dialogue for several minutes.



We need only fast-forward about 20 years to see how fully Hitchcock’s art matured. For instance, Vertigo, considered by most critics to be his masterpiece, contains a sequence almost three times as long as the Sabotage bomb episode, during which James Stewart follows Kim Novak through the streets of San Francisco, mainly by car. Nothing much happens. Repeated cuts to Stewart’s face as he sits behind the wheel of the car show only a growing unease andbewilder-ment. Bernard Herrmann’s exquisite music, far from savagely cranking up the audience’s tension, as Levy’s sought to do, merely sets a certain mood: eerie, romantic and implicitly tragic. Meanwhile, we watch, utterly compelled. This is cinematic sadism of the highest order. And, once again, it is achieved with almost no recourse to dialogue.



I don’t believe Hitchcock hated dialogue, exactly, but certainly he had little ear for it (some of his greatest American films have some of the worst dialogue committed to celluloid), and certainly he ranked it low in the list of weapons.



in the film-maker’s armoury. Offhand, although I could quote a dozen lines of dialogue from Billy Wilder’s movies, say, I cannot call to mind a single line from one of Hitchcock’s. With Hitchcock, everybody talks about their favourite sequences, not their favourite lines; and this is as it should be. The art of cinema, he would insist again and again, did not consist of taking “photographs of people talking”, and the director’s cardinal sin, when plotting a film, was to say: “It’s all right – we can cover that with a line of dialogue.” Hitchcock started working, after all, in the silent era, and it’s the grammar and vocabulary of silent cinema that really underpins his work.



In other words, Hitchcock’s films, viewed today, take us back to the very roots of cinema, and that is what makes them perennially modern. In an interesting piece published in The Irish Times a few weeks ago, Fintan O’Toole pointed out that the best American television – The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men - has recently started to rival and in fact outstrip anything American cinema can offer in the way of dialogue. Television is the perfect medium on which to see “photographs of people talking”, and American TV now offers a platform for some of the best writers of English-lan-guage dialogue in the world.



As a result, O’Toole argues: “What we’re now seeing is the beginning of a return by cinema to its own distinctive essence - moving pictures.” By way of example, he cites the 20-minute wordless sequence at the beginning of Pixar’s Wall-E, the silent first act of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and the many long, dialogue-free - and indeed Hitchcockian - suspense sequences in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.



This, surely, is why Hitchcock remains so important to today’s cinema: not because he upped the ante on how much horror and misogyny could be smuggled into main-stream films, but because he reminds us that cinema is at its most emotionally powerful when it speaks in sounds, music and images, not in words. In life, as in movies, people talk to each other because chatter fills the void. (“What is there to keep us here?” one of Beckett’s tramps asks, and receives the answer: “The dialogue.”) Silence frightens us, because it brings us closer to the essential unknowability of life. But that unknowability was exactly what Hitchcock wished to confront us with, so we are offered few words to protect us from the mystery and horror at the heart of his vision.



Showman he may have been, but his work does not try to palliate the pain of existence.



Instead, in the best of his films, he did something miraculous, something that only a great artist can do: he converted that pain, for two delicious hours of cinematic bondage, into pure pleasure.

[Gary D.]

Your post has said it all and I can add little, except I've retained my fondness for the Maestro and lost all my respect for Walt Disney.



There is still a great mystery why Disney treated the late former child actor Bobby Driscoll so contemptuously, after the young actor brought millions into the studio. When Bobby heard he was going to be let go, he went to the Burbank studios. Not only was Disney 'too busy' to see him, but eventually he had his secretary tell Driscoll he was no longer welcomed in the studio and security guards all but threw him out.



I read accounts of Hitchcock, and once I knew what to look for, I could go back and review his films and see the not-so-buried meanings. The train going through the tunnel ending in North by Northwest was pretty obvious--Grant and Eva Marie Saint were making 'whoopee.'



The director's final movie, Family Plot, brought back some of the old magic--quite unlike his previous two pictures (did they bombed at the box office?).

[Windthrop]

The director's final movie, Family Plot, brought back some of the old magic--quite unlike his previous two pictures (did they bombed at the box office?).

Topaz was the biggest dud of his career but Frenzy was one of his biggest successes.

[cally]

'This is cinematic sadism of the highest order' - what??



'Vertigo' is one of the most romantic films of all time, and quite rightly voted time and again as one of the greatest films ever made.

[thatllbetheday]

Cally, you're the only other person I know who recognises that Hitchcock, apart from all those other things that have been said, was one of the greatest romantic directors - another aspect of his personality.

[cally]

Thank you thatIbetheday for your kind commendation.



I toured San Francisco last year with the Vertigo locations in mind and it made me reflect on the passage on time and lost romance which 'Vertigo' is all about.



It is hard if not impossible to dislocate the film and the locations themselves from the impression the film makes in the mind. When one stands at the foot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge for example, it is hard not to see Scotty as he rescues Madelaine from the water, even though those steps don't exist in real life.



For those who yearn for a lost love or for a love that time has enveloped as its own as if in a dream, 'Vertigo' stands still as as a masterpiece.



To see these locations in real life including the Mission is to see ones own nostalgia and idealisation of love though Hitchcock's own eyes - and never was love more romantic than through the prism of Hitchcock's camera as evinced by this majestic film.

[torinfan]

Your post has said it all and I can add little, except I've retained my fondness for the Maestro and lost all my respect for Walt Disney.

There is still a great mystery why Disney treated the late former child actor Bobby Driscoll so contemptuously, after the young actor brought millions into the studio. When Bobby heard he was going to be let go, he went to the Burbank studios. Not only was Disney 'too busy' to see him, but eventually he had his secretary tell Driscoll he was no longer welcomed in the studio and security guards all but threw him out.



I read accounts of Hitchcock, and once I knew what to look for, I could go back and review his films and see the not-so-buried meanings. The train going through the tunnel ending in North by Northwest was pretty obvious--Grant and Eva Marie Saint were making 'whoopee.'



The director's final movie, Family Plot, brought back some of the old magic--quite unlike his previous two pictures (did they bombed at the box office?).

I had to look up Driscoll at IMDB - no pun intended but I sometimes wonder what Disney's "obsession" with youth was. No doubt Driscoll's experience being dropped by Disney contributed to his later drug habit. Back to Hitchcock - he really is a Genius of the Camera and Film.

[billy bentley]

Thanks for the article DB7, an interesting read. I'd never really put Hitchcock and Disney together, now the comparisons seem quite obvious.

[cally]

I should of course mention that I got it wrong above - it was of course the Golden Gate Bridge and not the San Francisco Bay Bridge:-)

[Santonix]

Thank you thatIbetheday for your kind commendation.

I toured San Francisco last year with the Vertigo locations in mind and it made me reflect on the passage on time and lost romance which 'Vertigo' is all about.



It is hard if not impossible to dislocate the film and the locations themselves from the impression the film makes in the mind. When one stands at the foot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge for example, it is hard not to see Scotty as he rescues Madelaine from the water, even though those steps don't exist in real life.



For those who yearn for a lost love or for a love that time has enveloped as its own as if in a dream, 'Vertigo' stands still as as a masterpiece.



To see these locations in real life including the Mission is to see ones own nostalgia and idealisation of love though Hitchcock's own eyes - and never was love more romantic than through the prism of Hitchcock's camera as evinced by this majestic film.

Did you take the drive out to San Juan Batista and see the preservered area, still exactly as it was when Hitch filmed there? it comes at as a bit of a suprise that there is no bell tower at the mission there, from where a lot of the plot action took place and from which Madeline fell in the final scene ( it was faked for the film). But everything else is the same even to the the carriages in the stables. It's just like walking on to the film set.

[cally]

I did Santonix and as you say, San Juan Batista is like walking onto the set and the stables are exactly as shown in the film. Along with the fine mist when I visited, it made the experience all the more vivid and like the film itself, dreamlike.

[thatllbetheday]

I agree there is a poignancy about "Vertigo", perhaps because the lovers are not united at the end. But I was thinking about the way Hitchcock filmed his love scenes. 39 Steps - who can forget those two handcuffed together in the bedroom, saucy but tender. Rebecca - Maxim de Winter romancing his intended new bride on the Riviera. Suspicion - that scene on the hilltop where Johnny gets "monkey face" to let down her hair. Spellbound - those wonderful close-ups of Bergman and Peck. Notorious - that sensaaaaaaationally prolonged kissing scene. Rear Window - wonderful close-ups of Stewart and Kelly and another prolonged kissing scene. Poignancy here too, Miss Lonely Hearts. Hitch's secret was the chemistry he created between his stars although it could go wrong as witness Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in Torn Curtain. Everybody has their off-days, I guess

[thatllbetheday]

Gary D.

Topaz was a misconceived film. I've never been able to get through it and what Hitch was thinking remains a mystery. Frenzy is another matter. I believe it to be his final masterpiece. I know the location scenes are unconvincing - an American view of London - but Hitch had been away from home for many decades. One critic said he was trying to recreate the London of his youth. That aside, the film contains several masterly set pieces, most famously the one in the back of the lorry where the killer is trying to find the body in a sack of potatoes to get back his tie pin clasped in her stiffening hands. My favourite scene is where the camera tracks the killer and his next victim up the stairs to his flat. The door closes and the camera silently backtracks down the stairs, into the street and across the road. It then gazes at the window of the flat where we know a woman is being murdered but life goes one as usual for the rest of the world. A profound comment on life.

[image45]

I just love his early films from his British period from 1925 - 1939. Some are stronger than others but gems are often re-released in PAL formats or NTSC in the States. The Pleasure Garden got an official UK release a few months ago in colour tinted format rather than in normal Black & White as fan copies tended to be. The lodger has been available in colour tinted BFI restored version with BFI music score since 2003 in the German box set. You just have to look at every market of viewing so you do not miss out on something.

[charliekane]

Afraid this will probably go down like a lead balloon, but although I do very much like many of his movies, I do think Hitchock pretty much lost it when he went to America (there are exceptions, of course - Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest),

How many awful films did he make in the 40s and 50s though - Stage Fright, I Confess, Foreign Affair, Under Capricorn - when he had already made his best picture (The 39 Steps) in 1935.

It's all too obvious that he lost interest in film-making by the late 50s, as Hume Cronyn observed. This is why Psycho is so exceptional - made with his television crew in six weeks before boredom set in. As for Frenzy - a cheap and rather nasty film I think, yet hailed as a classic by the 'Master' the same year that 'Clockwork Orange' was reviled (while Psycho was an admitted masterpiece in 1960 - the same year that Peeping Tom finished Michael Powell in the UK). By this time Hitchcock had become 'Alfred Hitchcock' - a self creation more significant than many of his movies. Who can watch 'Marnie' without wincing ?

[charliekane]

Cally, you're the only other person I know who recognises that Hitchcock, apart from all those other things that have been said, was one of the greatest romantic directors - another aspect of his personality.

Afraid I find his continued attempts at 'romance' rather clumsy and more to do with showing off ('how long can I make this kiss last ?' 'where can I put the camera where it's actually impossible ?' - the excruciatingly overdone kiss between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in the railway compartment in NbyNW ).



The one supreme example of romance in all of his movies ('Vertigo' apart) lasts about 4 seconds in The 39 Steps when Robert Donat kisses Peggy Ashcroft before making his escape from the farmhouse. The look on her face speaks absolute volumes - this is the only act of tenderness and kindness she has ever known.

[Bernardo]

I had to look up Driscoll at IMDB - no pun intended but I sometimes wonder what Disney's "obsession" with youth was. No doubt Driscoll's experience being dropped by Disney contributed to his later drug habit. Back to Hitchcock - he really is a Genius of the Camera and Film.

Just read Disney's biography and I think you are right. Hitch was a master of pace and atmosphere and he knew exactly where to set his camera. The romance/sex etc mast have passed over my head, perhaps I was into the action, except the preference he had for blonde leading ladies.

[thatllbetheday]

I agree with you charlie. First, the Peggy Ashcroft moment is exquisite. And I deliberately didn't mention North by Northwest because I have always found that kissing scene on the train rather disturbing. Grant's hands seem too large, almost like giant spiders. Hitchcock was never clumsy. He was probably not aiming for romance in this particular scene. But in Notorious, that prolonged kiss certainly does things for this lady.

[scenesixty]

Afraid this will probably go down like a lead balloon, but although I do very much like many of his movies, I do think Hitchock pretty much lost it when he went to America (there are exceptions, of course - Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest),

How many awful films did he make in the 40s and 50s though - Stage Fright, I Confess, Foreign Affair, Under Capricorn - when he had already made his best picture (The 39 Steps) in 1935.

It's all too obvious that he lost interest in film-making by the late 50s, as Hume Cronyn observed. This is why Psycho is so exceptional - made with his television crew in six weeks before boredom set in. As for Frenzy - a cheap and rather nasty film I think, yet hailed as a classic by the 'Master' the same year that 'Clockwork Orange' was reviled (while Psycho was an admitted masterpiece in 1960 - the same year that Peeping Tom finished Michael Powell in the UK). By this time Hitchcock had become 'Alfred Hitchcock' - a self creation more significant than many of his movies. Who can watch 'Marnie' without wincing ?

I suppose everyone has their favourite Hitch film; I found Strangers.. terrifying! Hitch always said he'd mentally put himself in the cinema audience and work out what they were feeling as well as seeing! An example: When in 'Psycho' Marion Crane has decided to abscond with her employers money, we see her for a moment at the traffic lights-then her boss passes by the windscreen with an understandable look of puzzlement-we FEEL her guilt-we SHARE her guilt, that was the genius of his film making.

[CliveT]

I suppose both Disney & Hitchcock had their secrets and the truth no doubt lies between their dark/light side. Disney was supposed to be anti-semitic and ran the studio with a tight rein. I think the "good" Disney movie ended in the late 1950s and thereafter the movies were long drawn out, cutesy, all-American "how wonderful family life can be" type. With Hitchcock it seemed it was hit and miss throughout his career, his best work was, IMHO, in the 1950s, "North by Northwest", "Vertigo". I wonder if Hitchcock was ever, truly satisfied with any of his movies? Perhaps, like so many directors, he was hoping the next film would be the film that would cement his career.





CliveT