Hitchcock had a history of putting children in harm’s way. In 1934, he made The Man Who Knew Too Much; the Day-Stewart version was a Hollywood remake, also directed by Hitchcock. Both versions revolve around the kidnapping of a child, but only in the original do we see the act of capture, when Hitchcock gives us a close-up of the face of twelve-year-old Betty (Nova Pilbeam), her eyes wide and desperate as a man’s hand smothers her mouth, as bracingly unsettling an image today as it was in 1934. In both films, the children are sucked into the adult world of deceit, betrayal, and violence. But neither is portrayed sentimentally as a vessel of purity and goodness. Indeed, as soon as the opening titles are complete, they create havoc. In the original, Betty causes an accident at a ski-jumping competition, leading to a pile-up of adult bodies on the snow. In the American version, Hank’s transgression is less spectacular, but more shocking. On a crammed bus traveling through Morocco, he accidentally pulls off a Muslim woman’s veil, sparking outrage among the other passengers and instigating his parents’ first encounter with the spy who will tear their lives apart. In every film that features a child in a prominent role, Hitchcock uses them as spinning tops of trouble. They cause complication and insult, spearing adult perspectives, or saying things the grown-ups would rather leave unsaid. One might think of them, per the critic Michael Walker, as Puck to Hitchcock’s Oberon; cheery, free-floating sprites sprinkling chaos into their master’s otherworldly kingdom. In one of the many cameos that Hitchcock made in his own films, he appears in Blackmail (1929) as a passenger on a London Underground train who has his hat yanked down over his eyes by a small boy. Exasperated, Hitchcock flails around but has no idea what to do—he can’t strike the child, and he can’t appeal for the boy to observe an adult sense of decorum—so is left to harrumph, his dignity diminished. More often, though, the nuisance caused by Hitchcock’s children is unintentional, making them more like Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, whose mischief is born of naivete not malice.
Hitchcock admires their pluck, appreciates their potential for comedy, and knows they are naturally sympathetic—yet he’s wary of children’s capacity to scratch off the veneer of our adult, “civilized” selves. In a cameo in Torn Curtain (1966), a grandfatherly Hitchcock holds a baby in the lobby of an elegant hotel as the child appears to urinate on his lap. Considering how Hitchcock worried over the small details of life, and worked hard to remove as much uncertainty as he could from his personal and professional environments, it’s not hard to see how the unpredictability of children might have made him wary of them. Only occasionally did he stray over the line between blowing raspberries at the sanctity of childhood and being cruel or unpleasant. In a 1972 interview with Rex Reed, a film critic who is himself no stranger to saying the supposedly unsayable, the conversation turned to serial killers. “I loved the tapes I heard made by the moors murderers,” Hitchcock said, referring to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who killed five children in Lancashire during the 1960s. “They made tape recordings of children screaming as they were buried alive . . . jolly good stuff.” Aiming to shock the wholesome Walton within us all, on this occasion his mordant joking came off as callous and juvenile.
Thirty-six years earlier, he had been accused of something similar, this time in his film Sabotage (1936, retitled The Woman Alone on its US release) in which a boy of twelve named Stevie is killed by a bomb he is unwittingly carrying on behalf of his sister’s husband, who is, unbeknownst to Stevie, a terrorist. In a trick he wouldn’t try again until Marion Crane got hacked to pieces in the shower a quarter of a century later, Hitchcock bumps off a delicate, sympathetic character shockingly early in the film, and with it goes the very idea of childhood innocence.
Stevie is handed the bomb, disguised as a reel of film, and is told to take it to Piccadilly Tube station before 1:45 p.m.—the time at which the bomb will detonate. He sets off on his fatal errand like a Labrador retrieving a tennis ball, all bouncy eagerness as he works his way through central London. But his innate childishness—blithe, distracted, unpredictable—leads to turmoil. Rather than hurrying straight to his destination as he’s been instructed, he stops to marvel at gabby market traders, admires the marching soldiers of the Lord Mayor’s Show, and is pulled out of a crowd to take part in a demonstration of a miracle toothpaste. He’s running late, and all the while, we know something he doesn’t: the package under his arm is a ticking time bomb. In true modernist fashion, time is disrupted but not obliterated; Hitchcock drags out seconds and compresses minutes, but the hands of the clock sweep ever forward. As the moment draws near, the tension grows. Stevie hops on a bus. He smiles at a lady next to him and pets her dog as a percussive tick-tock rises up in the fraught incidental music. The camera gives us close-ups of clock faces as they pass the window; Stevie nervously taps the package. We imagine that a reprieve must be around the corner. Instead, as the clock reaches 1:45 there’s an explosion, and a shot of the bus in smoking ruins.
The scene is not among those that have burned themselves on the cultural retina, but it is crystallized Hitchcock, a devastatingly constructed moment of slow-building suspense of the sort that provides a direct link from Hitchcock films of eighty years ago to Hollywood blockbusters of today. Reviews in Britain made a great deal of the bomb sequence. There were those who viewed it through a Hitchcockian lens and praised the director for having the guts to shake us up with something genuinely beastly. “The bomb is exceedingly ‘bombish,’ ” wrote one critic of the scene of Stevie on the bus, and all the characters “happily ignorant. . . . What more does the lover of film suspense wish?”
Hitchcock, however, took more notice of those who thought he had committed an unforgivable crime. C. A. Lejeune, the leading critic of her day, said, “there is a code in this sort of free-handed slaughter, and Hitchcock has gone outside that code” by exterminating a child with whom the audience had complete sympathy. Perhaps influenced by Lejeune, who was usually a great fan of his, Hitchcock looked on Stevie’s death as an egregious error. But for him the problem was not moral but technical. He had confused suspense with surprise. As Hitchcock explained countless times to countless interviewers, suspense is what you get when, as in Sabotage, the audience knows there’s a bomb in the parcel; surprise is what happens when a bomb detonates without warning. “Had the audience not been informed of the real contents of the can, the explosion would have come as a complete surprise. As a result of a sort of emotional numbness induced by a shock of this kind, I believe their sensibilities might not have been so thoroughly outraged.” As it was, Hitchcock had robbed the audience of the relief of suspense they expected and needed. Stevie’s death, said Hitchcock, was not so much ill-judged as badly executed: “The boy was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful. The way to handle it would have been for Homolka [Oscar Homolka, the actor playing the terrorist] to kill the boy deliberately.”
That Hitchcock didn’t treat children like children might explain why he was so popular with them. Starting in the 1950s, and largely thanks to his television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became an early iteration of the trend for the shared cultural interests of adults and children—though, unlike today when childhood passions for wizards and superheroes are carried into adulthood, Hitchcock was a decidedly adult figure who found a way of communicating with kids. The director Gus Van Sant is linked to Hitchcock through his 1998 remake of Psycho, but his interest began as a little boy in the 1960s, watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He and his sister were beguiled by Hitchcock’s wry, sometimes cartoonish appearances that opened and closed each episode, and riveted by the suspense stories at their heart. Although Alfred Hitchcock Presents was never intended as a children’s show, many of its episodes possess qualities common to a lot of the most enduring works of children’s literature. Six of its episodes were adapted from Roald Dahl stories, and many more of the Hitchcock television shows contain the key ingredients of Dah
l’s children’s novels and his Revolting Rhymes short stories: fantastical wickedness running riot, but ultimately defeated by an extreme dose of moral justice, which Hitchcock often delivered himself in his closing monologues—the teacher speaking directly to his pupils.
From the television shows, Van Sant became a reader of the Hitchcock anthologies of mystery stories and the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. It wasn’t until much later that he explored Hitchcock’s filmography. Judging from the fan mail Hitchcock received from the 1950s onward, this was a path traveled by many young fans. The publishers of the Hitchcock magazine received so many letters from children that an official fan club was established. For fifty cents, each member received an eight-by-ten photograph of Hitchcock, a brief biography (which featured the story of his childhood incarceration), and a bulletin of the latest Hitchcock news every quarter. Such was his crossover appeal that Hitchcock was approached to lend his name to a series of children’s books. Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators ran for thirty volumes in the United States, and was published with success in Europe and Asia. Like an anti–Santa Claus, Hitchcock received missives from children all over the world. Some wanted to point out continuity errors in his films; others asked for explanations of plotlines. Many wanted signed photographs, which the Hitchcock office sent out in large quantities. Others, in the grip of their hero’s influence, delivered vignettes of gruesomeness that must have tickled and disturbed the secretaries who opened Hitchcock’s mail. One fifteen-year-old boy from Texas wrote to say that he had designed gallows on which to give Hitchcock a spectacular send-off. He had even done the sums to ensure the apparatus did its job properly: “a 3 foot 9 inch drop would be sufficient to break your honorable neck.”
The year Hitchcock arrived into the world, Sigmund Freud was at work on one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Published in 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams decisively shifted the space occupied by sleeping and dreaming in Western cultures. Perhaps more than any other text, it carried Freud’s theories of the unconscious into the mainstream, making his ideas commonplace even among those who have never read a word he wrote. The lodestone of Freud’s dream analysis is his notion of a dynamic unconscious that whirs away in each human mind, constructed and anchored in childhood. Dreams, according to Freud, are the expression of childhood desires, typically those that have been forbidden or repressed. As the years passed, Freud modified various aspects of his ideas, and his conclusions were challenged from many angles, not least by his protégé Carl Jung who formulated his own comprehensive theories on the psychological significance of dreams and dreaming. However, the cultural significance of The Interpretation of Dreams can hardly be understated. Within twenty years of the book’s publication, Freud’s concept of dreams as a portal into the child-created unconscious had been widely absorbed, established as a major theme of modern art, and would become a strong influence on the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Many of those close to Hitchcock said he was very widely read and could talk with authority on matters of psychology, politics, and philosophy, as well as almost any field of the arts. Quite how much of Freud’s work he read is hard to determine. Freudian ideas crop up in several of his films, but usually in a rather superficial way—he was, after all, making ninety-minute entertainments for mass audiences. But the notion that dreams can help us understand the inner child that is the unconscious mind resonated with him. Those early memories that he cited as the origins of his anxiety—itself a Freudian-sounding conceit—could equally be mistaken for dream recitals, similar to some of those logged and interpreted in Freud’s case studies. The majority of Hitchcock films, for at least some portion, have a dreamlike quality, “oneiric,” to use the term favored by the academic critics. Characters, such as those played by James Stewart in Vertigo and Cary Grant in North by Northwest, find themselves dropped into baffling, nightmarish circumstances, battling their way through a valley of the uncanny—another Freudian backdrop—hoping to put the world back on its axis. When Truffaut noted this, he asked Hitchcock whether this was because he had a lot of vivid dreams of his own. As he tended to do when an interviewer encroached too close to the perimeter wall, Hitchcock poured cold water on the topic. “Not too much,” he offered; “my dreams are very reasonable.” By “reasonable” he meant a mundane dream of the sort that a respectable person would have; certainly no sex or violence like the dreams that haunt the characters in his films. Few who knew him would agree with that. About a year after he’d made that remark to Truffaut, Hitchcock told a colleague that he sometimes dreamed that his penis was made of crystal, which, to his considerable distress, his wife repeatedly tried to smash.
In narrative terms also, dreams, daydreams, and hallucinations are important to Hitchcock films. His fourth picture, Downhill (1927), features a sequence that he hoped would break the mold, depicting a dream in “solid, unblurred images,” vivid and intense rather than as something distant and opaque, as though the dream, although deeply odd, felt somehow more real than the waking parts of the film. He aimed for similar, discomfiting sharpness in Spellbound (1945), in which the psychiatrist Dr. Constance Petersen, played by Ingrid Bergman, uses dream analysis to help Gregory Peck’s character, John Brown, discover his real identity and clear him of a murder charge. Hitchcock recruited Salvador Dalí to design a dream sequence that would resemble one of his paintings in dynamic motion. After a close reading of the dream, Brown is able to locate a violent, guilt-ridden childhood trauma that is the source of his blocked memory. With the blockage cleared, his mental travails are ended, he remembers that his real name is John Ballantyne, and he realizes that he has been framed for a crime he didn’t commit. As if by magic, the spell has been broken, and the prince and his princess can live happily ever after.
A similar ending is found in Marnie (1964), the third of a triptych of Hitchcock films—the others being Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963)—that are built around a childhood trauma tucked away inside the mind of a central character, a loss of innocence that leads them into violence, waywardness, and emotional retardation as adults. In Marnie, the root of the eponymous character’s kleptomania, compulsive lying, and, supposed, sexual dysfunction is discovered in her nightmares. At the film’s conclusion, she dredges up a repressed childhood memory of the time she killed a man who was paying her mother for sex. As the long-repressed trauma comes flooding to the surface, Marnie physically regresses into her child self, cowering on the floor and yelping “I want my mama!” in the high-pitched voice of a little girl.
Hitchcock terrorizes children in The Birds.
The role of Marnie is played by Tippi Hedren, who also starred as the flighty Melanie Daniels in The Birds. Just before the first major bird attack (at a children’s birthday party), Melanie reveals to Mitch (Rod Taylor) that she is an abandoned child. “My mother?” she replies bitterly to Mitch’s questions about her family, “don’t waste your time! She ditched us when I was eleven.” In the closing stages of the film, she is savagely attacked by a mass of birds, at which point Mitch’s mother offers her the maternal affection she has craved for so long. In an earlier draft of the script, the point was really hammered home, as Melanie, like Marnie, regresses to childhood and calls out for her absent mother. In Psycho, Norman Bates relives his traumatic adolescent memory when he commits murder in the guise of his mother, “Norma,” whom he killed in a fit of sexual jealousy.
Why Hitchcock’s long-standing interest in the repressed child within should have occupied him so much in this trio of very dark films is unclear. One might speculate that serious health scares he and his wife, Alma, endured in the late 1950s concentrated his mind on his mortality and dragged up unresolved issues from his past. Psycho’s screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, apparently captivated his director at the start of their collaboration when he told Hitchcock that he was in therapy. “I would go to his office directly from the couch and tell him all about it,” Stefano explained. “He was very interested and seemed delighted t
hat I was, I guess, a different kind of animal than he’d worked with before.”
Perhaps not entirely different; Hitchcock had previously worked very productively with Ben Hecht, the so-called “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” who had written Spellbound and was also heavily interested in psychoanalysis, as indeed was the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, who hired his own therapist, Dr. May E. Romm, to work as a consultant on the production. Stefano, however, was of a younger Hollywood generation for whom the ideas of psychoanalysis and its language were an integral part of their identity. During the writing of Psycho, Stefano happily divulged some remarkable truths about his relationship with his mother that informed the Bates’s parent-child dynamic. “I said to Hitchcock one day: ‘I could’ve killed my mother. There were times when I knew I was capable of killing her.’ ” Such talk gripped Hitchcock, in part because he couldn’t imagine being so emotionally honest with anyone, including himself, and certainly not somebody he barely knew. As Stefano saw it, the childhood trauma that forces Norman into his murderous acts was not a consummated incestuous relationship with his mother as many believe, but Mrs. Bates’s sexual teasing of her son. “I saw his mother coming on to him and then stopping him,” said Stefano of the childhood trauma he imagined on Norman’s behalf.
More than once, Hitchcock observed that the breakthroughs that Marnie Edgar and John Ballantyne achieve in his films had not happened to him in his own life. Although he had apparently identified the traumatic childhood incidents that bequeathed him his fears—the police-cell incident; the time he awoke to an empty house; the forbidding priests of his school days—he still broke out in a cold sweat when he saw a policeman or heard something go bump in the night. The fairy-tale logic of his films, of course, doesn’t apply to the real world: locating trauma is the easy bit; the hard work comes in dealing with it. And, although intrigued by the theories, he expressed doubt about the efficacy of psychoanalysis. “I think I have enough silly hypotheses of my own about myself, without listening to the silly hypotheses of other people,” he told one acquaintance—though such dismissiveness may have been a way of defending himself from searching psychoanalytical readings of his darker films. In any case, one must be skeptical about the weight he placed on those memories, even if one accepts their veracity, considering the much more serious events that occurred in Hitchcock’s youth about which he said relatively little: the sudden death of his father, and London’s cataclysmic experience of World War I.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 3