He was fourteen when the war began, nineteen at its close. There’s barely a significant European or American artist of that generation who wasn’t irreversibly affected by it. Yet if Hitchcock ever spoke about his thoughts and feelings on the outbreak of conflict in 1914, they don’t appear to have been recorded. It’s possible he was unmoved; few had any sense of the prolonged horrors ahead, and many in Europe at first regarded the war as an intense jamboree of patriotism that could cleanse and revitalize a continent stymied by the enervations of the modern age. “Over by Christmas” is what the British are reputed to have told each other about the war with Germany. If a teenage Hitchcock had any such notions, he would have been swiftly disabused of them as casualties began to pile up. Then, on December 12, 1914, his father died of chronic emphysema. Alfred, at fifteen and only a month into his job at Henley’s, was now pushed firmly into the adult world. Unlike the prison-cell experience, the emotional impact of his father’s death was something Hitchcock never broached in public. The closest to a firsthand account we have appears in his authorized biography by John Russell Taylor, published two years before his death. Having been sought out by his brother, who broke the news to him, Hitchcock went to see his sister, Nellie, who blurted out, “Your father’s dead, you know,” which, Taylor reports, “gave him a surreal sense of dissociation,” the kind of psychologically jarring moment Hitchcock would explore on film as an adult.
Within weeks of William Hitchcock’s death, the war took a dramatic turn. Germany commenced its bombing raids on England, reaching London in May 1915. The gigantic zeppelins crept across the skyline like lethal black clouds. Londoners were mesmerized and petrified. Nobody had any frame of reference for an airborne war, let alone one that targeted innocent civilians on the ground. The first raid hit Hitchcock’s home turf in the East End. Among the casualties were two children, fatally hit while walking home from the cinema. It was the start of three years of trauma and terror. The worst came on a bright, beautiful morning in June 1917, when Gotha bombers carpeted the city east to west, killing 162 civilians, including 18 infants at Upper North Street School in Poplar, half a mile from Hitchcock’s home and even closer to his old engineering school. Wounded soldiers returning from the front became a familiar part of the cityscape, and in the war’s final year, the influenza pandemic came with them. Sixteen thousand Londoners died of flu between September and December 1918, with the crowded east of the city worst affected.
There’s no way Hitchcock couldn’t have been shaken by the onslaught of total war on his doorstep. A historian of the conflict has written that “Londoners almost without exception were caught up body and soul in its maw. The war utterly dominated the city’s life. It changed everything.” Most damaging was not the physical destruction, but four years of “relentless disruption and accumulating strain, built up night after night,” the very type of tortuous suspense and grinding anxiety that was the adult Hitchcock’s stock in trade.
To interviewers, including Taylor, Hitchcock gave the impression that the war “did not impinge much on him” and that he was relatively unaffected by his father’s death. This seems unlikely, especially for someone of Hitchcock’s nervous disposition. The Hitchcock household had several narrow escapes, though Hitchcock recounted such incidents for laughs. Downplaying what must have been an utterly terrifying experience, he recalled coming back home one day in the aftermath of nearby bombing and artillery fire, to find his mother in a state of sheer panic in her bedroom, desperately throwing on her clothes over her nightgown. He reprised that memory as a comedy scene in the film Murder! of 1930, in which a woman attempts to dress hurriedly as word ripples down the street that a neighbor has been killed and the police are on the scene. The Birds also can be viewed as Hitchcock reliving the terror of the air raids: the indiscriminate targeting of children at school and at play; the Brenners recoiling in their home as the assault rains down; the groundbreaking aerial shot of the birds hovering high above the fiery carnage they have caused in the town below; Melanie, in Hitchcock’s early draft, crying out for the comfort and protection of a parent who has abandoned her.
It’s impossible to think that a man so beholden to anxiety wasn’t deeply affected by the events of 1914 to 1918, entering the adult world as he lost his father and as his city was ravaged by an entirely new, utterly terrifying mode of warfare. The lasting impact that Mary Rose had on him, with its themes of dislocating death and youthful innocence shattered by inexplicable tragedy, suggests as much. It is surely more than coincidence that in 1964 he pressed ahead with his plans for adapting the play into a movie, immediately having finished a trio of films in which he had engaged with repressed childhood trauma. When viewed in this light, it makes sense that he swerved the topic of his war years, and instead repeatedly talked about his five minutes in a police cell as the source of his internal anguish. For a man who chose never to look too far inside himself, and who valued his “tidy mind,” diverting his feelings of abandonment and arbitrary injustice into other, neater tales would have been eminently sensible—especially when those stories were so visually arresting, tailor-made for his public image as the master of suspense.
Childhood evoked strongly mixed emotions in Hitchcock. It was a confounding place of fear, insecurity, at times isolation, a place of the occluded and the unresolved. Simultaneously, it was the fount of his creativity, a time of play, excitement, novelty, and discovery. Children had uninhibited potential but were vulnerable and unpredictable, a cause of joy and anxiety. The duality was expressed in his telling of the prison-cell incident, in which he suggested he’d been punished for embarking on an intrepid adventure, following the nearby tram tracks to wherever they might lead. The legacies of those experiences never left him. As a man of sixty-three, he recorded an eleven-minute message from Stage 18 at Universal City in Los Angeles, for the benefit of a tiny film society in Westcliff, an Essex seaside resort he remembered from vacations as a boy. His decision to take time out of a crammed schedule to perform this act of kindness was “inspired by a touch of nostalgia,” he explained with his customary blank expression. He reminisced about his youth, a time simultaneously close and distant, though he discouraged any attempt to work out just how long ago it had been. “Please don’t speculate,” he deadpanned; “I’m younger than I look.”
2
THE MURDERER
A desperate, wretched love has pulled the girl into the water. From the shore, it looks as though she’s making a threat on her own life, hoping that the man who spurned her will rush in, save her, and promise never to leave. For a moment, it seems her wish is granted. Seeing him wade out toward her, she beams and flings out her arms in expectation of a tender embrace. Then comes the violent twist. Holding her by the back of the head, his hands find their awful strength and push the girl under, until nothing but her hair and the fabric of her skirt move beneath the surface.
It was the summer of 1925, and Alfred Hitchcock had just committed his first murder, in his debut feature film, The Pleasure Garden, a melodrama about the love lives of two London showgirls. After beginning his full-time post at Famous Players-Lasky British in the spring of 1921, things happened fast for Hitchcock. He established himself at the company, which was based at Islington Studios in north London, and he used his spare time to draft outlines for his own scripts. There was an aborted attempt to make a film—Number Thirteen or Mrs. Peabody—with money scraped together from family, and he codirected a comedy short called Always Tell Your Wife when the intended director fell ill. At the studios, he also met Alma Reville, a young editor, who would eventually become his wife and chief collaborator.
When Famous Players-Lasky British folded, Hitchcock fell in with a group of young filmmakers at Islington, led by the producer Michael Balcon, who was impressed by the boy’s “passion for films and his eagerness to learn.” Originally engaged as assistant producer on a number of pictures, Hitchcock volunteered for everything: screenwriter, art director, costume supervisor. “I’m sure t
hat if he never actually swept the floor at Islington he would have been ready and willing to do so,” said Balcon.
In 1924, Balcon recruited Hitchcock for his new production company, Gainsborough Pictures, to work on two Anglo-German coproductions—The Prude’s Fall and The Blackguard—directed by Graham Cutts at the Neubabelsberg film studios near Berlin, a hub of the German expressionist film movement, and where Hitchcock’s ideas about the artistic dimensions of filmmaking were first shaped. During this time, he observed the director F. W. Murnau making The Last Laugh. This, Hitchcock said, was where he learned the rudiments of expressionist filmmaking: using the camera to tell a story without words, to capture the subjective emotional experience of a character, and to paint the screen with black pools and bright lights, an effect the German film theorist Lotte Eisner says represents “a twilight of the German soul, expressing itself in shadowy, enigmatic interiors, or in misty, insubstantial landscapes.”
His own director proved less inspiring. Although some believe that Graham Cutts was also applying expressionist ideas to his work, Hitchcock maintained that Cutts knew little about directing, and he, Hitchcock, grew weary of having to cover for his boss’s extramarital affairs that intruded on their working schedule. When Cutts walked out on The Blackguard, denouncing his “know-it-all son of a bitch” assistant, Balcon turned to the twenty-five-year-old Hitchcock to finish the picture, and soon after gave him the chance to direct a movie of his own.
The Pleasure Garden was filmed in Germany and northern Italy, and proved to be an object lesson in Murphy’s Law. Equipment was mislaid; film stock was confiscated at customs; money to cover location expenses was stolen; actors absented themselves from crucial scenes—everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. “I can smile about them today,” Hitchcock said of the stresses, “but at the time they were ghastly.”
Happily, the movie turned out just fine, full of stylistic flourishes he learned in Germany and preoccupations now considered definitively Hitchcockian: voyeurism, guilt, enchanting blondes—and murder. Over the next fifty years, he would dispatch victims in an ingenious array of horrific scenarios. There was a pre-dinner party garroting in a swanky Manhattan apartment, a knife hurled into the back of an international diplomat, and a shootout in a dingy London backstreet. On his word, women were slaughtered in the shower, pushed from a bell tower, hacked to pieces, and buried in flowerbeds; men were set alight, suffocated, and taken out for a little drive, never to be seen again. In Hitchcock’s lethal universe, nowhere is safe; violence stalks factories, schools, and churches; bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens; windmills, motels, movie theaters—even the children’s carousel at the local fairground. To Hitchcock, all life is in murder. If you want to crack the Hitchcock code, there’s no better place to start than at the grisly end.
In any discussion of Hitchcock and his murders, there is a blood-spattered elephant in the room. The shower scene in Psycho—in which Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh (and, from the bare neck down, Marli Renfro, her body double), is stabbed to death in a frenzied attack by Norman Bates—is an emblem of postwar popular culture, unceasingly referenced, parodied, and reinterpreted. The movie was born of Hitchcock’s desire to captivate a younger generation brought up on television and rock and roll, and to meet the challenge of elevating the slasher genre to the heights of Hitchcockian brilliance. He had also noted, with envy, the critical acclaim that the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot had won for his film Les Diaboliques (1955), a psychological horror film with its own scenes of bathtub-bound violence. Clouzot had clearly been influenced by Hitchcock, yet his film was edgier than the Hitchcock of the mid-1950s, who was making Technicolor escapism with Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Grace Kelly. When Hitchcock’s assistant Peggy Robertson handed him Robert Bloch’s latest novel, Psycho, loosely based on the real-life crimes of the serial killer Ed Gein, she had an inkling that the strangeness of the book’s violence, replete with cross-dressers and taboo sexual fetishes, would catch her boss’s eye. She was right. Hitchcock was gripped by the novel, especially “the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue.”
On first viewing, many critics trashed the film, and expressed disbelief that Hitchcock could’ve wasted his talent on such gratuitousness. One ignored Hitchcock’s pleas to keep the plot twists secret, saying he had a duty to warn anybody thinking of seeing the film that they would be confronted by “a rotting corpse in a shawl, a maniac in a wig, and that they are going to share the camera’s loving preoccupation with the process of swabbing out the bath where Janet Leigh has been knifed.” The sneering and shrieking of critics had no effect; Psycho was an instant hit, making a gargantuan profit on its $800,000 budget, which Hitchcock had financed himself after his studio of the time, Paramount, declined to fund such a risky project.
As Psycho broke box-office records and launched Hitchcock into a new sphere of cultural relevance, some raised questions about what kind of mind could have produced those fifty-two seconds of savagery. In conversation with Dr. Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist who was alarmed by onscreen violence, Hitchcock insisted that poor Marion Crane was no different from Little Red Riding Hood, that other flaxen-haired damsel killed by a wolf in old ladies’ clothing. Neither, Hitchcock swore, did the scene “reflect in any way whatsoever my own private life or my own private mind.” Violence, anger, and conflict of any sort were anathema to him, he insisted. In fact, long before Psycho, he had expressed distaste for films that resort to “sadism, perversion, bestiality, and deformity” to elicit emotional responses from audiences, a tactic he condemned as “utterly wrong, being vicious and dangerous.” Staff of his recalled a time in the 1960s when he stormed out of a projection room when a film that had been recommended to him featured an unexpected scene of animal cruelty, something he considered beyond the pale. Many of those who worked with him testified that his aversion to conflict was so great that he would go to remarkable lengths to avoid “causing a scene,” a horror that could be added to his index of phobias. He told, with pride it seems, the story of how he responded when Ingrid Bergman lost her temper during the complex filming of Under Capricorn (1949): “I did what I always do when people start to argue. I just turned away and went home.” Such tales were intended to evince his imperturbability; he told anyone who would listen—usually journalists—that he never lost his temper because he had no temper to lose. It wasn’t true. Hitchcock’s capacity for anger made itself apparent on any number of occasions, though it was generally stifled with fits of sulking and brooding. Flouncing away from arguments wasn’t a sign of an even temper, but an inability to deal with complex emotions, whether his or other people’s, that manifested itself throughout his life.
Frequently he claimed that he would love to make films that weren’t edged in suspense and tethered by corpses, but his audience wouldn’t allow it. He couldn’t make a film of Cinderella, he said, because “people will immediately start looking for the corpse.” Yet the notion that violence and murder were purely the by-product of his nine-to-five day as a filmmaker, no different to him than coal to a coal miner, is clearly untrue. Naturally, he had no designs on being a serial killer himself, but Hitchcock had a lifelong fascination with cruelty and violence that fueled his creativity.
Most of his understanding of violent crime, as with so much else in his life, came from reading, fantasizing, and silent observation. “I’ve spent so much of my life fascinated by crime and the administration of justice,” he said in 1977. By fourteen, he was reading G. K. Chesterton and John Buchan, the cream of British crime writing, as well as “all the real-life crime stories I could get hold of.” Over the years, he built something of a crime library and developed an in-depth knowledge of several notorious serial killers; he gave copies of relevant books to a number of his writers for inspiration, and to leading men when preparing to play murderers in his films. As a young man, he was also a frequent visitor to the public gallery of the Old Bailey, an extension of his innumer
able trips to the theater and the cinema. “I would have liked to have been a criminal lawyer,” he said. “Think of the opportunity I would have had to be a great man in court.”
Several of his films feature characters who share his armchair enthusiasm for true-crime tales, and who, like Hitchcock, enjoy murder as escapist fantasy. In Suspicion (1941), there’s Isobel, a bluff crime novelist who talks Cary Grant through the execution of the perfect murder; in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Herb and Joe unwind at the end of the day with amiable chats about poisoning and bludgeoning, as others might talk about baseball or celebrity gossip. Hitchcock made a joke about the link between fictional murders and the inner desires of their creators in “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret,” an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in which a sunny, suburban writer of murder mysteries expresses her thoughts about her latest victim: “Poor woman. Such a shame I had to kill her off that way. A psychiatrist would probably say I had some hidden homicidal tendencies. . . . Who knows, if I didn’t get it off my chest by writing mystery stories I might end up committing a few murders myself.”
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 4