In Jack the Ripper’s day, popular newspapers blurred the lines between fact and fiction as they cast the Ripper as the archetype of a new cultural figure: a genius twisted by the malevolence of the modern city. One mass-market publication described him as “another Hyde,” as though either Robert Louis Stevenson’s character from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had been flesh and blood, or the Ripper was a work of spine-chilling fiction. Such reporting promoted rumors that the Ripper was Richard Mansfield, the American actor who at that moment was terrifying West End audiences in a stage production of Jekyll and Hyde. A number of other artists have been named as suspects over the last century. In 2002 and 2017, the novelist Patricia Cornwell published books claiming that the Ripper was Walter Sickert, one of England’s most important early modernist painters and a member of the influential Camden Town Group. Hitchcock would have been intrigued to read Cornwell’s theories; at some point, he bought one of Sickert’s Camden Town Murder paintings, a series of melancholy depictions of the murder of Emily Dimmock, a London prostitute who had her throat slit by a customer, on her bed, in 1907. Hitchcock’s homes were generously decorated with art; this piece hung on a bedroom wall.
The Lodger rebooted East London’s murderer-as-artist tradition for the 1920s, and for the new medium of cinema. The first eight minutes of the film are among the most arresting Hitchcock ever made, and perhaps the highlight of his nine silent films. It begins, naturally, with a murder. The opening shot is a close-up of a woman’s face, her mouth wide open in a silent scream in the moment of her demise, foreshadowing that famous image of Janet Leigh in Psycho. A montage quickly puts us in a time and place, as police officers arrive on the scene and a horrified witness gives her description of the murderer. Nearly a hundred years later, it feels urgently familiar. A crowd gathers; rumors take flight; sick jokes spread within minutes of the corpse hitting the ground. Reporters scramble, and we track the news as it goes viral through the buzz of the latest technology. “MURDER wet from the presses,” read the intertitles, “MURDER hot on the aerial.”
Like any good murderer who creeps around popular culture, the Avenger leaves a calling card on the person of each of his victims. And, like any good modern artist, the card has a signature flourish: a single triangle, which is incorporated into the design of the film’s intertitles and reflects the tense love triangle between Daisy, her family’s mysterious lodger, and Daisy’s policeman boyfriend, who suspects the lodger of being the murderer. It’s as though the evil genius whose killing spree has brought us here is the same as the one behind the camera. The suggestion is reinforced as a man in a newspaper office leans into a telephone. This is Hitchcock in his first cameo, reporting that the Avenger has claimed his seventh victim. He asserted that his screen debut arose simply because there was nobody else to play the role, and in time the tradition of his cameos became part superstition, part running joke. Whether that’s quite accurate is debatable. Nevertheless, his appearance in The Lodger gives us another premonition of Psycho, this time of the publicity campaign in which he took center stage, using his face, voice, and body to disperse the message about his latest unhinged killer.
The murder of an innocent young blonde woman that opens The Lodger.
The link between murder and creativity was one Hitchcock played with for the rest of his career. Cinemas, music halls, performances of ballet and symphonies, are all sites of Hitchcock murders. Sometimes the killers, like Hitchcock himself, are those who see their whole campaign of violence in their head long before its execution, planning it with joyful meticulousness. Other times, they are performers, for whom role-playing, disguise, and transformation are their modus operandi. Young and Innocent (1937), a lesser-known Hitchcock film, is compulsory watching for any cinephile if only for the astonishing shot—adapted a decade later for a more famous sequence in Notorious (1946)—that takes the audience from the back of a large room right into the face of a jazz drummer, a white man in blackface whom the audience, but not the other characters, now realizes is the murderer we’ve all been searching for. Knowing that his pursuers are closing in, his anxiety gets the better of him: he loses his rhythm, his eyes begin to twitch, sweat erodes his face paint. His disguise ruined, he’s apprehended, given away by his own guilty conscience.
Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Psycho.
Hitchcock’s playful parallels between artists and murderers continue to hold our attention. In 2020, his fantastically silly album of easy listening, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Music to Be Murdered By, made a return in the form of Eminem’s Music to Be Murdered By, which references Hitchcock in its concept, on its cover, and in numerous samples of his voice. Speaking on his original 1958 LP, Hitchcock says that the record is intended for thousands of frustrated members of his television audience: “The program seems to have inspired them to murder, but did not furnish the proper atmosphere for it.” Hitchcock’s album was released before Psycho, but Eminem’s is unquestionably a post–shower scene record, his vitriolic rhymes intended to lacerate and outrage. That Eminem sees in Hitchcock—“the master, Uncle Alfred,” as he refers to him—a kindred soul is not as surprising as it might seem. Both have been accused of crude misogyny and gratuitous invocations of violence that could corrupt impressionable audiences; both insist it’s all humor, hyperbole, and role-play, lost on the po-faced and literal-minded. From De Quincey to Hitchcock to Eminem, the art of murder continues to inspire the most incongruous miscreants.
The dominating power of violence was made clear to Hitchcock throughout his life: in the popular culture of the communities in which he was raised, during the savage war in which he came of age, and in the conflagration that stirred just as he established himself as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.
Between 1934 and 1938, Hitchcock released five pictures that tapped into the violence and menace rippling through Europe, a world detached from its moorings. The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes (1938) were breakthrough pictures for Hitchcock, the first of the spy adventures after which many of his immortal Hollywood films would follow. “My parents were not political,” confirms Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, but that clutch of films reveals that while Hitchcock may never have been interested in ideology or party politics, he was interested in power, and the means by which people use it against others.
Shortly after the release of The Lady Vanishes—one of the great Hitchcock movies of romance and espionage set amid the creep of fascism in Central Europe—he explained that his recent work had been fantastical because his desire to show “violent things” could be done only through heightened fiction. The previous decade or so had been a febrile time; Hitchcock had been motivated to capture the “forcefulness and violence” of that atmosphere. When the General Strike of 1926 put tanks on the streets of London, Hitchcock apparently tried to make a film about it. He wanted to re-create “fistfights between strikers and undergraduates, pickets, and all the authentic drama,” but producers told him that such explicitness would never make it past the censors. Much the same thing happened when filming The Man Who Knew Too Much. When the Home Office learned of Hitchcock’s plans to film a siege at the film’s climax, Hitchcock was told he could not show the militia on the streets and ordinary houses “surrounded by machine guns. All that I was allowed to do was depict the policemen being handed rifles and shown how to use them.”
In September 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, by which time Hitchcock and family had begun a new life in Hollywood. From the outbreak of hostilities, Hitchcock felt compelled to lend his talents to the war effort. “I was both overweight and overage for military service. I knew that if I did nothing I’d regret it for the rest of my life.” On and off for five years, he worked quietly but seriously on several projects designed to support the cause of US intervention and raise the morale of those back home in Britain. Among a community of Brits in Hollywood, he was heavily involved in the development of a pro
paganda film called Forever and a Day (begun in early 1940, eventually completed in 1943), and reedited two docudramas for the American market, Men of the Lightship (1940) and Target for Tonight (1941), the former about the Nazi bombardment of British installations in the North Sea, the latter about British bombing raids of Germany. American distributors had refused to handle the films as originally cut, considering them far too parochial and pedestrian for American audiences. Displaying his native understanding of popular taste, Hitchcock made both snappier, and less insularly British, and, according to one historian, they became the most profitable of all government-sponsored war films released within the first four years of the conflict. Between December 1943 and February 1944, he then wrote, produced, directed, and edited two French-language films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, both in praise of the French Resistance. At only twenty-six minutes long, and made on a tiny budget, Bon Voyage has a certain similarity to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, in that it is littered with false memories and mistaken identities, lots of tightly framed close-ups, and not an ounce of narrative fat. Contrary to later reports, the film was shown to the French public, and appears to have been well received. Aventure Malgache was a different story. “We realized that the Free French were very divided against one another,” Hitchcock explained, and it was these “inner conflicts” around which he decided to spin the film. With nuanced characters and moral gray areas, the atmosphere was pure Hitchcock—but bad propaganda. Failing to tell a simple story about the heroic French people and the dastardly enemy, the film was suppressed for decades.
As the war rolled toward its end, Hitchcock was approached by his friend, the British producer Sidney Bernstein, to help shape the final reels of a film Bernstein was making for the British Ministry of Information, in which there would be no space for ambiguity or playfulness: a documentary about what had taken place inside the Nazi concentration camps. In June 1945, Hitchcock checked in at Claridge’s hotel in London, ready to host several weeks of meetings with two writers, Richard Crossman and Colin Wills, and an editor named Peter Tanner, with whom he crafted the most damning testimony of Nazi atrocities, based on hours of raw footage from Dachau and Buchenwald. Hitchcock’s involvement in the film was known about during his lifetime, but he refused to discuss it in any depth.
Originally designed to educate the public about the extent of the Third Reich’s crimes, the film was ultimately shelved, unfinished. So horrific was its content that the governments of the United States, Britain, and France agreed that its impact on public sentiment may have detracted from the aims of the Marshall Plan. Better to build a new Germany, it was felt, than wallow in the ashes of the old one. Some of the footage was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials, but after that the film was removed from public sight. In 1985, five years after Hitchcock’s death, it briefly reemerged when PBS screened the unfinished portions of it in the documentary Frontline: Memory of the Camps. Only in 2014 was the film finally completed, restored, and screened, when it played at the Berlin Film Festival under the original and appropriately sober title, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.
Given the glee with which Hitchcock put people’s lives in danger on screen, simply, as he claimed, to thrill his audience, recruiting him to be the guiding hand on a serious testament to genocidal depravity might seem odd. But Sidney Bernstein, who had known Hitchcock since 1925, “thought he, a brilliant man, would have some ideas how we could tie it all together, and he had.” Hitchcock was taken by the contrast of the horrifying footage from the camps and that of the tranquil, bucolic towns in the vicinity. He suggested they use simple maps to illustrate how ordinary life ran along with human slaughter on its doorstep. Peter Tanner, the film’s editor, credited Hitchcock’s understanding of the emotional impact of film technique as having a real bearing on his work. Hitchcock, said Tanner, “was very careful to try to get material which could not possibly be seen to be faked in any way,” making extensive use of long takes that could be displayed without cuts. Likewise, Hitchcock also urged that other parts should rely on montage. In one section of the film that Hitchcock helped to structure, we are shown unbearable images of body parts, and piles of personal possessions. The sight of mounds of clothing, robbed of their owners, transforms everyday objects into symbols of true evil. As Jean-Louis Comolli has observed, the “juxtaposition of what is familiar with what is horrible is one of the great Hitchcock themes.”
At one point in the section of the film on which Hitchcock worked, the camera takes us to the threshold of a room with a sign above the doorway: “BRAUSEBAD,” German for “shower bath.” At first sight, it looks like a bathroom, albeit functional and forbidding. Once inside, the brilliant white of the room is draped by sinister dark shadows. Most viewers today, familiar with film images of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps, will instantly recognize the deception that Hitchcock and his colleagues are revealing to us. The apertures on the ceiling are not shower heads, but vents for poison gas. This is not a place of cleansing, but of murder.
Once seen, the visual rhyme with the shower scene from Psycho, as profane as it might appear, is difficult to dislodge from one’s mind. Picture that moment when Hitchcock’s camera looks up directly into the shower head, the water pouring onto Marion’s face and chest. For a moment she looks relaxed, having made up her mind to hand back the money she stole and return to being the good, honest person we all know her to be. From nowhere, she is overwhelmed by a force of inexplicable depravity. Within seconds, she lies dead, destined for an unmarked grave.
In 1965, the critic Robin Wood—who, at the time, had never seen the camp footage—wondered whether the experience of working on the documentary had affected Hitchcock’s most famous film. “One cannot contemplate the camps without confronting two aspects of their horror: the utter helplessness of and innocence of the victims, and the fact that human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some measure share, were their tormenters and butchers. . . . Psycho is founded on, precisely, these twin horrors.” If Psycho had been influenced by the images he spent days poring over, Hitchcock didn’t say. He may not even have been conscious of it. Peter Bogdanovich recounts the time in the 1960s when he asked Hitchcock about a scene in his Cold War thriller Torn Curtain (1966) in which Paul Newman and an East German housewife commit the remarkably slow, drawn-out murder of a Stasi security agent, Gromek, played by Wolfgang Kieling. Newman and his accomplice wrestle with Gromek, stab him, and hit him with a shovel, but he clings, Rasputin-like, to life. It isn’t until they drag him across the floor and hold his head in a gas oven that he dies. Bogdanovich asked Hitchcock whether this was an intentional allusion to the gas chambers of the Holocaust. “He seemed genuinely surprised and shook his head no,” but a few years later Bogdanovich saw Hitchcock on a television program, where he “quite seriously and at some length explained the symbolism of this murder sequence and how it related to the Germans’ gassings of the Jews.” This, presumably, was the show in which Hitchcock said of Gromek’s murder, “here we are back at Auschwitz again and the gas ovens. The world today is full of brutality.”
Perhaps Hitchcock had been keeping something back from Bogdanovich, or perhaps once the possible link had been revealed to him, he came to see its truth. Gimlet-eyed in all things, Hitchcock was always open to suggestion. It was Jane Sloan who once described him as a “sponge, eager to adapt the point of view that would sell, and open to any idea that seemed good, insistent only that it fit his design.” Though impossible to prove, it is not at all hard to believe that knitting together the most disturbing real-life footage of human depravity ever captured had, consciously or not, shaped Hitchcock’s feel for his own depictions of murder. The Wildean abstractions of art and sophistication had been superseded by the viciousness of the modern world. Whatever the case, the shower scene had announced a new era. Not long after Psycho, the American Red Cross approached Hitchcock to do a knowing rehash of the film’s trailer for a public service spot in which he would walk aro
und an ordinary home and point out the lethal horrors that lurk in every room—especially the bathroom. Within the blink of an eye, the transgressive violence of Psycho had become part of the fabric of American life. Violence and nudity were taking on new roles in our shared existence. There was no going back for any of us, Hitchcock included.
Over the Christmas holidays of 1969, the BBC treated prime-time viewers to an hour of Hitchcock on his favorite subjects: suspense, sex, movies, and murder. It was a recording of Hitchcock’s interview with Bryan Forbes, a fellow English director, before an audience at Britain’s National Film Theatre. For much of the evening, Hitchcock had his audience in stitches, his answers capped with double entendres and twinkly eyed, ironic understatement. There was even laughter when the scene of Gromek’s murder was played. One audience member, however, struggled to find the humor, and challenged the “nauseating . . . stomach-turning . . . unnecessarily tasteless” manner of Gromek’s protracted death. Hitchcock replied, “I would say the demonstration of the scene is intended to show how difficult it is to kill a man. Because it is a messy business, it is a horrible business.”
In years to come, numerous young directors defended their depictions of murder in precisely the same terms. Sam Peckinpah said that The Wild Bunch (1969) was his attempt to counter the Hollywood tradition in which “people die without suffering and violence provokes no pain.” After Torn Curtain, Hitchcock had one graphic murder left in him, when Barry Foster’s charming psychopath is seen to rape and murder Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s character, Brenda, in Frenzy (1972), a seventies reprisal of The Lodger, tying together the two ends of the Hitchcock murder trail, the fantastical legend of the Ripper, and the disgusting reality of his crimes. The scene took three days to shoot and was difficult for both Leigh-Hunt and Foster. “Just another day and a half and we’ll be through with this,” they said to each other at the halfway point. In the shot that completes their struggle, Foster was struck by the sight of Leigh-Hunt posing dead with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, just as Hitchcock had directed: “the effect is genuinely horrendous. Hitch did experiment with having an extremely close lens at her mouth, getting through makeup, saliva, and blood. Hitch, I think, was trying to plumb the ultimate in horror there.” In the practice of the fine art of murder, there is always some fresh hell to be rent from the murky depths of a brilliant imagination.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 6