The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  Beyond the graphically or explicitly sexual, Hitchcock’s preoccupation with looking, its motivations, and its consequences, is one of the most fascinating aspects of his work and one that ensures its enduring relevance to our culture. It was three Hitchcock films—Rear Window, Vertigo, and Marnie—that formed the basis of Laura Mulvey’s argument that Hollywood movies display the world through the “male gaze,” favoring male desires and experiences, reinforcing the notion that women exist only to please men. Mulvey’s term, and its underlying concepts, have drifted into common parlance and, in certain quarters, have helped to solidify Hitchcock’s reputation as the supreme auteur of patriarchy. Doubtless, there is abundant evidence in Hitchcock to sustain Mulvey’s theory of the privileged male gaze, but it’s also true that Hitchcock’s male voyeurs are rarely gleeful in their obsessive looking. Often, their ogling causes them either guilt or regret, and hastens their downfall in some way. In that opening scene of The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock shows us the dancers hurrying their way to the stage before cutting to a panning shot across the front row of the audience, a line of supposed gentlemen leering at the women before them. We then see through the binoculars of one particularly lecherous fellow as he stares at Patsy, the film’s heroine. After the show, hoping to make a fantasy come true, he approaches Patsy, only to be mortified as she removes her blonde wig—she’s a natural brunette—and laughs in his face. Within the first five minutes of the first Hitchcock film, the male gaze is presented, critiqued, and ridiculed.

  Unease with a compulsion to look is what makes Rear Window so compelling. Not since the experimental Rope seven years earlier had Hitchcock found a project that so enthused him; despite various claims to the contrary that have been made over the years, he was heavily involved in building the script from the template of its source material. As the historian Bill Krohn notes, the drafts of the scripts feature so many small touches evocative of earlier Hitchcock—“the little people who inhabit it, and the way the man at the rear window becomes involved in their lives”—that they surely came from him rather than from a writer. An initial treatment for the film by Joshua Logan—written before Hitchcock had bought the rights to the story—begins with the camera surveying the windows of the various apartments, not unlike the opening sequence of Rear Window. However, Hitchcock had already filmed something very similar more than twenty years earlier, a shot at the start of Murder! in which the camera pans down a row of houses, allowing us to peer inside at private lives as lights come on and people respond to a commotion outside.

  Hitchcock on the set of To Catch a Thief.

  Rear Window stars James Stewart as Jeff, a globe-trotting photojournalist, confined to his Greenwich Village apartment while he recuperates from a broken leg. Bored and frustrated by his incapacitation, Jeff begins to spy on his neighbors, one of whom, Lars Thorwald, he suspects of having killed his wife. Although disturbed by his voyeurism, Jeff’s physiotherapist, Stella, and his glamorous young girlfriend, Lisa, help him investigate the murder, eventually bringing Thorwald to justice. Jeff never leaves his apartment (apart from one brief moment of defenestration), and the camera stays with him throughout. Exhibiting Hitchcock’s love of the subjective camera, almost all the action is told from Jeff’s perspective. We receive clues, red herrings, and revelations along with him, save one scene in which we see Thorwald exit his apartment with a woman while Jeff dozes in his chair.* We see Jeff’s pleasure in spying on the woman he calls Miss Torso as she exercises in front of her window. But we also see his shame as he watches Miss Lonelyhearts being assaulted by a man she has invited into her home, and as she later contemplates suicide. When Thorwald discovers Lisa in his apartment—where she has been looking for incriminating evidence—Jeff is reduced to pathetic impotence, barely able to watch.

  Rear Window is Hitchcock’s definitive film. It draws together various strands of the Hitchcock touch: ingenious production design; perfect casting; a taut, sparkling script; thrilling entertainment interwoven with dark, unsettling themes; beautifully judged use of colors and clothing. There’s also something inspired, in a gently subversive, Hitchcockian way, about the construction of the Greenwich Village apartments where the whole film takes place. In a period in which studios splashed vast sums creating epics such as Quo Vadis, The Robe, and Ben-Hur, Hitchcock persuaded Paramount to spend more than eighty thousand dollars—a vast sum in 1953—on a single studio set for a movie that takes place inside a nondescript apartment, where a middle-aged man sits in his pajamas, spying on the neighbors. Robert Burks, the film’s cinematographer, likened it to a DeMille production, though, as the historian John Belton points out, the themes of Rear Window hearken back to the earliest days of cinema when films were “more concerned with exhibition, presentation, and display, than with narration.” Hitchcock maintained that he was at his best when he adhered most strictly to the principles of silent filmmaking, as was the case with Rear Window. Ironically, the film also features some of the best dialogue of any Hitchcock movie. John Michael Hayes was chiefly responsible for that, but he conceded that in the process of writing the script, “Hitchcock taught me about how to tell a story with the camera and tell it silently.”

  “Of all the films I have made,” reflected Hitchcock in 1968, “this to me is the most cinematic.” Today, the word “cinematic” is frequently used as a superlative, a synonym for something visually stunning. Hitchcock used it in its strictest sense, meaning the core principles and techniques that differentiate cinema from other visual arts. This has relatively little to do with cinematography, and a lot to do with editing. “Galloping horses in Westerns are only photographs of action, photographs of content,” explained Hitchcock. “It’s the piecing together of the montage which makes what I call a pure film.” Hitchcock’s template was laid down by early pioneers, especially Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, the latter of whom conducted an experiment to demonstrate the almost magical properties of film assembly, which Hitchcock referenced in explaining his own technique. “Show a man looking at something,” he ventured, “say a baby. Then show him smiling. By placing these shots in sequence—man looking, object seen, reaction to object—the director characterizes the man as a kindly person.” But replace the shot of the baby with a girl in a bikini, and the sequence is transformed. “What is he now? He’s a dirty old man.” A sequence just like that appears in Rear Window as Jeff ogles Miss Torso, stretching and twirling in her kitchen. But elsewhere in the film, Hitchcock adds an extra element: the voyeur as unreliable witness. In Kuleshov’s experiment, our opinion of the man is manipulated by the nature of what he has seen; in Rear Window, Jeff thinks he’s witnessing a man getting away with murder—but he can’t be sure whether he’s being deceived by his own eyes.

  It’s a feeling shared by Scottie in Vertigo, again played by Stewart, who is driven mad by silent watching and the obsessive pursuit that follows. If Cary Grant was Hitchcock’s favorite man of action, some heroic, imaginary version of himself, Stewart was surely his favorite man of reaction, expressing through his silent gaze unsettling things about being an ordinary man that Hitchcock felt but rarely articulated. Stewart explained that his role in Rear Window “largely consisted of reacting. First Hitchcock would show what I was seeing through my binoculars. Then he’d show my face, and I’d reflect what I saw. I spent an astonishing amount of time looking into the camera and being amused, afraid, worried, curious, embarrassed, bored.”

  Hitchcock and the art of looking: James Stewart in Rear Window.

  It is in their dumb staring that Jeff and Scottie are at their loudest. Hitchcock’s original ending for Vertigo, only restored on its re-release in the 1980s, was not the dynamic chase up the bell tower that ends with Judy’s fall, but its aftermath: Scottie sitting in a chair, mute, gazing into space. His voyeurism has led him to misery; the male gaze has become an ugly hall of mirrors.

  Secrets and unspoken truths permeate Hitchcock’s work. Like Jeff and Scottie, Hitchcock was an assiduous observer of
people, and he was convinced that everybody had something to hide. Tippi Hedren acknowledged that one of her debts to Hitchcock was the way he encouraged her to drink in her surroundings as a way of developing her craft. “I watch, I observe, I observe people in situations all the time, and I put things back in my memory and say, ‘Oh, that would be wonderful to do, to put into a character.’ And that I learned from Hitchcock.”

  This was natural enough for the greatest maker of spy movies in history, especially one who spent the first forty years of his life immersed in a society that valued secrecy in the way that people of twenty-first-century America value disclosure. The profusion of British spy fiction in the early 1900s influenced Hitchcock profoundly and supplied him with much source material. It emanated from a period of rapid growth in state-sponsored espionage, which sat atop a pervasive culture of secrecy that one former cabinet minister called “the British disease.” Peter Hennessy, arguably the greatest living historian of the uses and abuses of Westminster power, believes that “secrecy is as much part of the English landscape as the Cotswolds. It goes with the grain of our society.” Hitchcock himself said that he “always felt that espionage stories are fairly tricky to do in America,” as its openness means it “carries no real menace with it. You always feel you can go to the nearest policeman and complain that the Communists are after you.”

  Hitchcock adhered to the British code of secrecy, and he formed close personal and professional relationships with those who had extraordinary secrets of their own. His friend and collaborator Ivor Montagu was a Soviet double agent during World War II, while his brother, Ewen Montagu, masterminded Operation Mincemeat, a plot in which the British intelligence services invented an entirely fictitious Royal Marines officer to fool the Nazis into believing that the Allies’ plans to invade Sicily were fake. In 1953, Ewen Montagu wrote an account of the plot, The Man Who Never Was—a possible allusion to The Man Who Knew Too Much, on which his brother had worked with Hitchcock. The book was adapted for the screen three years later, directed by Ronald Neame, who had started his career on Hitchcock’s Blackmail. An innocent man mistaken for a nonexistent spy is, of course, the central premise of North by Northwest, and that idea was first floated to Hitchcock in the early 1950s by the journalist Otis Guernsey who had heard about a wartime tale, similar to Operation Mincemeat, in which the British invented “a fake masterspy” in the Middle East. Ernest Lehman was adamant that neither Neame’s film, nor any other real-life story, was in his mind when he scripted North by Northwest, but given the spiderweb of associations, it may well have been in Hitchcock’s.

  Lore has it that not only did Hitchcock have an intense interest in looking and watching, he possessed remarkable powers of observation and foresight. Frequently, he cast actors and recruited writers based on his hunches, reading them over the course of a twenty-minute meeting, or a lunch during which they talked about everything but the film ahead of them. Some colleagues and associates told stories that suggested his abilities approached the preternatural. He could, apparently, grasp a person’s character and motive in an instant, second-guess them, and spot lies immediately. Considering how socially maladroit he could be, it seems a little hard to believe, but those who knew him best insist “he had an extraordinary sixth sense.” Even some of those who never had the honor of meeting him were of a mind to agree. Recounting the time when he crept onto the set of Family Plot in a vain hope of meeting his idol, Steven Spielberg said, “It was as if he sensed an intruder in his reverse vision. He couldn’t have seen me but he leaned over to an assistant director and whispered something.” Immediately, the assistant director approached Spielberg and escorted him off the set. “That was the closest I came to Hitchcock. I learned that he had eyes in the back of his head . . . very eerie.”

  The legend of Hitchcock’s third eye has been perpetuated at least partially because Hitchcock’s ability to visualize is so central to his professional reputation as a director. He often claimed that he would “never look at the script again once it’s written, because it’s all been done,” and by that point, he could see the entire film in his head, shot by shot. “The general method that is used by, might I say, the average director,” he boasted, “is to shoot what we’d term plenty of material and then cut. I personally don’t use this method. . . . I aim at getting a complete vision of my film before it goes on to the studio floor.” All that remained was to go through the tedious process of committing the thing to film, which he did with the aid of detailed storyboards that told cast and crew exactly what was in his mind’s eye. He shot only the tiniest amount of footage that didn’t appear in the final cut, and reshoots were as rare as hen’s teeth. “Films,” he said, “are made before they are shot.” Once the process was complete, he didn’t need to see the finished product with an audience because he knew how they would react. He understood how people worked. He could press their buttons and pull their levers at will. Not only could he see a whole film in his mind, he knew how to project it into ours as well.

  It is a remarkable testament to his unmatched visual genius—except it’s not entirely true. Scripting was clearly a highly stimulating process for Hitchcock, in which images solidified and pieces of the story slotted together. His preproduction planning was also rigorous, but it was an attempt to remove uncertainty and quell his nerves—a safety net rather than concrete walls from within which his films never escaped. On movies such as Topaz, The Birds, and Shadow of a Doubt, new pages arrived well after the cameras had started to roll, with Hitchcock adjusting his designs accordingly, giving the lie to his assertion that he never glanced at the script after the first day of filming. The usual equanimity of a Hitchcock set was frayed in Morocco during the filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much when the shooting script failed to materialize on time. Well after principal photography had begun, the assistant production manager, Hugh Brown, noted that the crew was receiving fresh pages each morning and having to work on the hoof. Robert Benchley, who both wrote dialogue for and acted in Foreign Correspondent, had a similar experience. From the set, he wrote his wife that “Hitchcock is a good director but an exacting one. . . . The picture isn’t written yet, and one of the most important roles isn’t cast. . . . They’re shooting the stuff that’s written, and then, when changes in the plot make that obsolete, they shoot it over.”

  Neither did Hitchcock storyboard a whole movie in advance, only key scenes, and sometimes not even those. When MGM asked him to provide sketches of the famous crop-duster scene for publicity reasons, he acquiesced—even though no sketches of the scene had been made before filming. Bill Krohn explains that “tracings of each still [from the shoot] preserved among his papers show that Hitchcock, or someone, gave it a try, but what he seems to have done finally was ask a production illustrator to draw a storyboard” retrospectively, based on the action that was filmed. By this stage in his career, Hitchcock’s storyboards had become part of his public image, eye-catching props that purported to show us genius flowing through the nib of a pencil. Krohn posits that it began in 1942, when Universal’s publicity department placed an article in Theatre Arts magazine that reproduced drawings from Hitchcock’s latest picture, Saboteur, as a behind-the-scenes peek at the Hitchcock methodology. But, even earlier, in publicizing the very first Hollywood Hitchcock movie, Rebecca, the New York World-Telegram ran an article featuring four sketches that Hitchcock had made during the making of the film, hailing Hitchcock as “a Pattern Designer,” whose movies skip from the chambers of his imagination to the page, then onto the screen, in quick, clean strides. Many years later, drawings from Saboteur’s Statue of Liberty sequence were put on display by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which those who worked on the film believed had actually been drawn after production had wrapped.

  Hitchcock clearly had an impressive visual imagination. Farley Granger declared himself amazed when he visited Hitchcock’s office before filming Rope. “Every wall was covered by eight-by-ten-inch drawings from ceiling to floor.
I was completely absorbed in this visualization of the script.” Yet it is going too far to say that Hitchcock had a film edited in his head, down to the last camera angle, before filming began—not least because by the time he was experienced enough at filmmaking to have developed such a skill, he would have also been experienced enough to understand the advantages of embracing the unexpected, which is a part of the creative process in every medium. Robert Burks confirmed that Hitchcock did exhaustive planning for each shoot, and tended to give camera operators rough sketches for each planned shot on the day of shooting.† “But he never nails you down to those sketches,” Burks told an interviewer. “If, after discussion, Hitch finds that we can achieve better results in another way, he has no hesitancy in rewriting the action or dialogue.”