The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  Jack Cardiff was a director and Oscar-winning cinematographer who shot Under Capricorn, arguably the most complex of all Hitchcock’s filming assignments. Cardiff was struck by Hitchcock’s certainty about the images he wanted, and his faith in the technicians’ ability to get them. “He hardly ever saw the rushes of the day’s work,” recalled Cardiff. “The editor would keep him closely informed, but Hitch knew exactly what he was getting on the screen. From the moment he had drawn pictures of the camera set-ups, he had it all firmly in his mind.” That someone of Cardiff’s talent, skill, and experience was impressed by Hitchcock’s ability to visualize is telling. Clearly, he had a rare gift. However, Cardiff’s description of Hitchcock’s behavior during shooting also suggests that Hitchcock made something of a performance of his reputation as the all-seeing genius with an editing suite in his head, and who found filming a terrible bore. “He had his back to the actors,” said Cardiff of Hitchcock during one of Under Capricorn’s lengthy takes, “aimlessly looking down at the floor, and at the end, when he had said ‘Cut,’ he made only one comment to my camera operator Paul Beeson: ‘How was that for you, Paul?’ On Paul’s nod, he would signal his acceptance of the whole reel.” There’s a quiet ostentation in the inactivity described here, the decision to look away from the very thing he should have been looking at; it’s tempting to believe that on Hitchcock’s set the act of directing—of being Alfred Hitchcock—was itself part of the spectacle.

  It coheres with the broader image that grew around Hitchcock from the mid-1940s: a great man who was defined by his unique ability to see what ordinary people cannot. In his reminiscences, his talent for seeing a film unfold in his head made itself obvious before he’d even begun directing his own films. When working as art director on Woman to Woman in 1923, he built the set of the entrance to a Park Lane mansion with nothing at the top of the stairs, much to the consternation of Graham Cutts when he arrived to direct the day’s filming. “They were expecting to do the conventional shot from the door looking up the stairs,” remembered Hitchcock, “with the balcony and the hostess at the top, and the people going up. I said, ‘No. You take the shot from the top of the stairs, looking down.’ ” He then explained to his superior that as the scene belonged to the hostess, the action should be seen from her perspective. “I was, in a way, a small martinet. I said, ‘this is where the shot is to be done,’ and the director was helpless.” The common or garden-variety movie director’s lack of visual imagination was a subject Hitchcock spoke on from the very beginning of his career, and he never let up. “Not enough people have a visual sense,” he moaned in 1976. “They cannot project. See, I don’t even look through the camera; I can visualize it on the screen.”

  Indeed, he consistently professed a total lack of interest in other directors’ work. In their many off-the-record conversations about films and the film industry, Peter Bogdanovich can’t remember Hitchcock talking about any other filmmakers, with the exception of Orson Welles “because he knew I was doing an interview book with Orson, so he asked questions . . . just a few.” Despite his suggestions to the contrary, Hitchcock was assiduous in keeping up with the latest cinema. His appointment books reveal that he made viewing films part of his weekly work schedule. This was especially the case once he signed for Universal in the early 1960s and set up his own suite of offices at the studio. A PhD thesis could be written about the movies that made it onto Hitchcock’s viewing schedule at the Universal projection rooms. Woodstock, A Clockwork Orange, Marat/Sade, The Wild Angels, The Pink Panther, The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, What’s Up, Doc? were among the many English-language films watched soon after release, along with dozens of films by leading foreign directors. It was after watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up that he felt inspired to push into bold new territory in the late sixties. “These Italian directors are a century ahead of me in terms of technique!”

  Such admissions were not intended for public consumption. In interviews, the grand old man of cinema was more likely to speak of his work by way of metaphor, likening himself to architects, composers, writers, and especially painters. Cézanne was one name Hitchcock invoked on a couple of occasions, as was his favorite artist, Paul Klee, because of what Hitchcock thought was their similar use of color. “I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned. I’m only self-indulgent about treatment,” he said in 1972. “I’d compare myself to an abstract painter.” Story was what he had writers for; the real essence of Hitchcock, the field in which the auteur made his mark, was, he suggested, his inimitable eye. In that same conversation, his interlocutor attempted to tease out Hitchcock’s opinions on his peers. Of Ingmar Bergman, Hitchcock offered nothing more than “he has indicated on one occasion that he learned a lot from Hitchcock” in terms of his visual approach, and pointed out that the same was true of Truffaut. Of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, he said that the Italian’s masterpiece of neorealism was “very good,” but that his own films did more with the form.

  In fairness to Hitchcock, he would not be the first or the last artist disinclined to discuss his contemporaries’ work. But the fact that he chose to explain his style by placing it in the lineage of another, more rarified field of the visual arts indicates he wanted us to believe that his mastery of “pure cinema” put him in a category separate from even the most accomplished filmmakers of the day. One could argue that it expresses an insecurity about his own status as a commercial filmmaker, and about cinema as a whole. If so, it’s one shared by plenty of others; there is no shortage of critics who have praised Hitchcock’s talents by way of comparing him to other types of artists. Dolly Haas, who played the role of the murderer’s wife in I Confess, was so fascinated by Hitchcock’s visual flair that she concluded he “was actually an architect. I thought, ‘My God, the man should have been a visual artist or an architect,’ because he drew every close-up and every scene from the left blank page of his manuscript.”

  It’s intriguing that a successful film actress apparently didn’t consider filmmaking to be a branch of the visual arts, but Haas hit on an important point. The writer Gavin Lambert once made the brilliant observation that many of Hitchcock’s most memorable scenes “could be titled like surrealistic paintings: Human Being Caged by Bird, Cigarette Extinguished in Fried Egg [To Catch a Thief], and as a presentation of the extreme not even Dali has gone further than, Young Man Dressed as His Dead Mother Knifing a Naked Girl under a Shower.” So strong was his visual motivation that Hitchcock does at times resemble a conceptual artist, one who liked to capture shocking, witty ideas in those images that were so often his initial motivation for making a film. This sensibility is perhaps why his work has appealed to and inspired so many visual artists in other fields, many of whom have responded to Hitchcock’s voyeurism in their own creations. For example, Douglas Gordon’s 1993 video installation 24 Hour Psycho slows the Hitchcock movie down, stretching it to last an entire day. So elongated is each shot that, even in the frenetic moments of the shower scene montage, the audience is no longer looking at Hitchcock the filmmaker, but Hitchcock the still-life artist.

  The work of the English artist Cornelia Parker has certain parallels with Hitchcock’s—bracing images laced with a playful wit, ingeniously executed, communicating an idea or a sensation, rather than a narrative. For her best-known work, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, she persuaded the British Army to detonate a garden shed full of everyday objects, then used the remains to reconstruct the shed in mid explosion, suspended in midair, with a single light bulb at its center, creating expressionist patterns of shadows all around it. Parker says that one artwork she wishes she had made is Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege, an enormous replica of Stonehenge in the form of a bouncy castle, the type of jaunty undermining of solemn reality that Hitchcock would have appreciated, and which he executed himself with his replicas of Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest) and the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur) that turned famous monuments into jungle gyms. In 2016, Parker installed on the roof of the Me
tropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan a structure she titled Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), a replica of the Bates family home made from the reclaimed materials of a dismantled red barn. In re-creating the most terrifying house in American history in the blood-red colors of an architectural icon of American wholesomeness, Parker intended to reflect her observations of the United States, in the way that Hitchcock used his outsider’s perspective as a lens through which to look at the American west. Hitchcock’s own inspiration for the Bates house, moldering next to a highway that represents the speed and transience of modern America, is thought to have included House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper.

  Parker watched Psycho repeatedly and in freeze-frame, poring over tiny details. It was only in doing this that the artifice of Hitchcock’s set became apparent to her: this was not a real house but merely a painted facade, one of the many clever tricks that Hitchcock played on our eyes, confident that, unlike him, audiences rarely look closely enough to differentiate reality from falsehood. It was Hitchcock’s contention that almost every shot will be on screen for less than five seconds, nowhere near enough time to pick apart the trickery of moviemaking.

  He may have been happy to bend the truth on screen, but Hitchcock’s approach to what he called “filling the tapestry” of a film was based on an unbending attention to detail. Though he took pride in declaring his films slices of cake rather than slices of life, he also aimed for realism in his work. Realism in the sense Hitchcock meant it had nothing to do with logic and plausibility, things in which he had only the vaguest interest. Instead, he felt it vital to place the Brownian motion of his plots within a sturdy, immutable chamber. “I avoid out-and-out fantasy because people should be able to identify with the characters. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal.” More succinctly, Robert Boyle described the idea as “fairytales played against a realistic environment.” If one played an outrageous event in a convincingly ordinary setting, the emotional impact on the audience would be that much greater. Thus, while one could drive a horse and cart through some of the holes in Hitchcock plots, the mise-en-scènes of those films are remarkably detailed.

  Fittingly, the pedant’s gaze seemed to reach new heights on Rear Window. In creating the right set, he instructed his team to scan Greenwich Village for granular visual details. Doc Erickson, the production manager, was charged with fulfilling Hitchcock’s wish for the neighborhood to be thoroughly photographed. Research images were taken of numerous apartments, and several courtyards were captured at different times of day, in different light, from different angles, and at different points of the compass. For the moment in the film when Lisa has an indulgent meal of lobster and champagne delivered to Jeff’s ratty apartment from the 21 Club, Hitchcock insisted on sourcing a wine bucket, two dinner plates, and six napkins from the restaurant, as well as a waiter’s uniform to ensure that the fabulous implausibility of the scene was accurate in every material detail. It wasn’t only Hitchcock’s eyes that needed to be satisfied. The sounds of Greenwich Village traffic and street life had to be recorded, this before Hitchcock had taken the decision for the camera to remain within Jeff’s apartment for the entire film. The older Hitchcock got, the more interested he became in perfecting such details. A few years later, in the preproduction stage for Vertigo, that other exceptional film about obsessive watching, he had the film’s art director, Henry Bumstead, research the apartments of single, retired police officers in the San Francisco Bay Area to get an acceptable model for Scottie’s home. On Hitchcock’s instruction, Herbert Coleman commissioned the portrait of Carlotta Valdes, a prop used early in the film. Coleman had to engage artists in Italy, England, and the United States before he found one to meet the boss’s expectations. Coleman wrote to Paramount’s point man in Rome with very specific feedback on one iteration of the portrait, including the need to “eliminate the blemishes on the girl’s skin below the neck” as well as a vein that was visible on her wrist. The Hitchcockian attention to detail perhaps reached its peak during postproduction for Frenzy when the director requested that a member of his team take a trip to the Coburg Hotel, one of the film’s settings, and record the noise of its elevator in operation, lest any erroneous whirring and clunking make its way onto the soundtrack.

  Hitchcock obsessed over such minutiae because it brought him sensory satisfaction, just as much as having the right colors and costumes. In this sense, his assertion that his films were made to please his audience was false; observing and capturing the facts of the world, then reordering them in a configuration of his choosing, was an ineffable pleasure of which he never tired.

  A portion of Hitchcock’s audience, however, shares his obsessiveness. They pore over Hitchcock films in the way art historians look at Renaissance paintings, with the certainty that nothing incidental is contained within the frame. Writing in the Village Voice in 1960, Andrew Sarris recommended his readers watch Psycho three times: first, to be thrilled and shocked; second, to enjoy the humor; third, to drink in “the hidden meanings and symbols.” To Hitchcock watchers, as dedicated to his films as Jeff is to the tableaus of life beyond his apartment window, there is bounteous significance in everything: staircases, light bulbs, milk, glasses, parallel lines, eggs, birds, brandy, water, hats, basements, shoes, doors, hands, musical instruments. No other filmmaker receives quite such close viewing. Before he published his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock in 1976, Donald Spoto had watched Vertigo twenty-seven times—this when Hitchcock had removed the film from circulation and it was therefore exceedingly difficult to obtain—and still found he had more to learn about it. In 2005, the scholar Michael Walker published Hitchcock’s Motifs, an academic study of more than four hundred pages devoted to decoding the significance of objects, images, character types, and narrative patterns within the Hitchcock universe. The book has plentiful sharp insights and reminders that Hitchcock did indeed attach symbolic meaning to many details. But Walker advises caution. Paraphrasing Sigmund Freud, he concedes that “sometimes a corpse is just a corpse.”

  D. A. Miller writes of his experiences watching Hitchcock films in the way others might of staring into the flames of a fire, high on peyote. After years of repeated and intense viewing of Hitchcock, Miller had an epiphany when he found himself watching Strangers on a Train very late at night in a “semi-unconscious mode of viewing,” seeing all sorts of hidden threads in Hitchcock’s tapestry. In this state, he stops paying attention to the foreground that usually grabs an audience’s attention, and instead fixates on background details, what we might label “deep Hitchcock.” Even continuity errors—a boom mic briefly in the corner of a shot, a coffee cup in a marginally altered position—seem rich in meaning; they form extra layers of “mistake, confusion, and nonsense that permeates Hitchcockian cinema.” This is what Miller calls being “the too-close viewer,” a phenomenon that fortifies the experience of watching Hitchcock but also leads one down a rabbit hole of obsession, confusion, and self-doubt of the type traveled by Jeff and Hitchcock’s other neurotic watchers. Like Iris in The Lady Vanishes, Miller sometimes asks himself, “Do I see what I think I see, what the others say isn’t there?”

  Among the hidden minutiae that Miller upturned in his free-frame scouring are brief appearances that Hitchcock made in his films, other than the famous cameos. If one looks very closely at the early scenes of Strangers on a Train, one can see that Guy is reading a copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Fireside Book of Suspense; a few minutes later, Bruno’s feet can be seen resting on Suspense Stories, another of Hitchcock’s anthologies. It’s an eminently Hitchcockian touch: a tiny self-referential in-joke—but also a wink to future generations, like a wad of chewing gum left on the underside of a school desk, or graffiti scribbled beneath a layer of wallpaper.

  Peter Bogdanovich believes the academic scrutiny of Hitchcock’s oeuvre “amused him, and delighted him in a certain way,” though it sometimes left him scratching his head. In the earl
y 1970s, the eldest of Hitchcock’s three granddaughters, Mary, took a college class on his films in which the tutor stressed the vital importance of the number seven to the thematic coherence of Hitchcock, a notion that meant nothing to the filmmaker himself. Mary asked for her grandfather’s help on an assignment about the style and substance of his work. She got a C.

  Hitchcock knew the power one could command by looking—and by denying others the opportunity to look. In his old age, the rights to five of his films returned to him, including Rear Window and Vertigo. Never voicing his reasons, he withdrew these movies from public circulation. In the seventies, academics and administrators from grand institutions asked to have prints of the films, for scholarly use only. Most times, Hitchcock refused, without explanation. Perhaps he sensed that depriving the world of his masterpieces while he lived would ensure that their fame continued after his death. Three years after Hitchcock’s passing, both Rear Window and Vertigo were re-released by the Hitchcock estate, and subsequently subjected to vital restoration work. Thirteen years later, Vertigo was re-released in cinemas across the US and the UK. The reviews back in 1958 had been lukewarm, at best; now they were rapturous. In 2012, Vertigo was named the best film ever made by a poll in Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, knocking Citizen Kane off its perch for the first time in fifty years.

  Yet it is Rear Window that speaks most eloquently to the twenty-first century. Hitchcock had an instinctive appreciation for the sleight-of-hand trick that cinema plays on us, zooming in on the lives of others while simultaneously reinforcing the solitude of watching. “Our lives are lonely but not private,” is how Raymond Durgnat boiled down the fundamental message of Rear Window. That seems truer now than ever before. As we observe Jeff gazing across his courtyard, we could replace the glass pane of his window with the black mirror of an iPhone, his sleep-deprived eyes peering into each one of his neighbors’ lives through the aperture of social media. “We’ve become a race of peeping Toms,” says Stella to Jeff as she walks in on him prying on the neighbors. “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” A sound piece of advice, maybe, but one that Hitchcock doubted we’d ever follow.