The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  The severe discipline of his school days may have filled Hitchcock with fears and dark fixations, but he admitted that his time at St Ignatius College left more constructive legacies, too. Above all, he believed that a Jesuitical education had a profound influence on his ability to think, as it “shapes the mind into given reasoning powers.” Echoing James Joyce, who thought his Jesuit teachers taught him how “to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge,” Hitchcock said that St Ignatius College bequeathed him “organization, control, and, to some degree, analysis.” By “reasoning powers” and “analysis,” he was presumably referring to his enviable ability for thinking through a problem and learning lessons from it. The Jesuits’ reliance on casuistry—a method of moral reasoning in which one seeks to extract broad principles from specific cases—is apparent in Hitchcock’s theories on how to manipulate an audience. The death of Stevie in Sabotage, for example, taught Hitchcock that it is okay to murder a child in a film, but not when the audience is expecting the kid to be saved. His rules for creating suspense, developing character, using montage, and all the other tenets of the filmmaking gospel according to Alfred around which he built his public image had a casuistic stem.

  Biographers have pointed out that St Ignatius College would almost certainly have inculcated in Hitchcock the lengthy tale of Catholic persecution in England, which might have dampened his patriotism and intensified his fascination with torture, pain, and suffering. Equally, he would have been versed in the astonishing history of the Jesuits’ long mission to spread the word of the Bible, which led its members to faraway lands. Exotic tales of the Jesuit missionaries who made scientific breakthroughs, won favor in the court of the Chinese emperor, mapped the Mississippi, and trekked through the Amazon were precisely the kinds of stories that would have fired the imagination of a young Alfred Hitchcock daydreaming of a world away from Leytonstone and Limehouse. To be a part of the Jesuitical mission was to be part of an exciting adventure that sought to explode mysteries and open up new vistas. Simon Callow, the actor and author, was educated at Catholic schools in London during the fifties and sixties and envied those boys taught by the Jesuits. “They epitomized the romance of the priesthood which still held such a seductive power for the young and religiously inclined,” he says. “They were fearless explorers, both geographically and intellectually . . . fiercely intelligent, practical, effective, radical,” adjectives that could easily be used to describe Hitchcock and his approach to moviemaking.

  The sense of corporate belonging embraced an artistic sensibility, too. One Jesuit critic believes that Hitchcock’s connection with German expressionism did not come as a thunderbolt revelation after watching the films of Lang and Murnau, or from visiting Munich and Berlin at the zenith of the Weimar renaissance; rather, it flowed naturally from “the religious and educational atmosphere of St Ignatius College prior to World War One,” which was “heavily baroque and was congruent with the new wave of Expressionism.” One should add that English cultural life in the years of Hitchcock’s childhood and young adulthood was more informed by Catholicism than at any moment since the early seventeenth century, especially in London. In 1850, the Catholic hierarchy in England had been reestablished after an absence of nearly three hundred years, coinciding with a famous Royal Academy exhibition of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which shocked establishment critics with their unapologetic “Romishness.” The Pre-Raphaelites fed into a broad revival of Catholic influence in English art that rumbled throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discernible in painting, neo-Gothic architecture, and the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as in the numbers of prominent artistic figures who converted to the Catholic faith, among them G. K. Chesterton (one of Hitchcock’s favorite writers), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Aubrey Beardsley, and, on his deathbed, Oscar Wilde. In Hitchcock’s home city, this Anglo-Catholic influence, with its notes of ornamentation, theatricality, and otherworldliness, gradually asserted itself from the mid-nineteenth century, and flourished in locations such as the interiors of the Houses of Parliament (designed by the Catholic convert Augustus Pugin); Westminster Cathedral (the location of an attempted murder in Foreign Correspondent), completed in 1903; and the Brompton Oratory, the capital’s second-largest Catholic church, where Alfred and Alma were married in 1926.

  In the most superficial sense, many of Hitchcock’s films certainly have a look that could be described as Catholic. In the 1950s and ’60s, his use of color as symbol bordered on the liturgical, especially in the way he selected colors for his leading ladies’ outfits. He explained how he designed a color scheme for Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder that expressed her descent from vibrant soul of femininity to nervous and broken victim. She first appeared in “a bright red dress, her face in full natural makeup. From there, her clothes went to brick red, then to pale brown shades. Her face kept pace, becoming paler and paler until at the end her face and clothes were completely drab.” The following four films he made for Paramount in the 1950s—Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much—are similarly crammed with symbolic use of color. With the autumnal colors of Vermont, and Shirley MacLaine’s vivid purple outfit, there are shots in The Trouble with Harry that look like moving stained-glass windows. Several scenes in To Catch a Thief, bursting with the colors of the Côte d’Azur, put one in mind of Henri Matisse’s “cut-outs” from the 1940s and ’50s, which were inspired by the same region of France, and by Matisse’s reawakening to God and the Catholic Church.

  A partiality for the vibrant, the dramatic, and the baroque are features of a recognizably Catholic aesthetic, but they are only surface, the same visual elements of Catholicism harvested by Madonna for her videos and Dolce & Gabbana for their handbags. Gauging the depth of Hitchcock’s faith is a trickier matter. Unquestionably, he was, as boy and man, gripped by the ceremonial aspects of religion, the liturgies and sacraments, which appealed to each of his senses, as well as his adoration of the dramatic and the spectacular. Elements of this crop up in his film work; religious vestments, ceremonies, and places of worship appear in numerous Hitchcock movies that don’t have any explicit religious subject. In a neat bit of bookending, Hitchcock placed a prayer scene early in his first movie, The Pleasure Garden, and made the abduction of a bishop during a church service a pivotal moment in his final film, Family Plot, a movie about births, deaths, marriages, and knotted connections between this world and the next. In the intervening fifty-one films (and hundreds of television episodes), the appurtenances of religion are brought into the frame at the slightest opportunity, evidence of their prominence in Hitchcock’s experience of the world, and in the public’s perception of him. In his ill-fated television collaboration with Hitchcock, Richard Condon had crowbarred some nuns into the script because he thought it seemed suitably Hitchcockian. Hitchcock said he appreciated the gesture but that on this occasion the wimples and cinctures detracted from the story. In his youth, Hitchcock was an enthusiastic participant in Catholic ceremonies, to the extent that he became an acolyte, assisting with the service of the altar, despite not knowing the correct Latin responses to recite during Mass. It was the tactile, sensual drama of the ceremony that captivated him: the surplice, the candles, the bells, and the incense, all deployed before a captive audience in an atmospheric setting that he loved, like the cinema, the theater, the courtroom, and the dining room of a good restaurant. The Jesuit priest George Tyrrell would have understood. Tyrrell was raised Protestant but began a conversion to Catholicism in 1879 when he experienced Mass, among a mainly Irish congregation, at a Catholic church in London. Through the ragged theater of the ceremony, Tyrrell felt connected to the early Christians: “The sense of reality! Here was the old business, being carried on by the old firm, in the old ways; here was continuity, that took one back to the catacombs.” There’s something pleasingly Hitchcockian about this “sense of reality” that isn’t fastened
to the dry world of fact, but has the power to transport one through time and space.

  This is the identifiably Catholic idea that can be found in Hitchcock’s aesthetic sensibility: surface beauty is transcendental, a gateway to another dimension of experience. “Catholics live in an enchanted world,” explains Father Andrew Greeley in his description of the Catholic imagination, in which all objects—not just rosary beads and bottles of holy water—are sacramental, “a revelation of the presence of God.” Some of the most famous shots in Hitchcock’s films display objects that seem to be imbued with forces, good and evil, beyond the physical realm. Think of the moment in Notorious in which Hitchcock’s camera swoops down across a vast hallway to close in on the key Ingrid Bergman holds in her hand, or when Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant’s rogue in Suspicion) walks portentously upstairs with a magically luminescent glass of milk, carrying it as a young Hitchcock would have carried a votive candle in church. Strangers on a Train has enough possessed objects to fill the Lourdes Grotto: the two pairs of shoes that bring about Guy and Bruno’s chance meeting; the cigarette lighter that ties them together; the women’s glasses that arouse and enrage Bruno. In Psycho, it seems that everything from a stuffed owl to a scrap of paper bobbing in a toilet bowl hums with the supernatural.

  Hitchcock with a nun (the actress Carol Lynley) during the filming of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode “The Final Vow” (1962).

  Across the Hitchcock canon, various inanimate objects, such as scissors, eyeglasses, keys, and jewelry, crop up repeatedly, as though relics floating from one locale of the Hitchcock universe to the next, and all with the power to bring harmony or wreak havoc. Mrs. Danvers, the terrifying housekeeper in Rebecca, keeps the first Mrs. de Winter’s bedroom as a shrine, filled with her clothing, including underwear “made especially for her by the nuns at the convent of St Claire,” as though they were the Turin Shroud or fragments of the true cross. In The Ring, the bracelet Bob gifts to Mabel is a symbol of their illicit love—which Hitchcock agreed could be read as an allusion to original sin—that bores into Mabel’s conscience and that she attempts to conceal, just as other Hitchcock characters hide handcuffs that have been placed on them to restrain, punish, and shame. One might locate Hitchcock’s pre-adolescent encounters with the ferule as the start of his fascination with the artifacts of restraint and chastisement, especially ligatures and handcuffs, which he conceded had strong fetishistic properties. In The Lodger, Ivor Novello finds himself dangling from a bridge above the Thames, his cuffed hands above his head, both sexually prone and Christ-like as a baying crowd urges his mortal punishment for deviant crimes he has not committed. Like Bernini and his design of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Hitchcock stands in a long line of Catholic artists who relish blurring the lines between the sexual and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane. Yet this is another of Hitchcock’s preoccupations that speaks to our time perhaps more clearly than it did to his. In the early 1980s, when Donald Spoto published his theories about Hitchcock’s sadomasochism, it elicited twenty years of pushback by those who insisted that the Master had no such grubby fixations. In a post-Secretary, post–Fifty Shades of Grey world, where conversations about submission and domination are mainstream, Hitchcock’s handcuffs and humiliations seem less like one aberrant man’s twisted perversions and more like further evidence of his ability to point us to our future, with a nudge and a sly wink.

  The magical elements of Catholic teaching to which Hitchcock was drawn were defended fiercely by the Vatican in the years of Hitchcock’s creative life as a bulwark against modernity—a condition that Hitchcock not only grasped but embodied. In the fall of 1910, the very season in which Hitchcock began his education at St Ignatius College, Pope Pius X issued the “Oath Against Modernism,” an attempt to insulate the Catholic faith from the insistent rush of a changing world, the hyper-urban and individualistic place that Hitchcock took such delight in exploring and exposing. The oath wasn’t rescinded until July 1967, by which point his decline as a filmmaker was well advanced. Between those poles, Hitchcock found a way to fuse the two contradictory traditions of the magical and the modern. He had a fixation with technique and precision planning, but this was used to create a filmic world that slipped the grasp of science, technology, and rational thought. In its way, this mirrors an experience with which many Catholics of the twentieth century could identify in their daily lives: reconciling the dogma of their church and the spirituality of their faith with the secular world.

  When the Hitchcocks wed, Alma converted to Catholicism, just as William Hitchcock had converted to the faith when he married Alfred’s mother. When Pat arrived into the world, she was raised Catholic, too. As opposed to her father’s upbringing, it was not insisted that she confess her sins to her parents each night, but she did have a painting of the Virgin Mary above her bed. Her mother and father also ensured that she was a regular churchgoer and was confirmed in the faith. Among the lunches, production meetings, and sessions in the projection room, a space was cleared in Hitchcock’s diary to attend his granddaughters’ confirmation in December 1966. Five years later, Pat joined her daughter Mary on a trip to Europe, which included a private papal audience, a privilege Hitchcock had been granted as early as the summer of 1935. When Pat and Mary were announced before his Holiness Pope Paul VI, one of the papal guards began to hum the theme tune to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, suggesting that the flow of influence between Hitchcock and the Vatican wasn’t entirely one way.

  In an arm’s-length kind of way, Hitchcock kept in touch with his alma mater, too. A history of the school, published to celebrate its centenary in 1994, named Hitchcock as one of the school’s alumni who had “given greater glory to God by their life’s work.” It concedes that “his admiration for his old school was not unbounded” but also confirms that it was he who provided the lion’s share of funds for new buildings on the school site. He was similarly giving to Catholic causes in California, even though his attendance at Mass became fitful after a few years in America. He formed a close bond with the Jesuit priest Thomas Sullivan, whose various charitable endeavors Hitchcock supported. It was to Sullivan that he wrote in 1966 to decline a request to give a speech at a function, telling Sullivan that such events caused him great anxiety, likening it to the drain he felt from making a film: “I go through hell and get no pleasure at all from the fact that it succeeds. I’m only relieved that it wasn’t a complete failure.” Not a confession as such, but few people received such emotional honesty from the man who publicly claimed to feel nothing but soporific boredom on a production once the script was finished.

  Hitchcock’s knowledge of being a practicing Catholic is unequivocally present in I Confess, his most explicitly Catholic film, released in 1952. Not only is its protagonist a priest, but its plot depends on the detail of sacrament, a rare example of a Hollywood movie that shows its audience the priesthood from inside the Church. The action takes place in Quebec City, in which Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) hears the confession of his caretaker, Otto Keller (O. E. Hasse), who reveals that, while disguised as a priest, he has just killed a wealthy local man by the name of Villette, whose home Keller was attempting to burgle. In a characteristic twist, we soon learn that Villette was blackmailing Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of a high-profile politician, over a secret relationship she had with Logan before he took orders. When the police investigate the murder, Ruth confesses her past romance with Logan, while Keller plays innocent, knowing that the rules of the sacrament prohibit Logan from revealing what he has heard in confession. Logan is arrested and tried for Villette’s murder but refuses to reveal the truth, honoring spiritual authorities over civil ones. By a whisker, he avoids a guilty verdict, to the fury of the public. Racked with guilt, Keller’s wife runs to Logan to apologize. In desperation, Keller shoots her and runs away, at which point the police fathom their mistake. In a final scene, Keller is killed by a police officer’s gunfire, and is cradled by Logan who reads him his last rites.
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br />   I Confess is not in the first rank of Hitchcock movies, but it treats its subject with intelligence; the complex character dynamics belie the idea that Hitchcock films relegate characterization to playful afterthought. Hitchcock himself, however, was not a fan. Dissatisfaction with casting, lack of humor, frustrations with Clift, and underwhelming box-office takings, led him to speak coolly of the film in later years. He was also frustrated that people identified the central premise of the movie—Logan’s refusal to divulge what Keller tells him in confession—as the latest example of Hitchcock’s war against narrative plausibility. Not only does the film reflect a truth about the sacredness of sacrament, it is rooted in the real-world experience of many Catholics of the time who felt the push and pull of competing bases of truth. The tussle between the rule of law and the rule of God is one that was particularly pertinent to the film’s setting—Quebec of the 1950s—which was still a place where “the Holy Church cherished quotidian control over the prospects of men,” to quote one Canadian writer who lived through the period.

  The two other Hitchcock films in which the practice of Catholicism plays an explicit part likewise sprang from factual events, and speak to moments when the Catholic faith conflicts with the secular institutions of the modern world. The Wrong Man is based on the true story of a man who clings to his Catholicism when the law convicts him of a crime he has not committed; Juno and the Paycock is set amid the Irish Civil War, when the old religion provides succor to those caught up in the battles of nationalism and imperialism. At the end of the latter film, Juno, played by Sara Allgood, pleads with statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary to help her rise above the violence that has torn her family apart. In his own pit of despair, Manny Balestrero clutches rosary beads and prays before a portrait of Jesus in The Wrong Man. Though Hitchcock expressed regret that his editing might imply that Manny’s eventual exculpation resulted from his prayers—a trill that deviated from the strict recitation of fact that had been the director’s stated aim—it is the ritualistic adherence to Catholicism that provides a mystical counterpoint to the equally proscriptive rituals of the criminal justice system. The rule of law is meant to be an objective, rational process, but its capriciousness bewilders Manny and crushes Rose, whose faith in law and God cracks. She tells her husband, “No matter what you do they’ve got it fixed so that it goes against you. No matter how innocent you are or how hard you try, they’ll find you guilty.” She could be talking about policemen or priests. But Manny’s mother, an older woman from the old country, implores her son to pray for strength. She has faith that absolution is always available from a priest in the confessional. New York City cops can’t be relied on in the same way.