What Hitchcock whispered in his own prayers, or what sins he might have felt moved to confess, is unknown. He spoke publicly about his Catholic background but rarely gave any indication as to the precise nature of his beliefs. One of the many areas in which he surprised and disappointed André Bazin when they met was the director’s inability to unpick what Bazin thought were the obviously Catholic themes of his films: guilt, shame, penitence, and vengeance. Bazin floated the idea that the Hitchcock universe was governed by a Jansenist God. “What’s a Jansenist?” asked Hitchcock. The answer is a Catholic who subscribes to the austere ideas of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen, who focused on original sin, predestination, and the depravities of the flesh. Jansenism thrived in Ireland after the famines of the mid-nineteenth century, communicating a disgust for bodily functions and stressing the need to repress sexual urges. One can see why Bazin detected a strain of Jansen in Hitchcock. Bad things almost always befall the unchaste and immodest in his movies, and in his own life he went out of his way to claim—unconvincingly—that away from filmmaking he had no interest in sex, and he boasted about the white, gleaming cleanliness of his home bathroom, which looked perpetually unused. As a matter of routine, he would use paper towels to dry a sink once he had washed his hands, lest any trace of his body be left in that place of unmentionable activities. For similar reasons, he would always lift his feet off the floor if he were forced to use a public toilet cubicle. Embarrassment about bodily functions is far from a Jansenist preserve, however, and, as Patrick McGilligan has pointed out, it could as easily be labeled an English pathology, the flip side of a scatological sense of humor, something Hitchcock also possessed. In any event, Jansenist severity only goes so far in Hitchcock, who spent at least as much of his life celebrating fleshly indulgences as he did denying them; he was a voluptuary and an aesthete, the wearer of silk pajamas and tailored suits, not burlap and hair shirts.
About the closest Hitchcock ever got to expressing his own sense of faith was in a brief interview with the St Ignatius College magazine in the 1970s. When asked whether he was religious, Hitchcock suggested that though he considered himself a Catholic, he was not necessarily a man of God. “[A] claim to be religious rests entirely on your own conscience, whether you believe or not. A Catholic attitude was indoctrinated into me. After all, I was born a Catholic, I went to a Catholic school, and I now have a conscience with lots of trials over belief.” Considering that the interviewer was a teenage schoolboy, it’s forgivable that this enticing morsel was not pursued; the follow-up question was about Hitchcock’s love of maps.
What did he mean by “trials over belief”? Did he lie awake at night plagued by worries for his eternal soul? Did he question how God could exist in a world of such arbitrary injustice and pervasive cruelty, that subtext of his darkest films? Were the images of violence and sadism that he projected from his mind onto our screens a reflection of his belief in man’s inherent evil? Could he find the strength to admit to his priest things about himself that he said he found impossible to tell a psychiatrist, a friend, Alma, or even himself?
The definitive answers to those questions went with Hitchcock’s ashes into the Pacific Ocean, and perhaps into a realm beyond our own. But many of those who worked with him—in particular, his writers—believe that Hitchcock, consciously or not, used his films as a means of “concocting a moral vision of the universe,” one in which evil doers are exposed and punished, and almost everyone is in need of expiation for something. In a gloomy frame of mind in old age, he told an interviewer that “today to a great extent evil has spread, every little town has had its share of evil,” although why that had happened or when it started, he didn’t say. In this world of ever-present wrongdoing, guilt can appear to be contagious, passed from one sinner to the next as easily as the common cold. “Transference of guilt” is what some critics call it, and it’s supposedly observable in manifold places: in Dial M for Murder and Blackmail, when the female protagonists inadvertently kill men who are attacking them; in Shadow of a Doubt, when young Charlie absorbs the guilt of Uncle Charlie, her “twin”; in Strangers on a Train, when Bruno commits a horrific crime that appalls Guy but that he has secretly willed. There are even readings of North by Northwest that state the hellish absurdity into which Roger Thornhill falls is cosmic payback for his stealing a cab in the opening scene.
This would be to mistake harlequinade irony for theological severity. Ambiguity in all things was Hitchcock’s preferred way of looking at the world, but his films don’t equate the violence of rape and murder with the violence of self-defense, nor small acts of selfishness with psychopathic thuggery and unpleasant thoughts with unpleasant acts. The feeling of guilt sloshes around the Hitchcock universe; it envelops his characters the way the swamp claims Marion Crane’s car—slowly, inexorably, completely. Yet this is because the human conscience is a punishing taskmaster, especially among the goodhearted and the God-fearing. It’s Hitchcock’s supreme joke that the men and women most burdened by their conscience tend to be those with the least to feel guilty about. Perhaps that’s how he felt about himself.
Whether it’s Barry Kane’s struggle to maintain his freedom and his faith in democracy in Saboteur, Dr. Petersen’s attempt to find the exonerating truth about the man she loves in Spellbound, or Iris’s attempt to rediscover the lost memories that will save Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock created testing rituals that his characters must endure in order to come out strengthened and absolved, their good names intact. Seen in this light, the master of modernism becomes the designer of medieval ordeals, tales of chivalric struggle from a pre-Reformation world. In Hitchcock’s land of birth, that tradition is dominated by the legend of Camelot and the Round Table; the deadly love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, swaddled in lust, deceit, guilt, shame, and vengeance, would have been terrific source material for a Hitchcock thriller. According to the critic Father Neil Hurley, such travails are the root of Jesuit spirituality, too. St Ignatius adhered to “the principle that a study of moral disease was a step toward health and happiness,” a notion that Hurley also sees at work in films such as Marnie and The Birds, in which the characters played by Tippi Hedren are put through the wringer in order to deal with the moral flaws that have led them to dissipation and unhappiness. “The soul of man prevails,” notes Hurley of Hitchcock’s films, “but only when moral struggle is present. Hope is there, but it must be activated by human initiative.”
Perhaps, then, Hitchcock’s religious background helped him develop the narrative structure for his picaresque adventure stories. Yet it’s not clear whether Hitchcock felt that the ordeals he put his characters through were morally just. In the Tippi Hedren films, the audience is always meant to be on her side, and her transgressions do not warrant the punishments that befall her, nearly killed by birds in one case; tormented, blackmailed, raped, and suicidal in the other. In Psycho, Marion realizes the moral responsibility she has to hand back the money she has stolen—at which point she’s knifed to death. Hitchcock conceded that one could discern allusions to original sin throughout his filmography. But one might say that his films engage with the idea of original sin by protesting the injustice of the concept rather than endorsing its reality. The burdens carried by his heroes and heroines are given to them unfairly, sometimes arbitrarily; the fatiguing work of shedding that weight of paranoia, guilt, and shame is a waking nightmare.
To judge him by his films, Hitchcock was a man who believed in such things as good and evil, and whose mind had been captivated by the rituals and iconography of Catholicism. Yet God flits in and out of his movies as though communicating through a weak AM radio signal, as it seems to have done in his personal life. Many of Hitchcock’s heroes ultimately survive because they act as individuals—albeit ones who realize that individualism won’t save the day. It is by letting Daisy into his cell of internal anguish that the Lodger is saved from ruin; Jeff in Rear Window finds justice and happiness by putting his trust
in Lisa; Michael’s noble mission in Torn Curtain is completed only once he accepts Sarah’s undying love. Hitchcock’s films suggest that the world is a baffling place, filthy and dangerous. People aren’t always who they appear to be; they can betray us and hurt us, destroy us, if they so wish. Yet they’re all we have. The best we can do is to be brave and reach out to them—something Hitchcock found very hard to do but had, sometimes, been rewarded richly for doing so, his marriage to Alma being the definitive case in point.
Perhaps he would have found sense in Oscar Wilde’s ideas on the subject. After his public ruination, Wilde wrote that sin and suffering were “beautiful, holy things” because they allowed one to reach within oneself to begin the painful, arduous process of spiritual growth, which in turn allowed one to form closer bonds with one’s fellow man. Though Wilde said this was an act of self-realization, not dependent on an unseen deity, he recognized the importance of Catholic materiality—“what one can touch, and look at”—in finding spiritual peace. He imagined “an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine.” With Hitchcock’s strident individualism and his “trials of belief,” allied with his love of routine, spectacle, and performance, perhaps beautifully ritualized agnosticism was a religious idea to which he could have turned. God, in the end, was to be found only in the inexplicable mysteries of each human heart.
For fifty years, Hitchcock was the god of the universe he brought to life on film. At times, he was a beneficent giver of love and the hope of rebirth. At others, he threw down Old Testament punishments of plagues and avenging angels. No matter which iteration of the supreme creator he assumed, the mortality of his subjects was never in doubt. Nobody on planet Hitchcock was more than one wrinkle of fate away from the end—nobody, that is, except for the majestic instigator himself, who popped up for a brief moment in each film, seemingly immutable and everlasting.
In the 1970s, that began to change. In a publicity stunt for Frenzy, Hitchcock arranged for a life-size mannequin of himself to be sailed down the Thames, a floating corpse to signal the return of the “boy director” as he still liked to call himself. Four years later, the distributers of Family Plot attempted to compensate for the movie’s lack of bankable stars by putting Hitchcock’s face on the promotional posters. At the bottom of the frame, his disembodied head appears in a crystal ball, winking at us in reference to the final shot of the movie, but also, it seems, a cheeky acknowledgment of both his age and his apparent omnipotence—even from the next world he would be playing tricks on us. His cameo in the movie was equally playful, but more explicit, about his advancing years: in that famous silhouette, he is seen remonstrating with someone behind a door marked “Registrar of Births and Deaths.”
These jokes aside, Hitchcock labored in the final stretch. The glee he took in murder was counterbalanced by a genuine terror of death. He had attempted to perfect living by approaching it as art and craft; dying had no stimulating form or soothing routine. He searched for a consolatory epilogue; the final page gave him nothing beyond “THE END.”
In Donald Spoto’s biography, he says Hitchcock, oscillating between terror and anger in his last days, told various people that he had cut his ties with the Church and would not receive absolution. Patrick McGilligan reports it differently, writing that Father Thomas Sullivan “insisted on coming to Bellagio Road once a week to say Mass for him and Alma,” making it sound as though Hitchcock’s final connection with Catholicism had more to do with his old-fashioned English manners, and his fear of confrontation with an authority figure, rather than a sincere desire for closer communion with God.
Mark Henninger, a young priest who accompanied Sullivan on many of his visits in Hitchcock’s last few weeks, suggests that it was in fact Hitchcock who requested their attendance. Henninger never knew the precise reasons why Hitchcock wanted the Church back in his life after so many years away from it, and he suspects it may not have been entirely clear to Hitchcock either. “But something whispered in his heart, and the visits answered a profound human desire, a real human need.”
Hitchcock in a graveyard with Bruce Dern during the filming of Family Plot.
On Henninger’s first visit with Sullivan, they found Hitchcock dressed in black pajamas, asleep in a living room chair. Fatigue, old age, and ill-health hadn’t eradicated his sense of humor. “Hitch,” Sullivan said as Hitchcock came to, “this is Mark Henninger, a young priest from Cleveland.” Looking up, a sleepy Hitchcock replied, “Cleveland? Disgraceful!” During Mass, it became apparent that the old ways of his religion hadn’t left him, either; he gave his responses in Latin, as he would have done as a boy, rather than in English as had been the practice since Vatican II. “But the most remarkable sight,” says Henninger, “was that after receiving communion, he silently cried, tears rolling down his huge cheeks.” Whether moved by the grace of God, fear of His judgment, fear of the unknown, or simply sadness at the nearness of death, Henninger couldn’t say.
When Hitchcock died, Alma struggled to comprehend the loss and spent the remaining two years of her life believing he was still with them. In one sense, she was right. The further we get from the twentieth century, the more importance to its story Hitchcock assumes. His variegated legacies, buttressed by his phenomenal talent and unconventional personality, make him a codex of his times, usually complex, often troubling, but always vital. Not long before he passed, he was asked by an interviewer for his plans for the future. More of the same, he said; years and years more Hitchcock. “I have lots of ideas . . . and something always comes up, some new story. . . . I warn you, I mean to go on forever!”
* Coincidentally, the male lead in Family Plot is also a disgruntled cab driver, George Lumley, played by Bruce Dern.
Acknowledgments
I owe special thanks to the Alfred J. Hitchcock Trust for kindly allowing me to reproduce excerpts from various sources. Numerous other estates have provided similar cooperation, and I am grateful to them all.
In conducting my research, I was helped by many people and institutions: Lisa Hilton and the extremely welcoming staff at the Margaret Herrick Library; Brendan Coates at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Oral History Projects department; JC Johnson and his colleagues at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University; the Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA; Terre Heydari at the DeGloyer Library, Southern Methodist University; Gaila Sims at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Susan Krueger at the Wisconsin Historical Research Society; the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, and the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library; the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University; the Butler Library at Columbia University; the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford; Victoria Bennett and colleagues at the British Film Institute; and all the staff at the magnificent British Library.
I am indebted to various Hitchcock scholars whose work has informed my own in many ways. These include—but are not limited to—Charles Barr, Jane Sloan, Sidney Gottlieb, John Russell Taylor, Donald Spoto, Dan Auiler, Tania Modleski, and Peter Conrad. Patrick McGilligan also belongs to this group, and I owe him extra thanks for kindly assisting me in my research, as did Sue Jones, Tabitha Machin, David Freeman, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Peter Bogdanovich, Tim Kirby, William Devane, Mariette Hartley, Bernard Cribbins, Nick Wright, Cornelia Parker, Gus Van Sant, Donna Ranieri, Andrew Bainbridge, Sophie Sweet, and Chris Levy.
Thanks to Nancy Palmquist and everybody at W. W. Norton, but especially my editor John Glusman, and Helen Thomaides who has been a model of efficiency and forbearance in fielding my endless, annoying queries. The guidance and assistance of Melissa Flamson and Janet Woods at With Permission was invaluable, while Chris Parris-Lamb was, as always, a great source of advice and encouragement. Thanks also to Sarah Bolling and the rest
of the Gernert Company.
The unfailing patience and support of my family was, and is, much needed and cherished.
Alfred Hitchcock Filmography
English-language feature films directed solely by Alfred Hitchcock. There is some debate about the dating of Hitchcock’s earliest films; the dates below give the year of the first UK screening for films up to 1939, and the first US screening of all subsequent films, following Hitchcock’s move to Hollywood.
The Pleasure Garden (1926)
The Mountain Eagle (1926)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926)
Downhill (1927)
Easy Virtue (1927)
The Ring (1927)
The Farmer’s Wife (1928)
Champagne (1928)
The Manxman (1929)
Blackmail (1929)
Juno and the Paycock (1930)
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 32