The film was shot in a glittering, harsh black and white by James Wong Howe and looked like the hide of a crocodile in the moonlight. Howe took advantage of fast film stocks just emerging to work on the city streets at night—real night instead of the offset fakery of day for night, where humans throw shadows. The film was proudly nasty, and the cross-talk manipulations were the lemon juice on the oyster. There are still people who run those dialogue routines; they have become treasured models for young cynics and the Entourage crowd. It was one thing for Burt to be that grim. He had always had that side, and you can see it in Criss Cross (1949), Apache, and From Here to Eternity, even if he had just had huge success as a mainstream Wyatt Earp in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957).
It was Tony Curtis who got under people’s skin. Curtis was what he himself would call an “American prince,” a handsome kid with a lady-killer’s smile and an aptitude for slick talk. He had been one of the last generation groomed for old-fashioned stardom (at Universal, where Rock Hudson was a fellow student), trained to fence, dance, shoot a gun, ride a horse, wear a costume, carry a line, and kiss the girl tastefully. He had made a long line of foolish adventures that had done very well: The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951), Son of Ali Baba (1952), Houdini (1953), The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), The Purple Mask (1955).
In 1951 he had married Janet Leigh in what the American public regarded as a picture-book union and a model of happiness, because that’s how it was presented in the magazines that still ran a lot of Hollywood coverage, including intimate home pix. (In fact, Universal had offered Curtis a bonus of $30,000 if he would marry another studio player, Piper Laurie.) Curtis was ambitious—has there ever been a face in which that is so clear? He relished Sidney Falco and his spiteful dialogue. But Mackendrick was a perfectionist who liked to get everything right, and Lancaster soon grew angry at the delays. There was a famous scene at Hunsecker’s table at the “21” Club. Who should sit where to play the scabrous talk? Mackendrick wanted a move.
Burt and Sandy started arguing about it [wrote Curtis]. Sandy raised his voice to Burt, and then Burt went apeshit. He got up and pushed the table over, sending all the plates and glasses and food crashing to the floor. Then he raised his fist to hit Sandy. Sandy put his hands up to defend himself, but he didn’t back down. He was a strong man, and he wasn’t going to take any nonsense from anyone, even Burt. Burt took a deep breath, everybody calmed down, and we did it Sandy’s way.
But Sweet Smell was only half a film. The setup between J.J. and Sidney is as intoxicating as it was anathema to the large audience. But once J.J.’s sister gets a hold on the plot and we have to deal with Martin Milner’s jazz guitarist who has drugs planted on him, we are into pallid melodrama. The look of the streets and the clubs in the film cry out for wilder jazz men—Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Monk, then at their prime—but all we get is the genteel salon jazz of the Chico Hamilton Quintet (with a lot of white guys in the band looking like business majors). The second half of the script was never right. There is a possibility in there that J.J. and Sidney could become a monstrous father-and-son pair—or could it even be lovers?—talkers who feed on their own poisonous exchanges.
Today, cineastes treasure In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly, The Night of the Hunter, and Sweet Smell of Success. Those films stand for the 1950s more effectively than such forgotten hits as The Robe (1953), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), or Peyton Place (1957). But they made no money; they gathered not a single Oscar nomination. They had central characters beyond sympathy and ready for fear and loathing, and not one of the films had a hopeful thing to say about the world or America. They were all black and white as color was taking over, yet Bogart, Mitchum, Lancaster, and Curtis were stars of the age, taking considerable risks. Actors, directors, and small companies felt the need to escape rigid habits of film material that was succumbing to the market and television anyway. Nobody on TV then dared talk like Sidney Falco. Winchell himself said the picture was shocking. Yet few of these elements of danger are to be found today in a Hollywood that cheerfully dismisses the 1950s as being old hat.
In the 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock found himself—though, in the end, his life was not comfortable. Whether in London or Los Angeles, he noticed just one thing: movie. He would become the emblem and the godfather of that single-minded attitude, but finally his work leaves us wondering how balanced or humane the obsession could be.
Hitchcock was born in East London in 1899, the son of a fruit merchant. As a youth he was a draftsman, and he got into pictures initially by designing titles. For ever afterward, he envisaged his films in advance and created elaborate storyboards that contained precise camera angles and length of shot. He liked to have the film in his head as a construct, a piece of suspense for us but not for him, and a work of celluloid fragments—or art, if you want to use that word. In 1926, as he began to direct, he married Alma Reville, an experienced story girl and editor, and she worked closely with him for decades.
He had a period studying in Germany, and in the following years a policeman’s eye could see him lifting details from Fritz Lang especially. But after the coming of sound, Hitch made a series of thrillers that were successful at the box office: Blackmail (1929), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). His representation in London was the Myron Selznick Agency, and thus he was hired by David Selznick in 1939 and brought to Hollywood. This was not appreciated in the British industry, where the patriotic call of war service beckoned. I suspect Hitch hardly noticed that reaction. When he arrived at the Selznick studio he was immediately given a sequence from the Gone With the Wind in progress to critique. He delivered an analysis so precise and smart it stupefied Selznick.
The boss and the director never got on, no matter that on their first project together, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1940), Selznick won the Best Picture Oscar. Hitch was nominated as director, too—he would be nominated five times, but never win that prize. Rebecca had been a power struggle between producer and director. Hitchcock’s advance vision of the film clashed with Selznick’s habit of having extensive coverage shot, the editing of which he could mull over as endlessly as he had rewritten the script. Hitchcock had come to America for the more sophisticated studio equipment, the stars, and the chance of greater success, but he had never guessed he would find such an indecisive dictator as his boss.
Still, Rebecca had something for both parties: it is a reasonable adaptation of the novel (an imperative with Selznick); it is a searching portrait of a woman (the Joan Fontaine with whom Selznick was romantically involved); plus it was a hit that won the Oscar. For Hitchcock it was a study in guilt and power in which he could pressure the woman, the unnamed “I,” to the point of near breakdown. He found the character of Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) and made a repressed demon of her. (She is his first baleful mother figure.) And he learned how expressive the beautiful sets in Hollywood could be, and how a sequence could be worked out in terms of décor and movement. The scenes in Rebecca’s old bedroom, where Mrs. Danvers goes into dark raptures over her dead mistress’s clothes, are the most sumptuous and perverse things Hitchcock had yet shot. They are a clue to his taste for voyeurism and necrophilia, an urge that would culminate in James Stewart’s treatment of Kim Novak in Vertigo and the camera’s hounding of Janet Leigh in Psycho.
In the 1940s, Hitch was still finding himself. There are several foolish films, such as Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945; he was nominated for both), the latter a testament to Selznick’s forlorn adoption of psychoanalysis to save him from his greatest faults. Rope is a clumsy, portentous film, because of the laborious ten-minute-take experiment that hijacked the innate cutter. For some reason, as if waking up to a technological dream, Hitch suddenly thought of letting the camera run, a thing for which he had little talent. On the other hand, in 1946 he made his first masterpiece, Notorious—he was freed on it because Selznick was mercifully preoccupied with the extra
vagant Duel in the Sun and his infatuation with Jennifer Jones. Notorious was a process of discovery: a wounded woman (Ingrid Bergman), a cold hero (Cary Grant), an attractive villain (Claude Rains)—this is Hitch’s frequent triangulation finding life and form.
The next major film was Strangers on a Train (1951), from Patricia Highsmith’s novel. It is a cunning suspense plot, of course, but what distinguishes it is the interplay between a blank hero (Farley Granger) and a mad yet irresistible ideas man, Bruno Anthony (played by Robert Walker). There is also a murder in the film that our secret desire wants to have accomplished and where Hitch actually delivers the corpse as a gift, into our laps (without 3D). No one before or since had guessed as much as Hitchcock about the dynamic but enslaved respect we feel for the screen.
If anything inspired him next it was finding Grace Kelly. Hitch had always liked cool blondes, but he enjoyed looking at all women, and putting them under a plot pressure that required his rapturous gaze. After Dial M for Murder (1954), a complicated play adapted for a fussy film, he put Kelly in Rear Window (1954). It is one of his great moments and it may be the cinema’s first inadvertent lesson in its own nature delivered as big box office.
L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart) is a press photographer with a badly broken leg, so he’s up to his thigh in a plaster cast, laid up in his New York apartment. With nothing else to do, he starts to spy on his neighbors in the courtyard he can see. He has his own telephoto lenses to give him close-ups. The other windows are like screens he can watch. As he studies them, he observes an unhappy marriage across the way, but then the wife is gone and the husband, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr, but white-haired and looking like David Selznick!), is curiously alone.
In the Cornell Woolrich story that inspired the film, the Jeff figure has no girlfriend. But in the movie, he has Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly), a fashion model who spreads seductive company, smart chat, gourmet food, and flirt wherever she goes. Nothing happens sexually—this is 1954, and if they had been making love, Jeffries wouldn’t have noticed Thorwald—but Lisa helps Jeff pursue his theory, the story he applies to one of the screens: that Thorwald may have murdered his wife. Then Lisa goes over to the empty apartment to look for the wife’s wedding ring (Lisa is hot to marry Jeff)—until here comes Thorwald returning home! Can you bear it? I won’t say what happens next.
Rear Window is a gripping suspense story, an amusing romance, a showcase for its stars, and a lesson on looking at screens, trying to fathom their stories and asking yourself whether you’re involved with the story or simply a spectator without identity or responsibility—because you’re in the dark. It’s only at the end of the film that Thorwald looks at the camera, and us, and realizes what is happening. The balance of entertainment and analysis is unrivaled, and it’s why I place Rear Window as the essential Hitchcock film. (Not even nominated for Best Picture; On the Waterfront won. Three Coins in the Fountain and The Caine Mutiny were also nominated.)
Hitchcock moved on with To Catch a Thief (1955), a holiday thriller in the South of France, with Kelly and Cary Grant, the puzzle of choosing a leg or a breast, and the dire mishap by which the actress met her prince and we lost a comedienne who might have rivaled Carole Lombard. Hitch never got over that loss, though it was while in France that he met some writers from Cahiers du Cinéma for the first time. He did The Trouble with Harry (1955), a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (with Doris Day singing “Que Sera, Sera”) and The Wrong Man (1956), a somber, neglected warning of a film in which Henry Fonda plays a man falsely accused of a crime. He is vindicated, but only as his wife has a breakdown. Hitchcock dealt in anxiety and stress because he knew how much there was to be afraid of in life.
Vera Miles plays that broken wife and does a good job. The story is that Hitch would have cast her in Vertigo if she had not been pregnant. I suspect he would have preferred Grace Kelly if she had quit Monaco. In the end, he cast Kim Novak, and a case can be made that the complexity of the part and its two aspects was a little beyond her—but maybe that is what makes her so touching.
In San Francisco, “Scottie” Ferguson (Stewart again) is a police detective forced to retire because of disabling vertigo. Of course, he should leave the city, which is not made to accommodate a fear of heights. But an old school friend, Gavin Elster (seeming very English), hires Scottie to watch his wife, Madeleine; Gavin thinks she may be going mad. There is then a pursuit sequence through the city, one of the most sustained and satisfying displays of voyeurism rewarded in film history, because by the time Scottie actually speaks to Madeleine, he is in love with her. So are we.
Madeleine is troubled—or she acts that way. But Scottie cannot save her. He is there, once more afflicted by vertigo, when she kills herself, falling from a mission tower. Scottie is criticized at the inquest. He has a breakdown. He is a wreck. And then one day, walking on the streets of San Francisco, he sees another woman, Judy (Novak again), a coarse redhead where Madeleine was a serene blonde. He is drawn to her because he sees a way of remaking her as Madeleine (or was it Grace?).
Vertigo is an uncomfortable, creepy séance, a test of credibility, and Hitchcock’s big box office flop from the 1950s. The story relies on unlikely events, and is driven by Gavin’s malignant cruelty, without his character ever being explored. It is better read as a troubled dream: If we know Judy is Novak, why can’t Scottie see it? Reverie explains the foggy glow of San Francisco, the somnambulism of Madeleine, and the increasing frenzy in Scottie, who is another of Hitch’s unwholesome heroes. But the most fascinating thing about Vertigo is its commentary on the fantasy through which a director, or an audience, brings a filmed woman to life in their minds. I said that Hitch loved film (or knew little else), but Vertigo has a helpless guilt, the first admission that voyeurism may undermine you, and that acting is a metaphor for all of life. So the flop from 1958 is now often included in lists of the best films ever made.
Vertigo is a necromantic rite, a story of love ruined and “direction” exposed, and a lesson in what you might call the layers of performance. If you reflect on its full story, there is this young woman, Judy Barton, who has come from Kansas to San Francisco (a version of Dorothy getting to an Emerald City). She’s sexy but not too smart. She isn’t a great actress. But Gavin Elster, full of old-world charm and authority, and her lover, has taken her over and directed her to play the part of his wife, Madeleine. So he gives her Madeleine’s gray suit to wear; he educates her in the wife’s blond hairstyle; he schools her in moving as if in a dream—this is important because she has to be followed without giving any hint that she notices the pursuer. She is the model of people in movies who are required to behave “naturally” without noticing the camera, the lights, and the crew. She is acting, but she might be said to be “presenting a self in everyday life.”
That phrase comes from a book by Erving Goffman, one of two academics in the 1950s, not exactly movie fans, but some of the first scholars or critics to see past the particular movies and wonder, well, what is happening with all our study of stories and actors and imagery—what is happening to “reality”? What happens to self once we realize it is something we are presenting?
Erving Goffman and Marshall McLuhan were both Canadian. Goffman was born in Mannville, Alberta, in 1922; McLuhan in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1911. McLuhan went to study in Cambridge and came under the influence of F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards when the topic of “popular culture” was beginning to be explored there. Goffman graduated from the University of Toronto and was the brother of an actress, Frances Bay, whose many credits include Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, both by David Lynch. McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride, was published in 1951; Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life came out in 1959.
I don’t mean to offer the two professors as twins in harness, but the similarity in their area of interest had one other thing in common: their work was not known to the professional and creative classes working in film and television. If there was academic interest in such
areas in the 1950s—and there was very little—it was to glory in classic films and sketches of the history. The “theory” behind the media was nonexistent as yet, along with common use of a word such as media. But McLuhan, who was handicapped by being an awkward writer, was beginning to examine television advertisements—both men were more attentive to the new rush of television imagery than to the movies. He was working his way toward saying that media were themselves a structure of technological messages more profound or influential than the storied or moral messages programmers thought they were pushing onto the screen.
McLuhan did not become a cultural figure until the 1960s, with books such as The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967). By 1975 he was “himself” for a moment in a movie theater lobby in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). Erving Goffman might have said this was not so much the real Marshall McLuhan as a presentation of him. Goffman’s work was beginning to develop a theory—whether naturally or through the steady exposure of so much imagery and acting—that we all of us were learning to play or present ourselves in order to be understood. This dry, academic approach was actually more provocative or instructive than the whole doctrine of the Actors Studio. After all, that was aimed at professionals, whereas Goffman had seen that acting is amateur and universal.
Before sound recording, people had had so much less chance to hear themselves; that addition to film’s reality was as much an inducement to self-awareness as photography had been. A sidelight to that was the spreading culture of impersonation, by professionals, and by us, which only pushed actors into exaggerating their own voices. So vocal imitation became an entertainment, along with ventriloquism. Why not, and where’s the harm if James Cagney, or Jimmy Stewart, or Bette Davis, were “doing” themselves? Just as we say “good-looking” about some people, so actors had to be “good-sounding.”
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