Children in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Debbie Olson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137472816
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Children and youth perform both innocence and knowingness within Hitchcock's complex cinematic texts. Though the child often plays a small part, their significance - symbolically, theoretically, and philosophically - offers a unique opportunity to illuminate and interrogate the child presence within the cinematic complexity of Hitchcock's films.

Chapter 1

Alfred Hitchcock’s Missing Children: Genre, Auteurship, and Audience Address

Noel Brown

The title of this essay is provocative, seeming in some respects to run against the prevailing themes and inflections of this book. In what sense are children “missing” from Hitchcock’s films? Most obviously, in a purely literal sense, children appear prominently in a mere six Hitchcock films: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Sabotage (1936), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and The Birds (1963). To these six films we could add the highly suggestive cameo appearances in The Manxman (1929), Young and Innocent (1937), The Wrong Man (1957), and Marnie (1964). Finally, more abstrusely—but also more significantly in their centrality to the story—we should include the unseen, implied children of Psycho (1960), Frenzy (1972), and, to a lesser extent, Spellbound (1945). Altogether, this amounts to 13 films, from a total of 54 that Hitchcock directed in his long and illustrious career.

But children are also missing in a more abstract sense; when they do appear, their identities are mostly confined to two recurrent and inevitably limiting modes of representation. The first is that of the symbolic archetype, which embodies—though not without traces of self-conscious irony and ambivalence—the myth of childhood innocence. Children function, to varying degrees, as the image of disturbed innocence in Sabotage, both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, and The Birds. Secondly, and contrarily, is the child as a portent of adult dysfunction, seen only in relation to his or her future adult persona. In Psycho, Marnie, and Frenzy, there are hints of incipient psychological disorder in childhood that reach their disturbing actualization in adulthood. Although I will identify some partial exceptions to this dyad later in the essay, these two modes of representation remain, to me, dominant. In either case, as David Sterritt suggests, the presence of children “almost invariably suggests some kind of actual or incipient chaos.”¹ The reasons for this, and for Hitchcock’s broader neglect of children on film, can be attributed on one level to the cinematic conventions of the period, in an era where the motion picture screen was predominantly adult; but on a deeper level, Hitchcock’s ongoing obsession with his generic identity, his preoccupation with his status among auteurist critics in his later career, and the values (personal, but inevitably mediated through societal norms) collectively espoused in his films all mandate against representations of childhood beyond the symbolic or totemic level. It is this absence, and the reasons behind it, that I would like to explore in this essay.

Hitchcock and the Myth of Universalism

One of the more glaring oversights in the voluminous canon of Hitchcock scholarship—and one that must be redressed before my analysis can shift to the films themselves—is the failure to interrogate the notion that his films possess “universal” appeal. Leaving aside the question of whether universalism in art can ever truly be attained, Hitchcock’s supposed universalism invariably refers merely to broad appeal for adult audiences. Given that much Hitchcock scholarship has been undertaken by auteurist critics, it is unsurprising that juvenile audiences are removed from the equation, for such writing is predicated on a valorization of the mature artist who does not compromise their integrity by condescending to such presumably unsophisticated consumers as children—or, indeed, by pursuing commercial success, if it is to be achieved through appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Hitchcock operated in a different age; the classically “adult” and highbrow art forms—the theater, the opera, ballet, classical music, certain types of literature, and so on—were still clearly separated from the lowbrow popular amusements, such as television, popular music, and film. Ironically, the attempt among French and, subsequently, British, and North American critics to assert the artistic worth of certain forms of popular cinema—such as art-house films and, later, the work of ‘auteurs’ such as Hitchcock—accelerated the disintegration of firm boundaries between the highbrow and lowbrow amusement forms initiated by the insurgent youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Those that could not be popularized, such as classical music, ballet, and opera, have gradually declined in popularity. In turn, indirectly this disintegration facilitated the development of “regressive” types of screen entertainment designed to transcend cultural and demographic boundaries, appealing to the “inner child,” and thus every conceivable audience type. Examples include the Star Wars (1977–) and, latterly, Harry Potter (2001–2011) franchises.² Hitchcock’s films perhaps retained their appeal among disciples of the so-called politique des auteurs (auteur theory) during the late 1960s and 1970s partly because of their few obvious concessions to youth audiences.

The idea that his films were universal in appeal has figured heavily in auteurist accounts of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. There are many passing (that is to say, unreconstructed) allusions to this end in Wood’s book, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, and even more explicitly in Donald Spoto’s biography, The Dark Side of Genius, which argues that:

He drew so deeply from the human reservoir of imagery and dream and fear and longing that he achieved universal appeal. Had his films been simply incarnations of his own fantasies and dreams, with no wider reference, he would have perhaps won a small and devoted group of admirers. But he expressed those elusive images and half-remembered dreams in terms that moved and astounded and delighted and aroused awe from millions round the world.³

As Janet Staiger has contended, universality is one of the core constituting elements in the auteur critic’s conceptualization of the filmmaker-as-artist.⁴ But this idea also found favor with contemporary journalists and trade writers in the United States during Hitchcock’s peak years, in the 1950s and 1960s. In its review of The Birds, Variety noted that:

A kind of community chemistry runs through an audience witnessing one of his films, a delicious and infectious state of constant group expectancy that threatens, in any given frame, to send an electric charge through the entire audience and make it react as a single entity.⁵

This perception was undoubtedly fostered by the extremity of the film censorship then in force in the United States, Britain, and most other leading markets for Hitchcock’s pictures, which in theory—if not always in practice—limited the cinematic representation of certain adult themes and situations deemed unsuitable for children. The Production Code—Hollywood’s system of self-regulation, which was created shortly after the transition to sound in 1930, and made mandatory in 1934—was designed to regulate North American cinema, ensuring its status as an universal popular entertainment; it remained in force until 1966. According to the propaganda, all films released with a Code seal of approval (which included every Hitchcock production from The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 to Torn Curtain in 1966) was automatically a “family” film.⁶

In reality, the presupposition that Hitchcock’s film were universally appealing is demonstrably false. We might begin deconstructing this by invoking a forceful denunciation of universalistic modes of cinema written by none other than Hitchcock himself in 1938:

The power of universal appeal has been the most retarding force of the motion picture as an art. In the efforts of the maker to appeal to everyone, they have had to come down to the common simple story with the happy ending: the moment they begin to become imaginative, then they are segregating their audience. Until we get specialised theatres, we shall not be able to do anything else. The Continental films go into specialised theatres in London, and that is about all. The cost of making a picture is so great, and there are so many aspects of the business—world markets, American markets, and so on—that we find it difficult to get our money back, even for a successful film with a universal appeal, let alone in films that have experimented with the story or the artist. That is the one thing that has kept the cinema back. I should say it has pretty well gone a long way to destroying it as an art.⁷

While Hitchcock may also have been alluding to the necessity of catering to other supposedly unsophisticated audience sections, such as working-class patrons, the child audience doubtlessly figures heavily in this lamentation.

Understandably, after his move to Hollywood—which more than any other national cinema advanced the universalistic ethos—Hitchcock adopted a more conciliatory attitude. Even in his later career, when the Production Code had weakened, he tended to evade questions regarding his films’ appeal to children, or else assert the ability of child audiences to engage with seemingly sophisticated, adult themes and situations. In 1960, shortly after he completed Psycho, Hitchcock argued that his films were no more frightening for children than fairy stories, citing the horrific aspects of popular tales such as “Hansel and Gretel.”⁸ This was a defense he later reused in his interviews with Francois Truffaut, and then again when forced to defend the content of his films against the inquisitions of behavioral psychologist (and infamous anti-media zealot), Dr. Fredric Wertham. In response to Wertham’s concern over the effects on children of adult material on the screens, Hitchcock insisted that “naturally it boils down to parents and their control over their children.”⁹ Although these lines of argument served to insure him against charges that he was a Code violator, Hitchcock recognized better than most that audience tastes and tolerances were changing. By 1964, with Production Code violations becoming commonplace, the masquerade was no longer necessary. Hitchcock publicly admitted that his latest release, Marnie, would be advertised as an adult film. But he reiterated: “Kids are adults today—we have to cater to children who are adults.”¹⁰

However, it had long since been accepted by the trade papers, revie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction  Alfred Hitchcock’s Children
• Chapter 1  Alfred Hitchcock’s Missing Children: Genre, Auteurship, and Audience Address
• Chapter 2  “The Future’s Not Ours to See”: How Children and Young Adults Reflect the Anxiety of Lost Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s American Movies
• Chapter 3  The Child Who Knew Too Much: Liminality in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956)
• Chapter 4  No Laughing Matter: Imperiling Kids and Country in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936)
• Chapter 5  “If You Rip the Fronts Off Houses”: Killing Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
• Chapter 6  Daddy’s Girl: The Knowing Innocent in Strangers on a Train (1951)
• Chapter 7  Renegotiating Romanticism and the All-American Boy Child: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955)
• Chapter 8  Between Knowingness and Innocence: Child Ciphers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) and The Birds (1963)
• Chapter 9  The Child Hero in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963)
• Chapter 10  “It’s the End of the World!”: The Influence of The Birds on the Evil Child Film
• Chapter 11  Psycho without a Cause: Norman Bates and Juvenile Delinquency Cinema
• Chapter 12  Alfred Hitchcock’s Stylized Capture of Postadolescent Fatheads
• Notes on Contributors
• Index