Latin Hitchcock

How Almodóvar, Amenábar, De la Iglesia, Del Toro, and Campanella Became Notorious

Dona Kercher

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231850735
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This study explores how five major directors—Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar, Alex de la Iglesia, Guillermo del Toro, and Juan José Campanella—modeled their early careers on Hitchcock and his film aesthetics. In shadowing Hitchcock, their works embraced the global aspirations his movies epitomize. Each section of the book begins with an extensive study, based on newspaper accounts, of the original reception of Hitchcock's movies in either Spain or Latin America and how local preferences for genre, glamour, moral issues, and humor affected their success. The text brings a new approach to world film history, showcasing both the commercial and artistic importance of Hitchcock in Spain and Latin America

PART I

SPAIN

CHAPTER ONE

First Loves, First Cuts: The Initial Response to Hitchcock’s Films in Spain

I. INTRODUCTION

Were Hitchcock’s films greeted with enthusiasm when they were first seen in Spain and Latin America? Was he an instant sensation? Well, no. Hitchcock’s relationship to the Spanish-speaking world evolved over the course of the six decades of his long career; his visits to Spain bracketed two important stages of that career. In the early 1920s when he was first setting out he scouted Spanish locations for the silent film The Spanish Jade for Famous Players-Lasky. Later in the 1950s at the height of his creative output he launched Vertigo and North by Northwest in San Sebastián, site of the premier film festival of the Spanish-speaking world.¹ There in August 1958 the press compared Hitchcock to Santa Claus. Despite his almost universal name recognition, the reception history of Hitchcock’s films is neither well studied nor uniform worldwide. The sequence and circumstances under which his films opened in Spain reveal significant differences from the conditions of their releases elsewhere in the world. For instance, certain films – Lifeboat (1944) and Psycho (1960) – were substantially cut in Spain. Others – Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945) – immediately impacted on cultural politics and served as rallying cries for a new type of cinematic aesthetics. The ‘Latin Hitchcocks’ of the 1980s and 1990s, who are the subject of subsequent chapters, arose from this specific historical and cultural terrain. We will explore whether, and if so how, humour, aesthetic innovation and a moral tone reflective of Hitchcock’s Catholic background – elements that became fundamental to these post-Franco directors – factored into the initial public response in Spain.

To survey the reception of all of Hitchcock’s 53 films and TV programmes in Spain and Latin America is a topic worthy of one or more doctoral dissertations, or at least a book-length guide similar to Jane E. Sloan’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Definitive Filmography (1993). A comprehensive answer lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Hence, as a first step to narrowing our focus, we will examine the range of Spanish or Latin American locations or motifs in his films. Whenever Hitchcock represented the Latin world throughout his career he laid the foundation for a unique dialogue with the viewing public. In effect the selection of a Latin location privileged the film’s reception history for that area. As a second step, in order to highlight and analyse the impressions Hitchcock’s films first created, we will turn to Spain as a case study, since all the directors subsequently studied in this book have at very least intervened in the Spanish market at one time, if not worked out of that country as their primary base of operations. This approach, moreover, will allow for an overview of important sources for reception studies in Spain for the period of Hitchcock’s active career.

II. LATIN LOCATION, LOCATION²

Alfred Hitchcock did work in Spain in his early years when he was getting into the film business and climbing the ladder at the British Famous Players-Lasky studio from errand boy, then significantly to art director, then director. As Patrick McGilligan notes in his biography Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, Hitchcock’s third project as an art director was the silent film The Spanish Jade (directed by John S. Robertson) in 1921 – Hitch was then 22 – for which ‘cast and crew traveled to Spain’. McGilligan comments that ‘overseas travel became routine in the Islington years’ (2003: 51). More important than the location, however, is Hitchcock’s career path, as McGilligan argues: ‘In all of film history only a small percentage of directors have come from the ranks of production design. This foothold gave Hitchcock a distinct advantage when thinking in pictures. From the start, the “right look” – for people and places – was integral to his vision’ (ibid.).

He knew, for example, when in 1956 he took on the project to adapt and modernise the French novel D’entre les morts for Vertigo, that San Francisco was the perfect location. He thought the city, which he had loved since he first came to California, sufficiently European in character. Part of this European background was its Spanish heritage. The picturesque Mission Dolores was chosen as a location from the earliest stages of the project. The climatic scenes of the film would take place in the most Spanish of sites, Mission San Juan Bautista, south of San Francisco. McGilligan, incidentally, confuses the two Spanish missions in his biography of Hitchcock, saying ‘Hitchcock had picked the Mission Dolores for its picturesque quality, even though the church didn’t have a bell tower’ (2003: 541). Dolores includes a more baroque church that indeed has a bell tower.³ According to Dan Aulier in Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (1998), Hitchcock’s longtime Director of Photography Robert Burks did not want a site that was ‘too obviously pretty’ and Hitchcock himself ‘wanted a location that looked abandoned’ (1998: 64). Since this mission’s church no longer had a bell tower when it was chosen, an enormous set, the largest single expense in the film’s budget, was created at the studio. Hence, for Vertigo ‘Spanish’ meant an austere site of history, religion and judgement. In an interview in July 1958, published in Spanish translation in El cine británico de Alfred Hitchcock (The British Films of Alfred Hitchcock, 1974), Carlos Fernández Cuenca, the Director of that year’s San Sebastián Film Festival in which Vertigo was entered, asked Hitchcock whether he had been concerned with religious problems or themes in any films other than I Confess (1951) and The Wrong Man (1957). Hitchcock immediately recalled that he and Burks in fact had counted Catholic churches in fifteen of his films. Hitchcock called their presence, including that in Vertigo, ‘un fruto claro del subconsciente, un deseo de amparar los conflictos humanos bajo la sombra de los símbolos de la religión’ (‘an obvious product of the subconscious, a desire to shelter human conflicts under the shadow of symbols of religion’) (1974: 36). Furthermore Hitchcock added: ‘No hago cine concreta y deliberadamente católico, pero me parece que nadie dudará de que mis películas están hechas por un católico’ (‘I don’t make Catholic cinema concretely and deliberately, but it seems to me that no one will doubt that my movies are made by a Catholic’) (ibid.).

Hitchcock was almost forced to address the Spanish Civil War when he was making Foreign Correspondent (1940), but he never quite had to. In the film a green American press correspondent is sent to Europe to cover the war in August 1939. The producer Walter Wanger believed film could ‘change the course of human events’ (Spoto 1999: 222), calling motion pictures, in his own words, ‘almost as important as the State Department’ (ibid.). Hence, Wanger’s vision for Foreign Correspondent was both idealistic and highly topical. He insisted on rewrites to incorporate the most up-to-date information on the war, including at one stage references to the Spanish Civil War, but events followed in fast succession so that the specific war references with which the film ends are to the bombing of London, not Guernica. Overall Hitchcock tried to avoid politics in his films, officially at least because it was bad box office. In the case of Foreign Correspondent he merely humoured his producer, did not do the suggested retakes and kept the film as general as he could. As Foreign Correspondent turned out to be ‘not a piece of anti-Nazi, anti-war propaganda’, as Wanger had hoped, but ‘a picaresque story, a romantic melodrama with considerable comic tone’ (Spoto 1999: 227), it has stood the test of time better for it. The Spanish may have prevailed in this gesture to the origins of the picaresque. Donald Spoto describes the shift to the generic well: ‘The finished film (except for the last minute) has about as much to do with the politics of the war as Tosca has to do with Napoleon’s campaign in Italy: the historical setting provides a distant background for a personal story of adventure, love and betrayal’ (1999: 230).

Although Notorious (1946) was filmed almost entirely on studio sets in Los Angeles, with the notable exception of the projection shots of Rio de Janeiro taken from an aeroplane, it spans the Americas in its Latin locations. This sweep to crisscross the globe was integral to Hitchcock’s new business plan. Hitchcock conceived the film as the first project of his dream company ‘Transatlantic Pictures’, named to suggest the collaboration between Europe and America. According to McGilligan, the story of Transatlantic Pictures is ‘a chapter in Hitchcock’s life [that] has been inadequately reported, and misunderstood’ (2003: 365). He emphasises that the ‘prescient’ choice of locales – Miami and South America – for Notorious was entirely Hitchcock’s decision, one that aimed to attract a global audience with important world issues. Hitch at that time, moreover, was genuinely concerned about world security, including the future of Nazis and Nazi sympathisers. At the end of 1944 he had pitched a short film called Watchtower over Tomorrow about threats to peace to the State Department. Its imaginative scenario ‘alarmed US officials’.⁴ Some precedent already existed for Hitchcock thinking Latin when it came to complex war scenarios. His first Latin character had been ‘the Mexican’, an Armenian professional assassin who tries to pass as a Mexican general, in Secret Agent (1936), a World War I spy film.⁵

This political and economic back story shows how far Notorious moved away from the original New York City locale of the serial called ‘The Song of the Dragon’ upon which the film was based. Nonetheless although the new Latin locations implied a link to real international intrigue and current events, if not futuristic predictions, the drama that unfolded in Hitchcock’s film, in Miami and Rio, recalled time-worn Latin stereotypes of wild parties and ill-gotten wealth.

Notorious opens at a courtroom in Miami. A distraught Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) witnesses the reading of the final guilty verdict at her father’s trial, then rushes out. Later at a party in her apartment she drowns her sorrows in booze and establishes her image as a Miami party girl. Her sparkly beach stripe shirt and bare midriff, which Devlin (Cary Grant) later humorously covers with a scarf when they leave for a drive, enhance the look. The Latin theme of the party is further underscored when a footloose yachtsman, played by the real life intelligence agent Charles Mendl, tries to get her to sail with him to Cuba. Shortly after the farewell party she leaves town to fly down to Rio as an undercover spy on the trail of the film’s MacGuffin, uranium stored in a wine bottle, owned by the fascist-in-exile, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), she is sent to seduce. The party scene at Sebastian’s mansion in Rio today ranks as one of Hitchcock’s most famous sequences for his invention of a massive crane shot that sweeps down to show Alicia’s hand holding a key. In subsequent chapters on their careers we will explore the effect these Latin party scenes in Notorious had on Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (1993) and on Juan José Campanella’s Love Walked In (1997).

A humorous rebuke to her Miami party girl image: Devlin minimally covers Alicia’s bare midriff with a scarf before they go out for a drive in Notorious.

Nonetheless, the reception of Notorious has more often foregrounded mise-en-scène in all its aspects – set and wardrobe especially – than cinematographic innovation, or even narrative. At the opening of Encadenados (Notorious) in Madrid in 1948, for example, Donald, the reviewer for the newspaper ABC, did not think much of the film’s emotional impact, writing ‘that plot is poorly realised in the sets and situations that they provoke. Despite the intensity that they want to convey, they...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Spain
• Part II: Latin America
• Conclusion: They Became Notorious
• Bibliography
• Index