Hitchcock

Past and Future

Richard Allen,Sam Ishii-Gonzales

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134477227
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoria: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock considers Hitchcock both in his time and as a continuing influence on filmmakers, films and film theory. The contributions, who include leading scholars such as Slavoj Zizek, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and James Naremore, discuss canonical films such as Notorious and The Birds alongside lesser-known works including Juno and the Paycock and Frenzy. Articles are grouped into four thematic sections: 'Authorship and Aesthetics' examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. 'French Hitchcock' looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. 'Poetics and Politics of Identity' explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work. The final section, 'Death and Transfiguration' addresses the manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece Psycho.

Part I
AUTHORSHIP AND AESTHETICS

Chapter 1

Hitch
A tale of two cities London and Los Angeles

Peter Wollen

This is an essay written against compartmentalization – specifically, the national compartmentalization of Hitchcock into “English” and “American.” Hitchcock began his film career in 1920 when, after showing some samples of his work as a title card designer, he was hired by the new Famous Players-Lasky studio in Islington, a district in the north of London. This was an American-owned and managed studio and in his first three years of employment Hitchcock designed the titles and worked in other capacities for no less than eleven films. Just as it seemed that he might be able to make the transfer to direction, however, the American owners pulled out. The empty studio was rented to independent producers, this time actually English, one of whom, Michael Balcon, eventually launched Hitch on his long career as a director. Hitchcock subsequently made five pictures at Islington for Balcon and Gainsborough, still working, however, with then-famous American stars such as Virginia Valli, Carmelita Geraghty, and Nita Naldi. Thus, from the very start, Hitchcock, although based in his native London, with excursions to Germany, was closely connected to Los Angeles, first through his American employers and then through the presence of Hollywood stars on the set of his “English” films.

His time with Balcon was followed by nine years working for John Maxwell and British International at Elstree, another London suburb. It was during this period that Hitchcock triumphantly negotiated the transition to sound with his 1929 film, Blackmail. He continued working for Maxwell through 1932 before he returned to Balcon to make the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he re-made over twenty years later for Paramount as an American film. The second Balcon period secured Hitchcock’s place as Britain’s leading director, as he successfully completed a string of hits for Gaumont-British, culminating in The Thirty-Nine Steps and Sabotage, the first classic Hitchcock thrillers, which established Hitch as the “master of suspense.” His very last picture for Balcon, The Lady Vanishes, further developed the mix of spy film and screwball comedy on which Hitch had built his reputation. Soon afterwards he was invited to Los Angeles where, basically, he recycled the same genre mix for his new Hollywood producers, eventually working with Cary Grant (rather than Robert Donat) as the star of North by Northwest. Grant – also, of course, from England – quickly became his preferred Hollywood actor.

We tend to think of Hitchcock’s Englishness in terms of his childhood in Leytonstone, his rise upward through the class structure to Shamley Green in Surrey, his bullying “little man” sense of the world, his old-fashioned music hall sense of humor, his smirking taste for double entendre, his keen attention to social embarrassment, his Orwellian view of murder as one of the fine arts, and his fascination with sexuality as forbidden fruit. No doubt these are qualities rooted in his childhood as the son of a Catholic shopkeeper, as he nurtured aspirations towards becoming a sophisticated man of the world in a merciless English social scene to which he felt fundamentally unfitted by his class and his cultural background, his private fears, and his all too public rotundity and weight. But it was in England too that Hitchcock, so staunchly middle-brow in so many of his tastes, also acquired his cultivated interest in modern art, his perfectionism, his willingness to experiment, and his fascination with new techniques, to which he always turned with immediate enthusiasm. It was another side of England, the artistic sophistication that Hitchcock acquired through his social superiors at the London Film Society, which stimulated his abiding interest in experiment, which led him towards the dream sequences in Spellbound and Vertigo, the rolling camera in Rope, the virtuoso montage in Psycho, the use of the Kuleshov Effect in Rear Window, the electronic soundtrack in The Birds, and the unachieved collaboration with Len Lye on The Secret Agent.

Hitchcock became an American citizen in 1955, sixteen years after he had embarked for New York on the Queen Mary, together with his wife Alma (whom he met at Famous Players-Lasky), their daughter Pat, their cook, their maid, and Hitchcock’s indispensable personal assistant Joan Harrison, who had been intimately involved in all Hitchcock’s projects since 1935, the year he had first hired her as a secretary. Harrison stayed with Hitch when he left for the United States, working on his films right through to Shadow of a Doubt. Although she did leave in the late 1940s, in order to pursue her own independent career, she returned again to the fold in the 1950s, to take charge of the nostalgically named Shamley Productions, where she was responsible for organizing Hitch’s extremely successful television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Shamley Green, it is worth noting, was Hitchcock’s last address in England, a lovingly restored Tudor cottage set in the countryside on the outskirts of London, which he reluctantly had to give up following his mother’s and brother’s death, since it was impractical to leave it empty.

For a long period of time after his arrival in America, however, Hitchcock was continually moving back and forth across the Atlantic – to make short films for the war effort, stung by taunts that he had fled the country in its hour of need, then back to Hollywood. He returned again to shoot Under Capricorn for the independent production company Transatlantic Pictures, which he had set up with Sidney Bernstein, an old friend from Film Society days, in order to escape the clutches of the monomaniacal Hollywood producer, David Selznick. In 1955, Hitchcock was back in London again, where he was introduced to Charlie Chaplin by Bernstein. Chaplin explained that he considered himself to be a citizen of the world and that consequently he saw no particular point in changing the nationality that he had arbitrarily acquired at his birth. Hitchcock argued that, as an American taxpayer, he felt that he was under a moral responsibility to become a citizen of his adopted country. However, as John Russell Taylor points out,¹ the very next film he made was The Trouble With Harry, a quintessentially English project, albeit transposed into an American setting – New England, of course.

If we look back at Hitchcock’s very first English picture, The Pleasure Garden – actually Anglo-German – we find a film in which the two leading parts were both played by American female stars. When his English producer, Michael Balcon, saw the finished film, he commented that the picture seemed completely American in its lighting and style. Hitch responded that this was only to be expected, since the bulk of his cinematic experience, both in the industry and as a filmgoer, had actually been of American films. He wanted, in fact, to combine a view of the world that was quintessentially English with a professionalism and an overall look that were basically American. The stories that appealed most to Hitchcock, even when he was in America, were very English, both in style and atmosphere – du Maurier, for instance, or the spy thriller – and when they had American sources he Anglicized them through his own detailed work on the script and through his choice of collaborators who understood and tolerated his predilections. On the other hand, he also wanted the gloss and sophistication and technical polish of Hollywood. He wanted both London and Los Angeles.

When we recall the earlier “English” Hitchcock we think of black-and-white films that were typically based on West End stage hits, although the later Pinewood films were already veering towards the melodramatic thriller (Buchan, Maugham, Conrad, du Maurier). When we think of “American” Hitchcock we think of films in color, largely based on short stories or slim and fast-paced novels (Highsmith, Woolrich, Boileau and Narcejac, Bloch). In comparison, English Hitchcock can look awkwardly dated and confined – disjointed, like a Nevinson painting, all jagged, angular, to use a phrase of Hitchcock’s – while the later American Hitchcock seems more streamlined, more expansive, more hypnotic.² But, in the last analysis, English Hitchcock was always already striving to be American and Hollywood Hitchcock was always already drawing on a whirlpool of paranoia, sadism, voyeurism, and schizophrenia triggered by the very English obsessions and fears that Hitch brought with him from Leytonstone and Shamley Green to Bel-Air and Scotts Valley.

In retrospect, it is striking how many of Hitchcock’s American studio projects were set in Britain or based on British source material. Rebecca was adapted from a du Maurier novel, Foreign Correspondent was set in London, Suspicion was based on a book by Francis Iles, the story idea for Saboteur was credited to Hitchcock himself, Rope came from a Patrick Hamilton play, The Man Who Knew Too Much was a re-make of the earlier English version, North by Northwest recycled The Thirty- Nine Steps, and so on, via J.Trevor Story’s The Trouble With Harry, right through to The Birds, which came from Daphne du Maurier short story; Marnie, a Winston Graham novel originally set in Devon; and Frenzy, a thriller set in London, adapted from a novel by La Bern, a favorite author for directors of English spy films and crime thrillers. Similarly, his most successful source for television was the work of Roald Dahl. Working closely on these and other projects were Hitchcock himself, Alma (of course), Joan Harrison, Angus MacPhail, Charles Bennett, Raymond Chandler, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.

One further footnote – perhaps most significant of all – Hitchcock, shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles, repaid the debt he owed from Islington days to both Jane Novak (star of The Blackguard, written by Hitch, directed by Graham Cutts) and Betty Compson (star of Woman to Woman, directed by Cutts, with Hitchcock as assistant director) by giving them each small parts in, respectively, Foreign Correspondent and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.Thus Hitchcock began his career as an English director in Hollywood by making an explicit connection to the American beginnings of his London career.The truth is that Hitchcock made every effort to Americanize himself professionally while he was still in England and then defiantly stuck to his English habits once he was ensconced in America.

There is a telltale story which Hitchcock recounted to John Russell Taylor. Towards the end of his career, he embarked on Torn Curtain, a project inspired by a very English spy story, but was prevailed upon by the studio, Universal, to cast Paul Newman opposite Julie Andrews – who was, at least, English. Newman, however, posed a serious problem. First, he was a Method-influenced actor and Hitchcock loathed not so much actors as such, but Method actors, as a particularly troublesome category. Hitch never forgot the horrors of his earlier experience with Montgomery Clift. Second, and much more unforgivably, Newman flaunted his shamelessly laddish American-ness. John Russell Taylor tells the story as follows: “The first real social encounter between Hitch and Newman got them off on the wrong foot. Hitch invited Newman home to a small dinner party. The first thing Newman did was to take off his jacket at table and drape it over the back of his chair. Then he refused Hitchcock’s carefully chosen vintage wine and asked for beer instead. And, to make matters worse, he insisted on going and getting it himself out of the refrigerator and drinking it from the can.” As Taylor notes, “the whole of the shooting was overshadowed by the judgments reached that evening.”³

Lurking beneath this story, of course, was the question of social class. Hitchcock had acquired fame and wealth and, with them, he had cultivated an idealized upper-class lifestyle. Although he by no means came from a poor background – his father was a shopkeeper whose successful business was eventually incorporated into the nationwide chain store Mac Fisheries – he was still fascinated, from his earliest years, by the social style and mores of the traditional British upper classes. His enthusiastic attendance at London Film Society screenings had given him an entrée into the more sophisticated world whose values he envied, the world of Ivor Montagu and Adrian Brunel. In a way, his interest in Murnau or Eisenstein or vintage René Clair was related to his taste for champagne and Parisian cuisine. At the same time, he developed an ambivalent fascination with upper-class women.The problem with English actresses, he told an interviewer in 1935, was that “it is always their desire to appear a lady and, in doing so, they become cold and lifeless. Nothing pleases me more than to knock the ladylikeness out of chorus girls.” In comparison, he thought, “many of the American stars have come from the poorest of homes. They have had the common touch, and they have never lost it.”⁴

In fact, Hitchcock took these attitudes with him on the ship to America. His favored male alter egos – Farley Granger, James Stewart or Cary Grant – always appeared as sophisticates, whatever their real origins may have been, whereas when the women were dressed up as ladies they were then tormented for it, just as Madeleine Carroll was in The Thirty-Nine Steps. In fact, long before he got to America, Hitch had fantasies of humiliating female American stars – “If I were directing Claudette Colbert (whom I consider one of the loveliest women in American films), I should first show her as a mannequin. She would slink through the showroom in her elegant, French way, wearing gorgeous gowns as only such a woman can. She would be perfectly coiffured, perfectly made-up.Then I would show her backstage. As she disappeared through the curtains, I’d make her suck down a piece of toffee or chewing gum which she had kept in her mouth all the time she was looking so beautiful.”⁵ Of course, this particular fantasy, which Hitch justified as “a touch of realism,” was nothing to what he was able to do when he actually got to Hollywood. Nor did he ever get the chance to direct Claudette Colbert, although she was his first choice for the female lead in Foreign Correspondent.

Shortly after Hitch’s marriage to Alma (at the fashionable Brompton Oratory) and his honeymoon in fashionable St. Moritz, Michael Balcon suggested to Hitchcock that he might move to Mayfair, traditionally the “society” core of central London. Hitchcock rejected the idea, explaining “‘I never felt any desire to move out of my own class.”⁶ Instead he moved into a maisonette, at the top of ninety-two stairs – no elevator – in a nondescript stretch of Cromwell Road. After he arrived in Los Angeles, however, Hitchcock acquired a house in fashionable Bel-Air, albeit a “snug little house” (in his words)⁷ rather than a grandiose residence – John Russell Taylor describes it as “an English-style cottage (or what passed locally for one).” There he read the English papers, “sometimes weeks out of date” and “wearing invariably English, invariably formal clothes, in defiance of the climate and that noonday sun to which only mad dogs and Englishmen are impervious.”⁸ Despite his success, Hitchcock always stayed fundamentally middle class in his tastes and aspirations, except (perhaps) in the area of food and wine (where he cherished the opportunity of becoming a bon viveur in the old Edwardian style) and art (where he added Braque and Dubuffet to the Klee and Sickert already in his collection).

I think Hitchcock was happier in Los Angeles than he was in London, largely because he was able to play the waggish and eccentric Englishman without the self-consciousness that would have overcome him i...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Hitchcock
• Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Hitchcock Chronology
• Introduction
• Part I: Authorship and Aesthetics
• Part II: French Hitchcock
• Part III: Poetics and Politics of Identity
• Part IV: Death and Transfiguration