Although Hitchcock always insisted that he wrote The Wrong Man because it was "the available project," it was also precisely what he'd been after for some time.  Partly by circumstance, his passion for research and authenticity had been overshadowed in recent films by artifice and Hitchcockery, and now he wanted to sink his teeth into a neorealistic subject.

In interviews, Hitchcock sometimes disparaged what he (and some critics) called "kitchen sink" neorealism, telling the press that he and his Italian housekeeper watched Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief in San Francisco one day, and that his housekeeper was half bored by the masterpiece.  He didn't always describe his own reaction, but he was impressed by the film, and once told the New York Times that The Bicycle Thief was a perfect double chase - physical and psychological.  Hitchcock's love for Italy was genuine; and he kept up with the postwar cinema there, paying special attention to Roberto Rossellini's films - in part because Rossellini's latest featured Mrs Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman.

                                            - McGilligan (Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, hb, 2003), pp. 532-33
 

WHOLE SEGMENTS OF PATRICK McGilligan's biography of Alfred Hitchcock seem almost to have written themselves, by association of ideas, and the above two paragraphs are no exception.  Note the assemblage of information concerning the 'Italian' provenance of The Wrong Man (1957).  In the best sense of the term, McGilligan's book is quality journalism, being typically 'transparent' and up-to-date.  That is, he deals largely in material that has emerged since the publication of Donald Spoto's controversial Hitchcock biography twenty years ago, and he appears at all times to be a clarifier and a facilitator.  For the first time, such people as playwright/screenwriter Whitfield Cook and producer Herbert Coleman go fully on the record about their association with Hitchcock.  (Actually, Coleman was so incensed by what he saw as Spoto's distortions that he wrote his memoirs, posthumously published in 2003 as 'The Hollywood I Knew'.  Most of its corrections to Spoto make it into McGilligan and thus now reach a wider readership.)  For this, all Hitchcockians must be grateful.

Furthermore, McGilligan's journalism - which includes several 'scoops', such as his unearthing of some early Hitchcock fiction - is professionally polished.  No doubt about that.  In the above passage on The Wrong Man, look at the economy invested in the phrase 'the available project'; and note, in the sentence after it, the richness of implication in 'Partly by circumstance' - McGilligan is consistently sensitive to any plight of a creative person, whether Hitchcock himself or, say, one of his writers.  Above all, McGilligan must be congratulated both for his success in ordering his masses of material and for bringing to it the voice of good sense and reasonableness.

In several ways, 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light' may be the 850-page equivalent of those wonderfully brisk 'making-of' documentaries by Laurent Bouzereau accompanying many of the Hitchcock DVDs.  There's the same self-effacing, no-nonsense assemblage of given materials, and, up to a point, the same care in maintaining a tone that constantly honours and valorises Alfred Hitchcock, the man and filmmaker.  I said: up to a point.  McGilligan is a conscientous biographer and certainly does more than just regale us with his subject's public lifestyle and accomplishments.  Speculation about Hitchcock's sexual 'impotence' finds a place in McGilligan's narrative; as does the revelation of Alma Hitchcock's brief fling in 1948 with Whitfield Cook.

I found myself agreeing with McGilligan's relatively few speculations, more often than not.  He consistently argues that Hitchcock's sometimes peculiar, and decidedly not 'politically correct', treatment of certain actors on the set was occasioned by the demands of performance.   The classic case-in-point concerns Joan Fontaine on the set of Rebecca (1940).  Hitchcock seems to have deliberately kept her off-balance and forever mindful of her relative-newcomer status alongside co-star Laurence Olivier and such veterans as Nigel Bruce, Gladys Cooper, and C. Aubrey Smith.  Obviously, such intimidation by Hitchcock suited the insecurity of the character Fontaine was playing.  And although McGilligan doesn't say so, it was equally a tactic that Hitchcock would sometimes use on audiences via a film's 'subjective' technique - as when in Marnie (1964) a whole battery of eye-offending and ear-startling devices nonplus the viewer in ways that match the neurotic central character's own feelings.

But what follows is neither, strictly, a review of McGilligan's book nor an encomium.  Far from that!  I have two main problems with the book, which I may sum up as its simplifying tendency and its many errors and omissions.  (I've a personal stake in the book's omissions, which I will declare shortly.)  What I've called McGilligan's journalism seems to me to finally lack depth.  Also, it can unwittingly distort.  So what follows is actually a critique of McGilligan's important work.  At a certain point, I will start to examine what it says about each individual film (the features) - and what things it might have said, but didn't.  Throughout, I'll try to be fair and honest ...

* * *

Oscar Wilde refers to someone who knows 'the price of everything and the value of nothing'.   Broadly speaking, that's how I feel about McGilligan on Hitchcock.  Compared with the two earlier Hitchcock biographers - John Russell Taylor and Spoto - McGilligan is an interloper to Hitchcock studies.  (Australians might call him a 'blow-in'.)  Sometimes he sees with exemplary fresh vision; more often he ends up quoting you a currently fashionable evaluation of Hitchcock that is inadequate.  Consider McGilligan's contention that with The Wrong Man Hitchcock wanted to emulate the Italian neorealists.  At some level, that's probably true.  A decade later, Hitchcock looked at the latest work of Antonioni (though also Buñuel and Bergman) and wondered how on earth he could match it.  The result was the ill-fated Kaleidoscope project.  In the case of The Wrong Man, an Italian connection is right there in the film: 'Manny' Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is second-generation Italian, living in Queens, New York City.  When Truffaut told Hitchcock that probably only a Catholic would have handled Fonda's prayer scene the way he did, Hitchcock replied: 'That may be, but on the other hand, you should bear in mind that this was an Italian family.  You remember, in Switzerland they have milk chocolate and lakes [cf Secret Agent (1936)], in Italy ...'  'In Italy', exclaimed Truffaut, 'they have the Pope!'  And neorealism, he might have added.  Thus far McGilligan.

But paradoxically - and as 'The MacGuffin' has often pointed out - The Wrong Manis also very English.  It is one of at least two Hitchcock films that show a marked indebtedness to 'Bleak House' (1853) by the greatest of English novelists, Charles Dickens.  Spoto, more perspicacious than McGilligan in this respect, wrote that the novel 'seems to have engraved itself on Hitchcock's memory', adding that it details 'a grim distrust in any public institution'.  Hitchcock studied the novel at school (and as an adult owned a boxed copy of it in its original serial publication version - information supplied to me by Bill Krohn of 'Cahiers du Cinéma').  It is full of images of wintry London, of lives inter-connected without anyone knowing it, and of a seemingly interminable lawsuit.  It so impressed Franz Kafka that its influence on his novel 'Der Prozess'/'The Trial' (1925) is palpable.  (The Wrong Man is often loosely described as 'Kafkaesque'.)  I'll come back to the matter of Hitchcock and Dickens shortly.

Now look again at how McGilligan assembles references to Italy and neorealism to try and prove his case for The Wrong Man as a neorealist film.  That case is at best specious.  For one thing, McGilligan seems unaware that Hitchcock's verbal references at about this time to 'kitchen sink' realism partly concern an English movement - the onset on the English stage of such ground-breaking plays as John Osborne's 'Look Back in Anger' (1956) and Shelagh Delaney's 'A Taste of Honey' (1958).  Also, such likely influences on Hitchcock's sensibility as John Galsworthy's harrowing drama 'Justice' (1910; film version 1917, directed by Maurice Elvey from a script by Eliot Stannard) and the classic real-life case of mistaken identity and wrongful arrest involving one Adolf Beck in London at the turn of the century, provide other detectable English precedents for elements of The Wrong Man.

Unfortunately, none of this makes it into McGilligan.  Nor does the probable influence on Hitchcock of such American works as Arthur Miller's man-in-the-street tragedy, 'Death of a Salesman' (1949), and Paddy Chayevsky's 'little' teleplay 'Marty' (1953), the latter on NBC featuring Esther Minciotti as the mother (whom Hitchcock almost certainly saw at that time and then later cast in The Wrong Man).  Further, Michael Kerbel has pointed out that Henry Fonda played 'wrong man' roles in both Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937) and its near-remake Let Us Live (1939).  Of the latter, Kerbel notes: 'Like Hitchcock's film, it was based on a news story. ...  The entire film is somber, and is directed in intense expressionist style by another German expatriate, John Brahm.'  (Starting in 1959, Brahm would direct episodes on television of both 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' and 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour'.)  Oh, and at Christmas 1954, CBS showed a 'television opera' of Dickens's exhuberant ghost story 'A Christmas Carol' which had lyrics by renowned American playwright Maxwell Anderson and a score by Bernard Herrmann ...

Not to labour my point here, but if McGilligan knew his Dickens better (and also The Wrong Man itself), he might have spotted yet another significance of CBS's 'opera' besides its first bringing together two key Hitchcock personnel, Anderson and Herrmann.  (But in fact McGilligan doesn't mention the CBS program at all.)   Both 'A Christmas Carol' (and 'Bleak House') and The Wrong Man are full of 'ghostly' effects, something that had been a speciality of the film's screenwriter Anderson since his 1937 play 'High Tor'.  Notice, for example, how the film's credits sequence shows patrons at the Stork Club being 'spirited away' by successive dissolves while Herrmann provides an eerie rumba accompaniment.  This subliminal 'dissolution' motif literally haunts Manny and his family throughout the film that follows.  Interestingly, a year after The Wrong Man came out, Herrmann sent Hitchcock a review of the film from Australia (I believe from the 'Sydney Morning Herald') with the following passage underlined: 'The film is a certainty for our 10-best list for 1957 ...  The gaunt sound-track ... is a series of plucked low notes from the musician's own double-bass, always in a rhythm to suggest footfalls of a ghost ...'

As I say, almost none of this makes it into McGilligan.  The Wrong Man, we must believe, shows an 'Italian' influence or none at all!  I quite realise that the journalist McGilligan needs to construct a narrative thread; my point is that we must turn to another Hitchcock biography to fill out the picture - literally.  For example, in Spoto we find the information that while waiting to start shooting The Wrong Man, Hitchcock in New York gave a 'Ghost-Haunted House Party' in a rented brownstone.  Not that Spoto, either, comments on the likely connection to the content of The Wrong Man (though he had earlier noted how Maxwell Anderson's 'delicate play "High Tor" ... mingled ghosts past and present with real people', an effect that 'intrigued Hitchcock').  Instead, he makes an unjustifiably sour remark about the 'weak puns' on the house party's menu!

So nobody's perfect!  But at least Spoto knows his Dickens!  My confidence in McGilligan in that respect was shattered as early as p. 5 of his book, where he comments:

The circumstances of Alfred Hitchcock's childhood have been portrayed elsewhere as Dickensian, but the truth was closer to Frank Capra.  The Hitchcocks were a jolly clan, full of fun.

In other words, McGilligan carries around with him the hoary and ignorant prejudice that 'Dickensian' means 'grim' and 'old-fashioned'!  That's far from the truth!  As any Dickens lover knows, the adult Dickens had a robust, fun-loving side that was second-to-none.  (In any case, what else is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life [1946] than a thinly-disguised, American version of Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol'?!)  Nor, I think, is McGilligan accurate when he seems to claim that Spoto portrayed Hitchcock's childhood as somehow deprived.  Of course, he must be congratulated for showing just how much bonhomie informed the Hitchcock household, especially on the part of flamboyant 'Uncle John' (on Hitchcock's father's side) who in turn 'inspired flamboyance in his nephew'.   Mind you, that trait, too, is Dickensian!

* * *

The judge in the story [of The Paradine Case], Lord Horfield - who suggests a composite of real-life Lords Rayner Goddard and Travers Humphreys, both capital-punishment advocates who had figured in sensational murder cases - called for special research on the part of the director.  Hitchcock consulted with official wig- and robe-makers, attended several court sessions, and sketched the judge in action.  "As I watched the judge," he noted in an interview, "I even knew what lens I would use to photograph him."

                                                                        - McGilligan, p. 390

Hitchcock's underrated The Paradine Case is his other film I referred to above that shows a definite affinity with 'Bleak House'.  (Both the 1947 film and Dickens's novel - in their imagery and mise-en-scène - depict a nation in which 'alienation' is endemic, yet where, as Dickens's most famous biographer put it, everyone is 'connected by fate without knowing it'.  Both works involve a London-based law case.)  Something that initially excited Hitchcock about making The Paradine Case was the prospect it offered of filming in London's Inner Temple with its Dickensian backgrounds.  Ironically, in the light of our discussion so far, the film's central character, Maddalena Paradine (Alida Valli), is Italian, and the film makes several pointed allusions to her birthplace.  Indeed, she represents what the Italian scholar Mario Praz in his book 'The Romantic Agony' (1933) calls the cult of the Fatal Woman - whose English literary practitioners included Swinburne and Wilde.  She is even associated with serpentine camera movements and imagery (for example, ornamental hallstands entwined with carved snakes in the Paradines' town house).  However, in Robert Hichens's original novel (1933), she is the child of a Swedish mother and an American father, and grew up in Copenhagen; there, she is referred to as a Strindberg Woman!  Accordingly, the screenplay represents an intelligent substitution of elements, presumably in order to accommodate Valli's casting.  Also, The Paradine Case becomes one of Hitchcock's quintessential 'lost paradise' films, embodying a motif seen in his films from The Pleasure Garden (1926) onwards (and discussed below).

But again little of this is noted by McGilligan.  That's understandable: he has his work cut out just detailing Hitchcock's despair at the incredible interference in the project by producer David Selznick.  What I most regret is that McGilligan is not only lax in referring to the Charles Laughton judge, Horfield, as 'a composite of real-life Lords Rayner Goddard and Travers Humphreys', but he is clearly ignorant of the real basis for the Anthony Keane (Gregory Peck) advocate, not to mention of the role played in the story by at least two famous English criminal cases.

Gentle reader, what I'm about to report is taken from my book called 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' (Titan Books, London, 1999).  (Its section on The Paradine Case may also be found, I understand, on the website of the Law Library, the University of Texas at Austin.)  When that book came out, Hitchcock expert Dan Auiler wrote that '[Ken Mogg] may know more about Hitchcock and his milieu than any other film critic'.  Hence I'm a little surprised that the author of a Hitchcock biography that appeared in 2003 chose not to properly consult my book - which, for film after film, provides material that adds to our post-Spoto knowledge of those films and which could have augmented, even corrected, many of the points McGilligan makes.  But I'll say more about that later.

The following is from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':

The [basis of The Paradine Case] was the 1933 novel by prolific author Robert Hichens, once an associate of Oscar Wilde.  In turn, Hichens based the novel on two sensational English murder cases.  The first was that of Madame Fahmy, an attractive Frenchwoman who in 1923 was acquitted by a British jury after she'd shot and killed her husband, an Egyptian prince, at London's Savoy Hotel.  At the trial, it was suggested that the prince had been intimate with his male secretary.  The fact that Madame Fahmy herself seems to have been a woman of loose morals wasn't revealed to the jury - her famous advocate Edward Marshall Hall saw to that.

The other murder case was that of Florence Maybrick, a young American woman found guilty of poisoning her English husband at Liverpool in 1889.  The Maybricks lived comfortably at 'Battlecrease House'.  But the husband seems to have had a violent disposition, probably the result of his chronic hypochondria.  It's also likely that he discovered that his wife was having an affair with a man named Brierley.  Given a life sentence, Mrs Maybrick served fifteen years before being released.

Further, Hichens based the novel's pivotal Keane/Horfield antagonism on a real-life clash of temperaments between Edward Marshall Hall and the most feared criminal judge of his time, Mr Justice Avory.  As Julius Symons notes [in a piece called "The defence counsel and the hanging judge"¹], Marshall Hall was handsome and excitable, and said to be 'at his best when able to identify himself strongly with his client's cause'.  In contrast, Mr Justice Avory had been a merciless criminal prosecutor who 'became an icy judge, one who disregarded all except purely legal considerations'.  He was known as a hanging judge, something that the novel's sadistic, as well as lecherous, Lord Horfield certainly is.  So too is Horfield in the film, though the character has been bowdlerised.

In fact, just about all of these real-life details went into the film's script, and many reached the film itself. ...  That [Gregory Peck's] character is based on Marshall Hall is readily apparent from the script.  At one point, Keane tells Mrs Paradine, 'Unless I can put my heart into this case, I shall lose it, and you're deliberately keeping me in the dark.'  That line was cut from the script at the last minute.

Incidentally, Mr Justice Avory had been the prosecutor in the case of Adolf Beck, already mentioned.  He succeeded to the Bench in 1910, where he remained until his death in 1935.  Typically, notes Julian Symons, he 'would sit with eyes closed, apparently inattentive, until an incautious statement or an unjustified reply would lift his eyelids and prompt a hawk-like swoop on counsel or witness'.  A later incumbent of the same Bench, and lord chief justice of England from 1946 to 1958, Lord Rayner Goddard, mentioned by McGilligan, followed in the stern tradition of Avory but without his reputation as a 'hanging judge'.  About him, the Encyclopedia Britannica tersely notes: 'Seldom lenient but always respectful of legal proprieties, he set a valuable example to the lower judiciary in controlling the crime wave that followed World War II in England.'

In sum, Hitchcock knew his British legal and criminal history of the first half of the 20th century (and the period leading up to it) rather better than McGilligan does; and The Paradine Case reflects that rich knowledge on Hitchcock's part.   That has been my main point here.

* * *

Time out now for a mea culpa and an apology - although as it also concerns McGilligan, what I have to say may be seen to cut two ways.  Here goes, then.  American actor Ben Lyon, who starred in the 1938 film version for Gaumont of Alec Coppel's play 'I Killed the Count' (later made into an entertaining three-part episode of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'), was not the star of Hitchcock's Number Seventeen (1932).  That was the Cockney actor and manager Leon M. Lion.  Unfortunately, late one night I sent an email to McGilligan replying to his request for information about the Australian-born Coppel (who did an early draft of Vertigo) in which I committed just that error: Lyon = Lion!  My blooper duly appeared on p. 542 of McGilligan!  What I had done, I now realise, was associate my happy childhood memories of listening to Ben Lyon and his wife Bebe Daniels in the BBC radio series 'Life With the Lyons' (which I had forgotten about) with the Hitchcock-connected Leon M. Lion and the film Number Seventeen, which is another Hitchcock that I consider underrated.  So now, as I say, I apologise to both McGilligan and his readers for providing that piece of misinformation!

* * *

What I have said so far must stand for various other failings or distortions that make McGilligan's book rather less definitive than some of us had hoped for.  Mind you, I feel only vindicated by one of his findings!  On p. 64 he writes:

[Hitchcock's] records prove that he diligently kept up with the best [films].  Indeed, no director was a greater devotee; he saw as many films as time allowed, from the earliest animated photographs to daily screenings in the final months leading up to his death.

That Hitchcock was a movie buff, and 'quoted' from literally hundreds of other films in his own work - not to mention from art works, from plays and novels, from anecdotes, and from personal experience - is probably the Number One point that 'The MacGuffin' and its website have been making since their inception.  Bill Krohn in Los Angeles, from his delving in the Hitchcock archives and from his contacts with Hitchcock associates and Hitchcock family members, long ago confirmed to me that Hitchcock was influenced by these works in exactly the sorts of ways I had claimed.  (A recent example from this website: examine the scene in Psycho [1960] in which Sam and Lila late one evening knock up the sheriff and his wife - while you juxtapose a scene from Clouzot's Les Diaboliques [1955] showing an elderly teacher couple kept awake by noises from the apartment downstairs.  You will see a definite influence, right down to the likely inspiration for Sheriff Chambers's flamboyant dressing-gown!²)  Bill also mentioned to me how Hitch and Alma were regular patrons at a repertory cinema in Los Angeles run by cinematographer Gary Graver.  On the recent French-release DVD of Suspicion, Pat Hitchcock well remembers these occasions.  Hitchcock's knowledge and love of particular films, then, clearly influenced the way he made his own, as both this website (see, for example, the article "The Fragments of the Mirror") and my book have shown.   However, despite the quote on p. 64 of McGilligan, that author seems generally indifferent to such an important aspect of Hitchcock's creativity - something I'll come back to.

To an extent, I would make a similar claim about another facet of Hitchcock that surely has significance for his films - namely, his love of animals.  (The Hitchcock family's love of animals has most recently been noted in the featurette called 'The Hitchcocks on Hitch' included on the Strangers on a Train DVD.)  Full marks, though, to McGilligan for this splendid paragraph from early in his book (p.10):

From the royal family down, almost every English house of the time had a dog, if only to ward off intruders.  A faithful hound can be imagined lying on the floor as young Alfred, in bed, listened to the sleepy-time tales.  Dogs proliferate in Hitchcock films, and sometimes, like Hogarth, who often put his dogs into paintings and etchings, they are his own pets.  Dogs in Hitchcock films are invariably amusing, brave, and intuitive about the distress of their owners, and when a canine is killed, as in Rear Window, up is sent an ungodly "hue and cry," in Truffaut's words, "as if the death of a child were involved."

(Keep in mind that word 'intuitive', as I intend to come back to it.)

McGilligan also makes passing reference (on p. 656) to how Hitchcock abhorred cruelty to animals.  But I feel that the matter runs deeper than McGilligan indicates.  For one thing, I can't forget the anecdote told by Pat Hitchcock in her book 'Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man' (2003) about how one evening the whole family (Hitchcock, Alma, Pat) sat in the kitchen 'speechless and crying our eyes out' after viewing Born Free (James Hill, 1966).  I also know of two occasions some twenty years apart - neither of them reported by any of Hitchcock's biographers - when Hitchcock at the studio was rendered grief-stricken by seeing a pet dog run over.  Both times, he remained visibly shaken, almost catatonic, for days afterwards.  In such reports, I find evidence for why his films have their power to move us.  It's something that goes beyond sentimentality - or technical things, whether Hitchcock's use of montage or the critical deconstruction of texts!  Rather, I'm reminded of the poet Keats's concept of 'negative capability', the empathy he admired in Shakespeare and which he considered necessary in a great poet.  In other words, I'm suggesting that here we have a clue to another aspect of Hitchcock's creativity.

In a letter dated 22 November 1817, Keats wrote to a friend: 'If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel'.  Exactly a month later, he defined his new concept: 'Negative Capability ... is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ...'  Interesting!  What was it that Hitchcock told journalist Oriana Fallaci?  'There's nothing more stupid than logic.  Logic is the result of reasoning, reasoning is the result of experience, and who's to say whether our experiences are the right ones?  My dog doesn't understand music, Bach bores him to death.  Does that mean my dog is illogical?  It only means that his experiences are different from Bach's.'³

My point?  Well, it's a huge topic, and I'm aware that I should probably invoke any number of cultural factors that may have helped form Hitchcock's sensibility, which is what we're touching on here.  (I can't recommend too highly a book like John Carey's 'The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939' [1992] - remembering that writers like Shaw and Wells and Chesterton were influential in the circles where the young Hitchcock moved.  More on Carey's book below.)  But when Hitchcock in his films provides instances of canine 'intuition' - as in a climactic sequence of Secret Agent - I basically believe that he's referring to a form of knowing that by-passes logic and which is possible because of what we share with our animal (and avian) kin.  Nothing less!  Call it an empathy based on the fact that ultimately all is One.  In turn, such unity is what 'pure film' is essentially about.

Or look at it this way.  Australian essayist and professor of English, Walter Murdoch, once called Shakespeare 'a sort of universal counsel for the defence'.  Likewise, it seems to me, Hitchcock and another truly cosmopolitan filmmaker, Jean Renoir, both saw how 'everyone has his reasons'.  That is, rather than a case of Hitchcock simply siding with underdogs (!), the fact is that there are hardly any despicable people in Hitchcock.  Even Tracy, the eponymous blackmailer in Blackmail (1929), is shown to literally fall victim to forces beyond his control and thus to earn a measure of our empathy.  As we'll see, it is those forces - ultimately one force - that 'pure film' is about.

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Part Two: film by film

I have quoted Dan Auiler's kind remark from 1999 that '[Ken Mogg] may know more about Hitchcock and his milieu than any other film critic'.  In early 2003, I asked Dan whether he was still of that opinion.  His reply: 'More than ever.'

So, as I say, McGilligan surprised me when 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light' came out and it was evident that he had scarcely given my book a glance.  Nor this website, it appeared!  For about four years, McGilligan and I had often emailed each other and I had supposed that he would regularly check out my 'Editor's Day' column here.  That's good, I had thought, because many salient points for a Hitchcock biography are appearing in that column!  For example, I remember writing about the film script that famous novelist Arnold Bennett prepared for Hitchcock and BIP in 1928.  The script was called Punch and Judy - perhaps anticipating Hitchcockian marital melodramas to come - and I had read about it in the standard biography of Bennett by Margaret Drabble (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).  Apart from the illustriousness of Bennett's name, the venture is of interest to Hitchcockians for several reasons, such as its timing: it came just as Hitchcock was breaking from Eliot Stannard, the screenwriter who had served him so well since The Pleasure Garden.  Neither of Hitchcock's pre-McGilligan biographers (Taylor, Spoto) so much as mentions Bennett - except, that is, for a reference by Spoto to Bennett's general disdain for the British movies of the time.  Disdain for all popular movies, something practically pandemic among British intellectuals in those days, is confirmed in Bennett's case by Drabble who reports that he could see little merit in Sam Goldwyn's production of Bulldog Drummond, starring Ronald Colman, but which deservedly was a huge success when it appeared in 1929.  Drabble further reports that Bennett and Hitchcock soon fell out.  But that's really all I know about the matter.  McGilligan never mentions Bennett.  Accordingly, my curiosity about the exact nature of the Punch and Judy project remains unsatisfied.

A passing observation or two now, not unconnected with my thoughts about 'pure film'.  First, I must praise McGilligan for this formulation: 'Catholicism swirled around Hitchcock's boyhood the way London fog envelops The Lodger.'  (p. 17)  And for this, immediately afterwards: 'Catholicism pervades his films, albeit a brand of Catholicism spiked with irreverance and iconoclasm.'  Very true!  But I would add that in the last analysis, the films are translatable into a broader context again, so that the viewer in, say, Thailand or Japan may take from them a universal inference.  Again and again, at least from the early 1930s, Hitchcock's films reference 'life'.  From Rich and Strange (1932) to Rope (1948) to Vertigo (1958), his characters seek heightened experience, 'more life'.  Equally, his characters are often defined by their exclusion from that same heightened life.  Think of the crofter's wife pining for the lights of Glascow on Saturday night, in The 39 Steps (1935), or Ann Smith (Carole Lombard) stuck with Jefferson Custer (Gene Raymond) on a broken-down Ferris wheel in the rain, in Mr and Mrs Smith (1942) - an ironic 'Lifesavers' sign glowing in the distance - or a depressed Rose Balestrero (Vera Miles) wanting to retreat behind locked doors, in The Wrong Man (1957) - her incarceration literally realised before the film's end.  Soberingly, though, Hitchcock manages to imply that all of these characters are somehow misguided, often because they (like the rest of us) have been deceived by what philosophers call the time-space-causality nexus.  The ending of Under Capricorn (1949) is archetypal in this respect: a chastened Adare (Michael Wilding) is heard to say, 'Australia is a big country ... but not quite big enough.'  And the last line of the Wrong Man is: 'Miracles happen ... but they take time.'

* * *

The Pleasure Garden (1926)

McGilligan's anecdotal coverage of the first Hitchcock-directed feature (on pp. 68-71) implies that he hasn't actually seen it (or seen it recently).  For example, he repeats Truffaut's over-zealous interpretation that the film's two girls, Patsy (Virginia Valli) and Jill (Carmelita Geraghty), behave like lesbians when they share a room together on Jill's first night in London.  (p. 65)

Mind you, the film does have its element of kink.  In 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', McGilligan could have read:

In one scene, Jill models a costume for her boss, Oscar Hamilton (the name echoes that of the legendary theatre manager Oscar Hammerstein, c. 1847-1919), and is fussed over by a butterfly-like male couturier who has been sitting alongside Hamilton on a sofa, with an arm around his shoulder.  It's a pre-echo of Vandamm's chummy friendship with his male secretary Leonard, seen decades later in North by Northwest [1959].

No such moment occurs in the novel, though the predatory Hamilton had reportedly once slipped cocaine to a showgirl, with fatal results.

There is no Pleasure Garden Theatre in the novel.  The two girls find work at the Huguenot Theatre in London, and several passages make clear that 'pleasure garden' is a metaphor for the variety stage, from which its chorus girls wait to be plucked like flowers.   As the Patsy character (called Gaynor) puts it: 'We're really there for show, but some of the public don't keep to the paths.'

Flower imagery would recur in Hitchcock.  But there's a related matter.  The Catholic Hitchcock would not have failed to notice an irony - given the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden - of his film's title, and in fact The Pleasure Garden, particularly in its Lake Como sequence, is the first of many Hitchcock films to incorporate imagery of a 'lost paradise' (or a 'paradise fleetingly regained' or 'an ersatz paradise' or 'an inverted paradise') .  Indeed, I would say that such a motif, or iconography, is central to his work in general, in one variant or another: lake, garden, desert, prairie, island, sunlit beach, open countryside, snowfield, walled city, small town, mansion.  Other key 'lost paradise' films include: Easy Virtue (1927), The Manxman (1929), Young and Innocent (1937), Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn, I Confess (1953), The Trouble With Harry (1955), North by Northwest, Topaz (1969), and Frenzy (1972).

The Mountain Eagle (1926)

Understandably, McGilligan spends just a couple of pages (pp. 71-72) on this 'lost film'.

Still, it is noteworthy for being one of several 'triangle' dramas that Hitchcock filmed in the 1920s (and also later).  Also, it is the first Hitchcock film to employ the 'wronged man' motif, when the jealous Pettigrew (Bernard Goetzke), local shopkeeper and Justice of the Peace, has his rival Fearogod (Malcolm Keen) arrested and thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge of murder.

Other foreshadowings of Hitchcock ingredients to come include of the 'trial' marriages in Secret Agent and Spellbound, and the showdown of rivals that was the intended ending of Topaz.

Some thirty stills from the film survive.  These can certainly help to tell us what the film was like:

For example [I wrote in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'], the first of a pair of stills shows Fearogod and Beatrice [Nita Naldi] in his log cabin: they are smiling and she is winding lengths of woollen yarn around his held-out arms.  The next still is practically identical - except that the smiles have gone and Fearogod's arms are now held rather higher because someone is snapping handcuffs on his wrists.  Ironic transitions like this would become a feature of Hitchcock's films.  There are several in North by Northwest, such as the moment when a man's gasp of apparent recognition at a photograph proves to be caused by the knife embedded in his back.

The Lodger (1926)

McGilligan notes of the stage version of Mrs Belloc Lowndes's novel that Hitchcock saw it in 1916, and that it included an element of comedy.  The play 'introduced the idea of the lodger wandering about at night in search of homeless people, presenting them with buns concealing gold pieces - an activity that is misinterpreted by Scotland Yard.'  (p. 78)

Curiously, to anyone with Freudian training, such information indirectly supports my claim in the 1992 'Hitchcock Annual' that the lodger may have been part-based on someone like Ernest Renan.  (Of course, the character is also a Jack the Ripper figure.)  Renan, the author of the popular 'Vie de Jésus' (1888), was featured in a psychological study by Albert Mordell first published in 1919.  In a chapter called "The Oedipus Complex and the Brother and Sister Complex", Mordell suggests that Renan's extreme attachment to his sister explains 'the gentleness, the moral tone, the kindliness we find in his writings', and adds that Renan's 'love for his sister was a great factor in his making his Jesus somewhat effeminate.'

Hence, perhaps, Ivor Novello's giving the neurasthenic lodger a hint of religious mania - a character who seems otherwise gentle and inoffensive.  In short, making him a troubled Christ figure.  (Recall the moment when a cross-like shadow appears on his face.)   If Dickens had earlier created a heroic Christ figure in his Sydney Carton of 'A Tale of Two Cities' (1859) - which was another of the Dickens novels that Hitchcock read at school - then The Lodger may be seen to offer a new 'introspective' form of melodrama, influenced by late 19th century and Freudian sensibilities.

Some excerpts from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':

The [Londoners] in the film treat the news of the killings with a mixture of frenzied concern, jocularity and business-as-usual aplomb - but not indifference.  It's as if the city had taken on an extra lease of life. ...

In Hitchcock's phrase, it's a film with 'lots of psychology'.  To begin with, the general vitality stimulates us, alerts us to indefinite possibilities (cf the beginning of Psycho).  Freud might have called this the arousing of the viewer's psychic energy.  Such a notion would have been timely.  In 1926, Freud's influence was just reaching the London stage in a new play called The Lash, in which a forgotten childhood trauma proves to hold the solution to a present-day mystery.

Further, The Lodger has an explanatory flashback of its own.  Based on a passage in the novel [Chapter XI] that suggests The Avenger is a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure, it shows the lodger dancing with his blonde sister at her coming-out ball.  Ostensibly the flashback clears the lodger of his sister's murder, but on closer examination it carries the opposite possibility.  At the very least, it implies a brother-sister complex of juicy ripeness! [This idea is developed below in the section on Shadow of a Doubt.]

Downhill (1927)

In discussing Downhill (on pp. 90-92), McGilligan refers to how, after arriving in France, 'the hero suffers disgrace, becomes a race driver, and worse.'  Well, the hero, Roddy (Ivor Novello), never becomes a race driver in prints of Downhill that I've seen, so I'm wondering where McGilligan got his information from.

Mind you, those may have been bootleg prints that I saw.  According to information supplied by Caroline Millar of the British Film Institute in 2001: 'Unfortunately the BFI does not own the rights to [The Pleasure Garden and Downhill, though it has prints of both those films] ... they are held by the company Carlton International.'  That information was confirmed by a spokesman of the company, Mr Kevin Domanski, who told an inquirer: 'I'm sorry but we have no plans to release those two videos [sic].'  A follow-up inquiry was answered by the company's International Video Manager, Mr Simon Wheeler, to the same effect.

About this rather scandalous situation involving the non-availability on video or DVD of several early Hitchcocks (other such non-officially-available titles include Waltzes From Vienna and Under Capricorn), McGilligan stays silent.

Lastly, an extract about Downhill from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':

In the stage performance, which had a short run in the West End and longer in the provinces, Novello thrilled his fans by washing his legs after the rugby match.  'The scent of good honest soap crosses the footlights', wrote an appreciative James Agate.  Hitchcock couldn't manage that, but he did include a shot of Novello naked from the waist up.  Later, in both The Ring and The Manxman, he remembered to include similar shots of a robust Carl Brisson.

Later again, of course, he did the same thing with James Stewart (Rear Window) and Cary Grant (To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest).

Easy Virtue (1927)

First, some information from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':

Hitchcock said that his film Rebecca owed much to the play His House in Order (1906) by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero.  Drama critic Benedict Nightingale has suggested the same ancestor for Noël Coward's play Easy Virtue (1925).   'But', he adds, 'Coward is more contemptuous of the smugness, insularity and hypocrisy of the "respectable" people than Pinero dared be.'  In filming Easy Virtue, Hitchcock introduced into his work an occasional criticism of the upper classes that would continue to inform his films up to Marnie and beyond.

In McGilligan's discussion of Easy Virtue (pp. 92-93), he gives Hitchcock his due for his protean brilliance - not only dreaming up 'unusual camera stunts' but taking pleasure 'in figuring out how to execute them before the specialists did'.  Here McGilligan is referring to the shot that opens the film: a judge's-eye view, through a monacle, of a crowded courtroom.  What McGilligan never does, though, is relate such 'stunts' to their thematic or dramatic import.  For example, in this case the emphasis is on subjectivity, foreshadowing the full-bore treatment of alienation seen in a later 'lost paradise' film like The Paradine Case ...

The Ring (1927)

Scrupulously, McGilligan notes that The Ring was the first BIP film.  Also, he picks up Hitchcock for telling Peter Bogdanovich that he - Hitchcock - 'taught' cinematography to his new cameraman, Jack Cox.  Cox had actually worked in the industry since 1913, filming several pictures in the early 1920s for top director Maurice Elvey.

But McGilligan's discussion of The Ring (pp. 98-100) omits much pertinent information.  A case in point: The Ring was one of at least two BIP films that drew heavily on the plot and often the mood of the German Variety (1925), directed by E.A. Dupont.  (Another BIP film to do so was Piccadilly [1929], scripted by Arnold Bennett and directed by Dupont himself.)

In 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', I refer to the film's 'greatness'.  Some excerpts from what I wrote there:

A misconception has it that Hitchcock wasn't interested in 'documentary' detail.  A careful look at any of his silent films, and several of the later ones, dispels that notion.  In particular, the first reel of each of the silent pictures is typically a triumph of sustained scene-setting.  The Ring opens with atmospheric shots of a drum being beaten, roundabouts whirling, a girl shrieking on a swing - shots with a 'documentary' impact that might have made John Grierson proud.

... The still-shot of the Albert Hall auditorium that's behind the opening titles employs a [particular] effect, that of Stimmung, mood achieved by means of lighting.  The distant, lit-up boxing ring surrounded by unseen watchers has intimations of destiny.

I think this next observation carries implications for what Hitchcock would call 'pure film':

The circular Albert Hall of the film's climax may be far removed from the boxing tent of the opening scenes - but in another way both worlds [of, respectively, circus boxing troupe and championship boxing] reflect each other.   Certainly, to the boxers themselves, it's all one.  At a party in [ex-circus boxer] Jack's London flat, where the champagne has flowed freely, two girls do a wild dance, then retire to their respective 'corners' and are revived by their 'seconds'.  At a night-club, Jack [Carl Brisson] and [the champion] Bob [Ian Hunter] come to blows, and Bob appears to be 'counted out' by the slide of a trombone being played nearby.  Contrariwise, at the Albert Hall, champagne is poured on the boxers' heads to spur them on.

Hitchcock used a recurring image of a billboard to chart the rise of Jack from a minor fighter to championship contender, and linked that image to the passing of the seasons.  Of that imagery, Hitchcock said that he took great care over it.

Regarding Bob, who is a go-getter and a bit of a rogue - and perhaps a lost soul - I can inform McGilligan that the character appears to be based in part on Australian boxer Les Darcy (1895-1917).

The Farmer's Wife (1928)

McGilligan spends just a page (pp. 100-01) on Hitchcock's and Eliot Stannard's robust adaptation of Eden Phillpotts's stage success.  He offers a measure of its appeal in this well-turned sentence: 'Its nimble comedy, subtle camera work, and excellent acting make it the most unlikely and enjoyable of [Hitchcock's] silent films.'

Of course, for the dedicated Hitchcock enthusiast there are deeper matters, and connections, to be appreciated.  Speaking of the passing of the seasons (see last entry), for example, one again finds the preoccupation with universal 'life' that was always a mark of Hitchcock's filmmaking.  (Of Frenzy, centred on Covent Garden Market, Hitchcock boasted to a journalist that it was full of 'life'.  The younger Hitchcock's irrepressible energy was often remarked on; I suspect that some of it came from his apprenticeship to vigorous director Graham Cutts and was reinforced by his admiration for the 'vitalism' of George Bernard Shaw.)

The entry on The Farmer's Wife in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' begins:

As so often in Hitchcock's films, life and sexuality are the subject matter of The Farmer's Wife, in which rural images carry a voluptuous charge.  Sweetland's elderly neighbour Coaker speaks of pulling turnips, 'as round and white as a woman's bosom'.  The intention of the filmmakers is less prurient than it is to share a matter of profound importance, to let the viewer 'enter in' (as the housekeeper Minta's phrase has it).  The film is an antecedent of the equally sagacious The Trouble With Harry.

Incidentally, apropos Frenzy, that film's buxom barmaid Maisie has her rural predecessor in The Farmer's Wife, the equally buxom Mercy Bassett!

Champagne (1928)

McGilligan (pp. 102-05) sees past the fact that Champagne was written in a hurry - 'on the back of envelopes on the way to the studio', according to assistant cameraman Alfred Roome - and that Hitchcock was dissatisfied with the acting of Betty Balfour as The Girl.

McGilligan: 'Champagne wasn't a bad picture, really, just predictable'.

In truth, perfectly good pictures have been written 'on the back of envelopes on the way to ...' - think of Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937)!  Writing a script in such a manner may force filmmakers to rethink assumptions about, for example, their audience.  Also, it may encourage a more 'libidinous' mode of story-telling, or one more akin to 'primary-process' thinking.  (Recall that, by 1928, not only Freud, but Surrealism, was in the air.)

From 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':

The most interesting character in Champagne may be The Man [Theo von Alten].  Introduced by a subjective shot through the bottom of an up-ended champagne glass, he turns out not to be the Vile Seducer we have supposed but someone paid by the millionaire [Gordon Harker] to keep watch on his daughter, Betty.  Even when this is disclosed at the end, The Man continues his watching.  Again he up-ends a champagne glass, and through it he observes Betty and her fiancé [Jean Bradin] embracing.  Clearly The Man is also a surrogate for the audience.

What, then, does he know?  What do we know?  The necessarily equivocal answer is that none of us is quite sure, though we may fantasise.  The theme of Champagne is what the critic Robin Wood euphemistically calls Order versus Chaos.  In the cabaret, with its art deco friezes and pillars, The Man tells Betty, 'anything could happen to you in a place like this' - and the recurring shot of the champagne glass briefly returns.  Then, The Man appears to escort Betty past dancing couples and into a private booth, where he tries to rape her.  But in the next shot, the two of them are still conversing over drinks in the ballroom.  So whose fantasy have we just seen?  The Man's?  Betty's?  Ours?  All of those?

The cabaret scene in its entirety, which recalls the one in Downhill, is brilliant, worthy of Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967), which it much resembles.  (For example, the shot of the champagne glass, which triggers various fantasies, functions in that respect exactly like the recurring sound of harness bells in Buñuel's film.)

And Champagne, overall, is surely rather less predictable than McGilligan claims ...

The Manxman (1929)

Neither McGilligan (p.106) nor Spoto, in their respective Hitchcock biographies, spends time on The Manxman.  Indeed, it must be said that both biographers rather skimp the director's silent films generally.  (McGilligan may have less excuse than Spoto for neglecting them, as his book purports to correct Spoto's imbalances!)

'The MacGuffin' #18 (February-May 1996) devoted an issue to The Manxman, with its findings summarised in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'.  Clearly, Hall Caine's novel (1894), set on the Isle of Man, took its inspiration from Tennyson's narrative poem 'Enoch Arden' (1864).  In turn, the broadly tragic theme of two friends and rivals vying for a girl they have both known since boyhood, had been used before (e.g., in an 1858 poem called 'Outward Bound' by Adelaide Proctor, whose work was admired by Dickens).  But Tennyson's very imagery is appropriated by Hall Caine's novel - and by Hitchcock's film.  The poem begins:

Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf
In cluster; then a moulder'd church; and higher
A long street climbs to one tall-tower'd mill ...

Hitchcock's film omits the 'moulder'd church' (but not the religious theme).  Otherwise, the film's iconography is virtually the same as both Tennyson's and Caine's, except that it adds the recurring image of a lighthouse whose revolving beam sweeps the darkness.  The credits sequence highlights waves breaking on rocks, another powerful image  - and one that will recur in the credits of Jamaica Inn (1939) and in Rebecca and Vertigo.  (Note: the waves in Jamaica Inn dash away the credit titles, an effect copied in the credits sequence of The Birds [1963], but where the 'waves' are diving birds.)  Such an image may be seen to represent the single life/death 'force' I referred to earlier (which in Blackmail will drive the unfortunate Tracy to his death).

But here's 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':

Unfortunately, to make a popular film of Sir Hall Caine's best-selling novel was, by 1928, likely to present problems, especially for a progressive director like Hitchcock.  The basic story ... had been around too long.  A film of the novel had appeared in 1916, and there had been two cinema versions of Enoch Arden made [and/or supervised] by D.W. Griffith back in [1911 and 1915].  So when BIP's John Maxwell insisted despite everything that the film go ahead, Hitchcock may well have wondered, what could a new Manxman hope to achieve?  The story was without humour, if not totally hackneyed.  The fact is that during the making of the film, Hitch showed signs of being bored.

... This didn't stop the film from containing one of those idyllic interludes that had sometimes figured in earlier Hitchcock films, such as The Pleasure Garden, suggesting nostalgia for a lost paradise.  The corresponding passage in the novel [Book II, Chapter V] reveals that Philip and Kate 'were like other children of the garden of Eden, driven out and stripped naked'.

The Manxman has many strong scenes, though Hitchcock considered its plot 'very banal'.  Film historian Charles Barr calls The Manxman 'one of the finest of all [Hitchcock's] films'.   In 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', I simply comment, 'the jury remains out'.

Footnotes

1.  See Julian Symons, 'Crime and detection: an illustrated history from 1840' (Panther Books edition, 1968), pp. 122-23.  [To return to your place in the text, click on the footnote number.]

2.  For more on the influence of Les Diaboliques on Psycho, see Stephen Rebello, 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho' (Harper Perennial edition, 1991), pp. 20-22, and passim.

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