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Our Alfred Hitchcock Enthusiasts Group provides one extension of this website.  Here's the URL: http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/hitchen/ 

1. 'Editor's Day'/'Editor's Week': May 24, 31, June 7, 14, 21, 28, July 5, 12, 19, 26, August 2, 9, 16, 23.  2. News and Comment (last revised 26 July).  3. Links to our other pages.

And what you'll find on our other pages includes:

1. About 'The MacGuffin'/ How to Subscribe (revised 8 June, 2004).  2. About me (skippable).  3. ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK 1 - TMWKTM. ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK 2 - Vertigo. ACADEMIC HITCHOCK 3 - Marnie.  4. EXCERPTS 1 - "Confined Spaces" in Hitchcock.  EXCERPTS 2 - Marnie. EXCERPTS 3 - Irony; Jamaica Inn. EXCERPTS 4 - Mr and Mrs Smith. EXCERPTS 5 - critical writing on Hitchcock.  EXCERPTS 6 - Stage Fright.  EXCERPTS 7 - Franz Waxman and Suspicion.   5. About Arthur Schopenhauer (who? why?).  6. Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Dickens.  7. Article: Hitchcock on melodrama.  8. Screenwriter Charles Bennett on "Shakespeare, Melodrama, and Hitchcock".  9. Two-part 'Report' on Patrick McGilligan's biography of Hitchcock (including film-by-film, to 1950).  10. The original, previewed ending for Suspicion (script excerpt + Bill Krohn's research).  11. Notes on all of Hitchcock's films (1: the silent films).  12. Notes on The 39 Steps.  13. Notes on Rear Window.  14. Notes on Vertigo (and Strangers on a Train).  15. Two discoveries: (1) Frank Baker's novel 'The Birds'; (2) Wanted for Murder (film by Lawrence Huntington).  16. Hitchcock's villains.  17. Kim Novak interview.  18. Interview with Psycho screenwriter, Joseph Stefano.  19. Long article: "The fragments of the mirror: Vertigo and its sources".  20. Article by Bill Krohn on Family Plot.  21. Article by Martin Grams Jr: "Alfred Hitchcock Presents".  22. Article by Martin Grams Jr: "Murder and Suspense".  23. Article by Philip Kemp: "Hitching Posts" (on Hitch's 'imitators').  24. New Publications (one of this site's main pages - last revised 7 August, 2008).  25. FAQs page (new material added 12 May, 2006).  26. Links (last revised 18 January, 2008).

Links to these other pages are grouped at the bottom of this page. (If you want to go straight to the bottom of this page now, click here.)

[This feature will cover musings on Hitchcock-related topics and similar matters with which the 'MacGuffin' editor has been occupied lately. Don't expect total rigour - these are basically 'ideas in progress'. Thanks!]     

Stage Fright documentary.  Film director Richard Franklin was quite right to compare Jonathan to Psycho's Norman Bates.  For it's clear that Todd plays the mentally unstable Jonathan as like a little boy - subject to tantrums in unguarded moments -  playing at being a grown man who would rise from the chorus-line to win the arm of stage star Charlotte: aspiration beyond a show's chorus-line is a motif that goes back to two of Hitchcock's earliest films: The Pleasure Garden (1925) and Downhill (1927).  The fact that sometimes Jonathan's (not Todd's) 'performance' shows through is doubtless what Hitchcock intended - though not without ambiguity.  For example, at one point Jonathan appears to wake from dozing in a chair, and promptly seizes the incriminating evidence, a bloodstained dress (itself a highly melodramatic object), and throws it on the fire.  Had he really been dozing?  Or had he overheard Eve talking with her father Commodore Gill (Alastair Sim), and realised that they might go to the police (which, appropriately, would be 'curtains' for him)?  In other words, is his action here another piece of acting?  Well, we can't be sure, and that's the point, definitely.  In turn, Hitchcock wants us to see that we're all subjective, 'all in our private traps', as Norman Bates says.  Molly Haskell puts it like this:  'We are left only ... with the distinct, occasionally overlapping truths of a group of disparate human beings.'  I'll talk next time about, for example, Mrs Gill (Sybil Thorndike), who lives in a a world of her own but not dysfunctionally so (or not altogether).  Meanwhile, Hitchcock as usual implies the need for a general compassion. For me, a key moment is how, even when (contra Truffaut's statement above) Eve's life is in danger, at the film's climax, she listens to the now clearly psychopathic Jonathan with pity - Charlotte had been using him all along - and exclaims, 'Oh, Jonathan, I'm so desperately sorry for you.'  (See frame-capture below.)  A note in Whitfield Cook's screenplay tells us that she means it.  Her own life isn't everything.  Eve has attained dual-mindedness.  More next time.

                                                                                          

Stage Fright gives us one of Hitchcock's 'representative cross-sections of society'.  In theory, it should have been even more engaging than it is.  But for all of its ingenuity and humour (worth another item here next time, possibly, in which I'll further sum up), the film never attains a sense of urgency, or of anything very substantial being at stake.

                                                                           

 Is all of this coincidence?  I don't think so.  I believe that Hitchcock and his screenwriter, Whitfield Cook, as part of their considerable research, had read the story on which All About Eve was based.  That story, called "The Wisdom of Eve", by Mary Orr, appeared in 'Cosmopolitan' in May 1946.  And in 1949 Orr's dramatised radio adaptation of her story was broadcast on NBC's 'Radio Guild Playhouse'.
   
                                                                                  

June 14 My thanks to reader MR who drew my attention to some Hitchcock references on the Dave Kehr website last month (www.davekehr.com).  In particular, it's evident that Kehr, and critic/screenwriter Kent Jones (on the site's Comments pages), would probably support our 'Seriously Alfred Hitchcock' discussion group who recently agreed that, in Psycho (1960), the psychiatrist's scene serves a necessary function though it has often been criticised.  (Hitchcock himself knew that the scene risked being 'a hat-grabber', meaning that audiences might get impatient with it.)  Those critics, I once suggested, are like the people mentioned by J.B. Priestley who 'have never been into the kitchen'.  That is, Priestley was comparing a play to a menu by a master chef: playgoers sometimes complain of individual scenes while forgetting that a menu has several, even many, courses, each designed with the others in mind.  Kent Jones put it this way.  'Ultimately, ... it's the whole film that counts.  But when you think of Psycho, do you think of [the psychiatrist played by] Simon Oakland?  Probably not.  Nor are you likely to think of [the sheriff played by] John McIntire telling the story of Norman [Tony Perkins] and his mother.  However, the reason I've always disliked Brian De Palma's films is that he has never had the patience for such scenes - he obviously looked at Hitchcock and thought, "I think I'll leave out all the boring stuff and take what's great."'  Now, Dave Kehr had this to say about the scene with the psychiatrist: '[it] is clearly meant ironically - as an explanation that explains nothing.'  (It does, however, provide a breathing-space for the audience after the excitement immediately preceding it - and a bridge to the scene in Norman's cell which follows, straight after we have heard the psychiatrist say that Norman has now 'become' his mother.  So we watch the latter scene with heightened curiosity ...)  And Kehr continued: 'Hitchcock underlines this [irony] by framing Simon Oakland against a pitiful little hand sink in the background of his [sic] office, an appropriately impotent echo of the torrents of running water that have been used throughout the film as symbols of the characters' futile attempts to cleanse themselves [of] guilt.'  Hmm.  That may be the case, but I have previously analysed the scene somewhat differently, and would like to now repeat the gist of my analysis here.  First, though, let's note that the shot of the hand sink (basin) occurs only briefly and about half-way through the scene.  Much more prolonged and prominent is the set-up shown in the frame-capture below.  Behind Simon Oakland are several objects, each of which stands in contrast to ones we've seen earlier.  A photo of a motorcycle cop posing innocuously with his bike contrasts with the highway patrolman in his police car who had seemed so threatening to Marion [Janet Leigh].  A framed map of Shasta County seems tame compared with the dreamy vista of a windswept desert framed on the wall in the realty office where Marion worked (and had dreamed of escaping to 'a private island' with boyfriend Sam [John Gavin]).  And a stilled electric fan contrasts with the whirring fan in the hotel room we've seen in the film's opening scene, when Marion and Sam had made love.  As for the filing cabinet symbolically (or actually) reducing each police case to a banal set of jottings on a card, I think forward to how the film Marnie (1964) is another 'case study' brought to life by Hitchcock's story, defying the (deliberately) clichéd credits sequence showing pages turning (as if Marnie were a conventional literary heroine from a 1930s movie produced by Irving Thalberg or David Selznick).  Similarly, the basin mentioned by Kehr is another banal object which, yes, contrasts with the dynamics of the shower scene.  All of which, I've said previously, reminds me of the famous last line of John Milton's verse-drama about blindness, 'Samson Agonistes' (1671): 'And calm of mind, all passion spent'.  Also, as I've previously shown, Psycho has a whole motif of 'blindness' (and 'angels' and 'waiting'), in keeping with its deliberate reference to another even more famous last line by Milton about blindness, namely, in his 16th Sonnet: 'They [certain angels] also serve who only stand and wait.'  Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano once confirmed to Dr Phil Skerry that he had Milton in mind when he gave the ironic line to Marion, 'They also pay who meet in hotel rooms.'  (Note.  Almost certainly, Hitchcock would have studied Milton at school.)  As for a Hitchcock film being about 'passion' and finally 'passion spent', isn't that true of virtually all of them?  Think, say, of Vertigo (1958) with its equally ironic or ambivalent ending (and another garbed mother-figure) ...       

                                                                           

our 'Seriously Alfred Hitchcock' Yahoo Group, where I further likened Psycho to a surreal version of Henrik Ibsen's anti-bourgeois play 'Ghosts', with its theme of incest.)  And when you look at the transcript on the HitchcockWiki site of the 'Making of Psycho' documentary, you find some revealing quotes.  I don't necessarly mean Janet Leigh's remark that Hitchcock asked her to help John Gavin show more 'passion' in the opening scene (whereupon I gather she squeezed him intimately, or something!), nor even her comment on Marion Crane's 'desperate grasp at life' (meaning stealing the money to be with Sam).  What particularly struck me were a couple of remarks by screenwriter Joseph Stefano.  First, he mentions a deleted scene in which Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam (Gavin) acknowledge that they have both 'lost someone they love', meaning the dead Marion (Leigh).  And, second, I was struck by Stefano's acknowledgement of the audience.  The part of Marion needed someone of the stature of Leigh, he says, 'in order to keep the audience with her [after her character is killed].  Because at an early point in the movie, we ask you [the audience] to forget everybody you loved [Marion and, I guess, Sam] and like these people [Norman and, presumably, Arbogast].'  So, yes, Psycho isn't the only Hitchcock film about 'passion' and 'passion spent'.  Nearly every Hitchcock film first arouses us and then, finally, calms us down again.  More another time.

                                                                                            

June 28 The 'theatrical occasion', in the hands of a knowing playwright or filmmaker, can be imbued with eroticism (see above, on Psycho, et al.).  This week I want to relate such a topic to 19th-century precedents for Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), notably Wagner's opera 'Tristan und Isolde' (1865) and Henrik Ibsen's 'symbolic' last plays, especially 'The Master Builder' (1892).  'Tristan und Isolde' (by Hitchcock's favourite composer) has been described as 'on the surface a celebration of unbridled sensuality' (Barry Millington, 'Wagner', 1984, p. 229) and - not least because of its use of the 'unresolved chord' - a 4½-hour exercise in suspense.  Also, critics are generally agreed that 'Tristan' is the Wagner opera that owes most to the notion of the inimical cosmic Will (life/death 'force'), as propounded by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.  Now let's consider Ibsen's 'The Master Builder', with its tower climax.  As I recently pointed out to our 'Seriously Alfred Hitchcock' Yahoo Group, it's almost unthinkable that Hitchcock, an inveterate play-goer, would not have seen and been influenced by the plays of Ibsen, who almost single-handedly transformed the 19th-century theatre.  (As early as 1891, in 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism', George Bernard Shaw was commending Ibsen's plays to English audiences.)  Something that struck me about 'The Master Builder' was its 'biographical' elements (on which more in a moment) and also its opposing of 'duty' to 'joy'.  The master builder Solness is married to the boring Aline who constantly refers to her 'duty' to be a good bourgeois.  Well, in an earlier Ibsen play, 'Rosmersholm'/'The House of Rosmer' (1887), there's the famous line, 'The [dutiful] Rosmer way of life does ennoble ... but it kills joy.'  And 'The Master Builder' takes up that idea.  Solness, a genius, has begun to feel his powers flagging.  Casting around for some means to fulfil his inner vision, and maintain both his sexual and creative energy, he is inspired - to his death, ultimately - by the young woman Hilde who has idolised him since she was a young girl.  Ibsen translator James McFarlane writes: '"The Master Builder" ... is the product of a mind deeply preoccupied with the nature of power ... [and is] a study in the erotic.  Potency, the capacity to exert some inherent power, is the theme to which the events ... constantly relate.'  Perhaps it's merely a coincidence that in 1891, when he was 63, Ibsen had an emotional involvement with 27-year-old Hildur Andersen, a concert pianist, whom he had met when she was 10.  (Another famous Ibsen translator, and Ibsen biographer, Michael Meyer, casts doubt on attempts to link Hildur Andersen with the character Hilde.)  What isn't in dispute is how the play opposes 'duty' to 'joy' - of various kinds, both sexual and spiritual - and suitably climaxes when Solness climbs the tower of a newly-erected villa to place a garland of greenery there - and falls to his death.  The villa's tower recalls the church tower where Hilde, aged 13, had first seen Solness, and afterwards - some scholars suggest - had her first orgasm.  Nor can it be denied, I think, that there are several parallels in some of this with Hitchcock films, notably of course Vertigo.  While the film's Coit Tower is an obvious phallic symbol (which Hitchcock relished), the connotations of towers and 'ascent' accrue throughout the film, suitably culminating in the tower scene at the Mission San Juan Bautista - where Scottie (James Stewart) finally loses the woman Judy/'Madeleine' (Kim Novak) who had been his 'second chance' (see frame-capture below).  The ambiguity of Judy's fall to her death, after she has been frightened by a black-garbed 'mother superior' (note: Aline Solness in 'The Master Builder' is also dressed in black during Act III), has its correspondence in the multivalence of Ibsen's climax.  Further, the film's Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), who has become over-attached to Scottie with little prospect of a sexual relationship (since they broke off their engagement back in 'good old college days'), is effectively another symbol of sterile 'duty' (wasting her time 'in the underwear department', as Scottie puts it, referring to her commercial graphics), and another mother-symbol ('Mother's here', she tells Scottie after he suffers a breakdown mid-way through the film).  By contrast, Judy/'Madeleine' is the film's (and Scottie's) 'potency' symbol.  (For correspondent JG, I would add this.  We agree, I think, that Hitchcock's films are about the life/death force, and I have shown how this applies to The 39 Steps [1935], with its motif of 'quickening'.  In particular, the music for the life-goes-on shot of the chorus girls at the end, while Mr Memory - another victim of 'duty', as Hitchcock himself told Truffaut - lies dying, is taken from the film Evergreen [1934].  That is, until the music segues into a few bars from the song "Ain't She Sweet" as Hannay leaves with Pamela in the film's last shot.  Anyway, compare the green garland that Solness carries up the tower at the end of 'The Master Builder' ...)  Interestingly, Dr Muriel Bradbrook notes that the 'two thinkers who influenced Ibsen most profoundly, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, both stressed the doctrine of the Will' ('Ibsen the Norwegian', 1966 edition, p. 14n).  And, describing a long dialogue passage between Solness and Hilde in Act II of 'The Master Builder', she calls it 'a sustained love duet in the manner of [Wagner's] "Tristan" ...' (p. 128).  QED.  More another time.

                                                                                                                      

July 5 'How ghostly!' wrote Eric Bentley about the relation of play and audience in the live theatre ('the theatrical occasion', as he called it - see above, June 21 and June 28).  A well-known book on the nature of film is called 'The Celluloid Ghost'.  Alfred Hitchcock was fascinated by ghost stories and plays, including his cherished project to film J.M. Barrie's 'Mary Rose'.  I have suggested (see above, June 28) that there are correspondences in Hitchcock's films with the plays of Henrik Ibsen, one of which was called 'Ghosts' (the title referring in part to a 'bourgeois' tendency to put 'duty' above 'joy', to settle for hypocrisy and self-deception over honesty).  Several of Hitchcock's films from Rebecca onwards have 'ghostly' elements, but especially there's his masterpiece Vertigo.  I suggested last time (June 28) that Vertigo is both erotic and about something more, the very life/death force itself (Will).  Coit Tower in Vertigo symbolises Scottie's eroticism (focussed on the girl Judy); the tower at San Juan Bautista, which effectively subsumes Coit Tower, symbolises Scottie's quest for the transcendental and the numinous (focussed on the 'ghostly' woman he knows as Madeleine).  Today I want to suggest that Vertigo is both a ghost story and a literal detective story whose ultimate subject is the nature of the film audience - with especial reference to the nature of viewing film ('the film occasion' we might call it).  It thus deals with illusion and reality, with elements drawn from both the traditional ghost story (but especially the English ghost story - I'll explain that in a moment) and from the nature of society (and epistemology and ontology), i.e., Ibsenesque elements.  It is a complex, profound masterpiece indeed.  Okay.  In the mid-1930s Hitchcock spoke of how he made films for audiences who 'have become sluggish and jellified'.  A decade earlier, Agatha Christie had dedicated her adventure-thriller 'The Secret Adversary' (1922) 'to all those who lead monotonous lives, in the hope that they may experience at second-hand the delights and dangers of adventure'.  (Hmm.  Thank you for condescending, ma'am!)  Here's my point.  In a splendid chapter on "Ghosts" in his book 'Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination' (2002), Peter Ackroyd draws attention to how, in the 1920s and 1930s, a recrudescence of ghost stories in England had coincided with the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction.  He draws a particular parallel between the two forms.  Ghost stories, he notes, such as those of the British master, M.R. James (1862-1936), are often reticent about sexuality.  Likewise, '[t]he great English fictional detectives - Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Father Brown - are curiously sexless figures, while sex itself is the instigator of crime and iniquity.  It is a very native displacement of passion.'  Well, isn't this largely true of Vertigo as well?  Behind the film is Gavin Elster's affair with Judy and the murder of his wife (with parallels to the story of his wife's grandmother Carlotta Valdes), but the film itself is in large measure about Scottie's attempt to solve the mystery of 'Madeleine' who has ghostly, uncanny qualities.  (Hitchcock even dressed the character in grey, the better to suggest that she had just emerged, like a ghost, from the San Francisco fog.)  On the other hand, of course, Scottie starts to fall in love with 'Madeleine' (and later Madeleine-in-Judy).  The film might thus be supposed to give the audience everything we could want: sublimation and/or scepticism, and spectacle, but also sexual fulfilment (represented by the famous 360° shot in Judy's hotel room), while moving the narrative steadily, like an Ibsen play, to an ambiguous, multivalent conclusion (see above, June 28).  This conclusion, in which Madeleine-in-Judy falls to her death, and a nun (or 'mother-superior figure') stands in for a ghost, may be read in at least two ways.  Today I want to concentrate on the 'ghostly' aspects, and in a minute I'll draw again on Ackroyd.  First, the nun is made to rise up, silently, like an apparition or ghost, frightening poor Judy to her death.  (Judy, an accomplice in murder, has had good reason to feel scared - of the ghost of the real Madeleine perhaps.)  The nun's black robes are thus apt, even as they imply - by opposition - the conventional white spectral appearance of a revenant.  Next, here's something that Ackroyd points out: that M.R. James, not himself a Catholic, had studied Church history, and in particular 'the martyrdom of the saints', so that he was not untouched by intimations of the Catholic past.  The vengeful ghosts in his stories might, or might not, show Catholics in a good light.  One James character, who has survived a ghostly encounter, remarks wryly that events have only 'served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome'!   But Ackroyd also writes this: '[Father] Ronald Knox established a Detection Club in 1929 for the sole purpose of excluding "Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery", an antipathy which represents an index of the English sensibility itself.'  I've space only to suggest that the nun at the end of Vertigo may be either a 'bad' ghost (a representative of the old unenlightened ways) or a 'good' ghost (who takes compassion on our human failings, our misguidedness, our failure from ignorance or circumstance to grasp 'joy').  More next time.