Notes by Ken Mogg

(1) 'The Birds' by Frank Baker

There are several literary antecedents, besides Daphne du Maurier's well-known short story, for Hitchcock's film The Birds (1963).  They include Philip MacDonald's short story called "Our Feathered Friends" (1931) and Frank Baker's remarkable novel 'The Birds' (1936).  But the film's credits acknowledge only the Daphne du Maurier story, originally published in her collection called 'The Apple Tree' (1952).

We first noted this anomaly in "Editor's Day", November 11, 2005.  For information about the estimable Frank Baker, we referred our readers to the following website:http://www.stormloader.com/users/abrax7/frankbaker.htm.  A brief synopsis of Baker's 'The Birds' is included there: 'The birds comport themselves like bleak, ever-attentive emissaries, varying between savagery and stony indifference. Explicitly they are corrupt emanations from the soul of man taking revenge on the host that has betrayed them.'  The novel begins and ends in Cornwall (which is the setting for Daphne du Maurier's short story) and climaxes in London as hordes of birds attack worshippers in St Paul's Cathedral. 

Subsequently in "Editor's Day" we published the following account of Baker's novel, which has prompted several Hitchcock specialists to comment that it's hardly conceiveable that screenwriter Evan Hunter hadn't read the novel before he wrote Hitchcock's The Birds.  A long article, for separate publication, is being prepared on this matter of The Birds and its antecedents.  But we believe the "Editor's Day" entry itself holds interest:

December 9, 2005 As reported here on November 11, Frank Baker's novel 'The Birds' (1936; 1964) was almost certainly an influence on Hitchcock's and Evan Hunter's 1963 film of that name, even though the filmmakers claimed only to be (loosely) adapting Daphne du Maurier's short story, also called "The Birds".  Having recently finished reading Baker's novel - which is a splendid piece of 'dystopian' fiction in its own right, a wise if misanthropic evocation of 1930s British society - I cannot do more than begin to convey here the qualities of the book.  Baker has put much of himself into it: he was a bisexual man in a generally staid and uptight society, and the animus that drives the book is deeply-felt and cogent.  It effectively poses to Hitchcockians whether their admired film isn't synthetic and shallow by comparison!  (I am talking now of the other side of Hitchcock's exemplary detachment and vision of a humanity in which we all share that I have lately praised here!)  The film 'borrows' a huge number of Baker's ideas and effects.  I'll try and list the main ones.  First and foremost, apart from the bird attacks themselves, both Baker's and Hitchcock's stories revolve around a grown-up man's relation to his widowed mother at a time of crisis, including the fact that he has just met a woman whom he may eventually marry.  The mother - Lillian in the novel, Lydia in the film - speaks of how she fears her son no longer cares for her.  The novel's narrator comments: 'I denied it, but I knew it was half true.' (Panther edition, 1964, p. 132.)  We see the mother grow increasingly frail-looking and tired, though at the last minute she will be spared from the birds to join her son and his wife-to-be as together they flee the devastation all around them - which includes the death of a family friend named Annie - to a better life far away.  The narrator, alerted by Olga, his future wife, finally sees that he must face up to what the birds mean to him personally, that is, he must learn to be his authentic self: a scene on Hampstead Heath in which he outfaces his 'Demon' bird (pp. 169-70) is the equivalent of Melanie's climactic ordeal in the attic in Hitchcock's film.  He writes: 'I stood up.  My ankles ached, my limbs were bruised, blood was dripping from my chin. ...  [But now] I knew that the metempsychosis which touched and threatened the whole race of man no longer had the power to assault me.'  The novel attaches various but related meanings to what the attacking birds represent, but these are distilled in the narrator's reference to '[this] terrible story of the breakdown of men under the prey of their own voracious natures' (p. 141) - which I suggest is close to how Hitchcock's film shows its own avian predators turning universal Will back against humankind (cf our 'Hitchcock and Schopenhauer' page on this website).  Amongst scenes from the novel: a woman with a feathered hat pecked to death in a London phone booth (p. 29); the birds massing all over the figure of Admiral Nelson in Trafalgar Square (p. 48: cf the monument to Admiral Dewey in Union Square at the start of Hitchcock's film); military forays against the birds that end up as fiascos (pp. 55-57); a chattering or croaking sound emitted by the birds, 'like a blunt knife drawn over a slate' (p. 95); an out-of-control car without headlights crashes (pp. 136-37); a bird pecks and bursts the wares of an old lady balloon-seller (p. 163); a man preaching Judgement Day is pecked to death (pp. 180-81); the climactic scene in which the birds invade a packed St Paul's Cathedral - described by Baker with great power and skill - and whose first victim is the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the deaths of nearly everyone else present (pp. 202-07); the subsequent devastation throughout the country (p. 207ff); an ironic reference to how the fleeing narrator had stopped to eat cold roast chicken in an empty cafe in St Albans (p. 221).  It's a splendid novel, as I say, and even has some additional Hitchcockian touches that the 1963 film didn't use: notably, a scene in which the birds invade a cinema showing a newreel of their activities, and shred its screen (p. 137)!

(2) Wanted for Murder (Lawrence Huntington, 1946)

I know of no other single film that not only incorporates so many Hitchcockian elements but palpably, and demonstrably, influenced Hitchcock's work.  Not even Grune's Die Strasse/The Street (1923), Dupont's Varieté (1925), nor Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944) match it in those respects!

First of all, here's James Agee's contemporary review (from 'Agee on Film' [London, 1963], p. 234):

Wanted for Murder, an English melodrama, stars Eric Portman as a middle-class mother's boy who can't keep his hands off the throats of working girls, of whom he strangles several before Scotland Yard catches up with him.  To have held out so long, he is remarkably careless at his work, dropping a marked handkerchief near one corpse, a shard of cigar near another, and the balance of the cigar in Inspector Conway's ash-tray.  He even knocks the head off his late, mad uncle, "The Happy Hangman," who is on exhibit at Madame Tussaud's and under whose influence the hero does the killing.  Neck-deep as he stands in a blizzard of such manna, Roland Culver manages to make the Inspector seem capable and subtle as well as likable.  Mr. Portman, who suggests a cross between Paul Henreid and Louis Calhern, gives the maniac a dangerous, melancholic grace.  Both men seem to me considerably more persuasive than most of the bench-dogs who are paid to charm women in American films; but not being a woman - not even an American woman - I am ill-qualified to judge.  This is a pleasant, unpretentious thriller of the second or third grade, with oddly contradictory streaks of good and crude directing, and some beautifully exciting shots of Hyde Park as a police cordon clears away the rattled crowds and closes, through the twilight, for the kill.

More to the point, I'm certain that Alfred Hitchcock must have felt that way, too.  There are direct borrowings from Wanted for Murder in at least three Hitchcock movies, as follows:

(a) Stage Fright (1950).  The not-unsympathetic portrait of Mrs Gill, played by Dame Sybil Thorndyke, resembles that of the alienated mother, played by Barbara Everest, in Wanted for Murder.  (In turn, the portrait of Mrs Gill anticipates Mrs Anthony in Strangers on a Train - see below.)  But even more obviously, much of Stage Fright's climax, in which Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) must stall for time to protect herself from the mad Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd), until the police close in, borrows directly from the climax of Wanted for Murder.  There, the young heroine, Anne Fielding (Dulcie Gray), finding herself in a lonely stretch of Hyde Park with the businessman called Victor Colebrooke (Eric Portman) who has lately been flattering her with his attentions, suddenly senses danger and must feign pity for him, especially after he remarks, 'You think I'm mad, eh?'  Meanwhile, both her regular boyfriend Jack Williams (Derek Farr) and the police are hunting for her close by.  'Anne, come away', calls Jack ...

(b) Strangers on a Train (1951).  The famous record-store scene, in which Guy Haines (Farley Granger) interrogates his trampish wife Miriam (Laura Elliott) about getting a divorce, clearly takes its inspiration from the record-store scene in Wanted for Murder - in which Victor confronts Anne inside a glass listening-cubicle while the film's fateful theme, "A Voice in the Night" (by Mischa Spoliansky), plays in quasi-diegetic fashion in the background.  Note that all of Victor's victims die by strangulation, the same fate that befalls Miriam in Strangers on a Train.  Moreover, Miriam's death on an island at a funfair is palpably inspired by the climax of Wanted for Murder which takes place on Serpentine Island inside Hyde Park.  Victor himself, rightly described by Agee as a mother's boy, is the predecessor of the well-dressed psychopath Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in Hitchcock's film - not to mention another mother's boy, Norman Bates, in the later Psycho (significantly, with its talk of 'private islands').  Also, Strangers on a Train is notable for some comic business involving a couple of shadowing detectives.  Their predecessor is one Detective Ellis (Bill Shine) in Wanted for Murder.  (However, Hitchcock had made fun of policemen previously, notably in Young and Innocent [1937] and Spellbound [1945] - the latter memorable for giving one of its detectives a mother-complex!)

(c) Frenzy (1972).  A city brought to life by - ironically - a murder hunt is something that goes back to The Lodger (1926) and receives its apotheosis in Frenzy.  There are no 'private islands', exactly, in Frenzy - their nearest iconographical equivalent, I'll suggest below, is Covent Garden where the murderer, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), lives by himself above a book publisher's.  (On one occasion, though, his mum comes visiting from Kent, 'the garden of England' as Rusk calls it.  Note that in Wanted for Murder Victor buys flowers from a Cockney lady in the street.  Again I'll take this up below.) Frenzy employs the device of having its Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) discuss the case with both his offsider Sergeant Spearman (Michael Bates) and, at home, with his wife (Vivien Merchant).  On each occasion, Hitchcock is able to take the grim edge off things by introducing a lighter note, typically involving matters of food.  But a precedent had been set in Wanted for Murder to this extent, that its Chief Inspector Conway (Roland Culver) is given an offsider, Sergeant Sullivan, played by none other than a comically droll Stanley Holloway.  (Both Chief Inspector Oxford and Chief Inspector Conway are suitably intelligent and impressive men, perhaps based on the legendary 'Fabian of the Yard', Detective Superintendent Robert Fabian, who retired in 1949.)

In addition to the above-listed Hitchcock films, several others show an influence of Wanted for Murder.  These include Dial M for Murder (1954) and Family Plot (1976) plus a couple of unrealised projects, No Bail for the Judge and Kaleidoscope - the latter manifestly inspired by the Neville Heath case.  In Benn Levy's original story-outline for Kaleidoscope, dated January 18, 1967, he describes the situation involving Heath's second victim: '[D]rag it out for ever.  Will she?  Won't she [accept him]?  At first she seems increasingly drawn to him, then she seems to be backing out, maybe because a former boy friend appears on the scene.  But then they have a row [...]  So she phones Heath, who meets her, [...] takes her off to the scene of the crime (as near as maybe), makes love to her and does her in.'  Except for the outcome, it could be Anne and Victor's story in Wanted for Murder that Levy is describing.

Also, the writers of Wanted for Murder took several ideas from earlier Hitchcock films.  Memorably, the scene in which Victor is summoned to the Yard, ostensibly as a witness, and asked to play the suspected murderer while another witness describes how he had asked such a man for a light, recalls the 'mousetrap' scene from Murder! (1930).

Ultimately, though, another work stands behind all of these films.  The sympathetic depiction of a tormented murderer has its prototype in Mrs Belloc Lowndes's novel 'The Lodger' (1913), told through the eyes of the lodger's landlady, Mrs Bunting - whose maternal protectiveness stops her taking her suspicions of Mr Sleuth to the police.  A similar sympathy is present in Wanted for Murder as a result of Spoliansky's surging piano score.  (It functions rather like the score for Marnie [1964] in that respect, lending a 'dignity of significance' to what might otherwise appear a mere forensic case-study.)  It is instructive to compare the epigraphs of Belloc Lowndes's novel and Huntington's film.  First, that of the novel: 'Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.'  (Psalms lxxxviii, 18)  Second, that of the film: 'No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another.'  (Sir Thomas Browne, 'Religio Medici')  In other words, both works highlight a kind of universal alienation.  At one point, Mrs Bunting has an epiphany: 'For the first time in her life she visioned the infinite misery, the sadness and strangeness of human life.'  (Chapter XVI)  

All very Schopenhauerian!  As a separate page of this website emphasises, Hitchcock and many of his contemporaries, growing up in Edwardian and post-Edwardian England, were exposed to some key ideas of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer via influences like the fin de siècle Symbolist movement ('For a time, I [even] had Symbolist dreams' - Hitchcock) and the 'pessimistic' writings of such English authors as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.  (Another such author was Robert Hichens, a one-time associate of Oscar Wilde, whose 'The Paradine Case' Hitchcock chose to film in 1947.  A work of considerable compassion, Hichens's novel speaks of 'the great Schopenhauer'.)

'The Lodger' has a climactic scene set in Madame Tussaud's waxworks.  The following passage makes explicit the significance of such a setting: 'Mr Sleuth suddenly stopped short.  The presence of those curious, still, waxen figures which suggested so strangely death in life, seemed to surprise and afright him.'  (Chapter XXVI)  Though the passage has no equivalent in Hitchcock's The Lodger, it remains a likely inspiration for the scene that figured three years later in Blackmail, showing the heads of Egyptian sarcophagi in the British Museum presiding silently over the events of the film's climax.  In turn, those figures inspired not only the Statue of Liberty climax of Saboteur (1942) and the Mount Rushmore climax of North by Northwest (1959) but also, I suggest, the Covent Garden setting of Frenzy - another death-in-life symbol.  Actually, Covent Garden represents the last major 'lost paradise' symbol in Hitchcock's oeuvre: hence the connection to the related symbolism of flowers and islands in other Hitchcock films - and in Wanted for Murder.  Also, it's worth noting how the already-quoted epigraph from Huntington's film, a passage from the Books of Psalms, fits Frenzy too (which employs its own quote from Scripture, when poor Brenda Blaney [Barbara Leigh-Hunt] babbles in her death-throes of 'the pestilence that walketh in darkness' and 'the destruction that wasteth at noonday', which is a quote from the Book of Common Prayer).

As if to acknowledge its source in 'The Lodger', Wanted for Murder includes its own scene set in Madame Tussaud's - as does another Eric Portman film, Corridor of Mirrors (Terence Young, 1948), which has connections to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) ...¹  The grotesquerie of such scenes evokes whatever is driven and irrational in this often cruel world of ours.  In short, what is 'wanted for murder' may be what Schopenhauer called the world's Will.

Finally, Wanted for Murder also seems to acknowledge Hitchcock's The Lodger when Victor walks with heavy tread along the Thames Embankment.  Mopping his brow, he asks to be 'set free' - at this point, he is Everyman, or very nearly a tragic hero.

Hitchcock had at least two film-savvy friends in England once he moved to America.  They were magnate Sidney Bernstein and distinguished screenwriter Angus MacPhail.  On the evidence of a film like Wanted for Murder, they kept him abreast of not just 'the best of British' but whatever might speak to him in his own deeply thoughtful terms.

• I wish to thank Professor Tony Williams for his input to this page.  He further informs me that the musical leitmotif in Wanted for Murder, which (in Hyde Park) foreshadows the use of 'The Band Played On' in Strangers on a Train, was suggested to the filmmakers by Fritz Lang's use of the 'Peer Gynt' theme in M (1931).  (See Tony Williams, 'Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939-1955' [Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000], p. 114.)

Note
1. These connections were discussed in 'The MacGuffin" #25.