The Alfred Hitchcock
Scholars/'MacGuffin' webpage
EXCERPTS - 1
From: Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
CONFINED SPACES
[Editor's note. Michael Walker's meticulous study of some forty
motifs, themes and clusters found in Hitchcock's feature films
and TV series is here represented by the motif of "Confined
Spaces". Read it and be stimulated by the author's mix of his
personal insights and thoughtful citation of other scholars' work.
Walker is on the board of the UK magazine Movie, and contributed to The Movie Book of Film Noir (1992) and The Movie Book of the Western (1996).]
Confined spaces is a loose term. I wanted a designation which covered two
sorts of setting in Hitchcock: on the one hand, small private rooms such as bathrooms
and toilets; on the other, a variety of public spaces, from jails to telephone
booths, which enclose the characters in more or less claustrophobic ways. There
are also more elaborate examples: the action of Lifeboat is entirely confined to
the lifeboat itself; that of Rope to the increasingly claustrophobic apartment of
the two killers. But my concern here is with small rooms and with ‘boxed-in’
spaces such as booths, bunks and trunks, where the sense of confinement functions
in two broadly contrasting ways: either as a retreat/hiding place from the
world or as an imprisoning cage. Although there may seem to be little connec-
tion between a bathroom and a telephone booth, my argument will be that, if
we look at how they are used across the films, a pattern emerges.
Bathrooms and washrooms
Only occasionally are bathrooms and washrooms in Hitchcock’s films used
purely for conventional purposes, such as taking a bath (as in The Lodger).
More often, something else is going on. In particular, they occur repeatedly in
the spy movies. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), there is a minor
example: Bob finds the MacGuffin hidden in a shaving-brush in Louis Bernard’s
hotel bathroom. In Secret Agent, the bathroom scene is much more significant.
Shortly after Ashenden and Elsa have first met, Hitchcock stages a long scene
between them in their hotel bathroom, in which Ashenden reads Elsa a decoded
message and they discuss both the terms of their fake marriage and their forthcoming
mission. The General enters during this, and he becomes so upset that
Ashenden has been ‘issued with’ a wife and he has not that he assaults a toilet
roll, an act which Hitchcock must have been delighted to have got past the censors.
Throughout the scene Elsa has been putting on her makeup, but when she
presents her beautified face for Ashenden’s approval, he is so rude that she
slaps him, prompting him to slap her. ‘Married life has begun,’ she comments,
tartly.
Marty Roth uses Secret Agent to suggest that ‘the espionage thriller (is) a
genre that is always on the verge of a homosexual subtext’ (Roth 1992: 37). The
bathroom scene is crucial to such a reading: it suggests Ashenden’s distaste at
finding himself saddled with a ‘wife’, and his rudeness to Elsa may be contrasted
with the way he seeks to placate the General: ‘This girl’s been issued to
me as part of my disguise’ (read, as a heterosexual) (40). In addition, although
the General is ostensibly a womaniser, he ‘comes across as a dandy and a sissy’,
prefiguring Peter Lorre’s performance as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon
(John Huston, 1941) (41). I discuss the gay subtext to Secret Agent further
under HOMOSEXUALITY.
The bathroom scene in Secret Agent also links with that in The Man Who
Knew Too Much (1934) in that each refers to the world of espionage: the
MacGuffin; the decoded message. Similarly in other spy movies. In North by
Northwest, Roger hides in Eve’s washroom on the train when, unseen by him,
she sends Vandamm the message which first reveals to us that she is connected
with the spies. Later, in her Chicago hotel room, Roger pretends to have a
shower whilst spying on her through the door. After she has left, he then ‘decodes’
the imprint of the address she wrote on a notepad, and follows her to
Vandamm, who in this same scene acquires the MacGuffin. In Torn Curtain,
the two settings of washroom and shower, and the hero’s actions within them,
are reversed. Both are in the Copenhagen hotel, but in the shower scene Michael
misses the important action – Sarah going off to fetch a book with a hidden
message – whereas in the washroom scene he goes into a toilet cubicle to decode
the book’s message, which relates to a secret organisation called pi. In pursuit
of the first MacGuffin in Topaz, DuBois and Uribe first meet inside the Hotel
Theresa in Uribe’s bathroom. Then, on the plane out of Cuba, André goes
into a toilet to discover the second MacGuffin: a microfilm hidden in a book
Juanita gave him.
Bathrooms and toilets in the spy movies would thus seem to function in a
metaphorical sense, as private spaces in which the secrets of the espionage
world are referred to in a coded form. First, there is a link with the notion of
voyeurism: as if Hitchcock keeps placing his professional voyeurs in these
rooms because he associates the rooms themselves with voyeurism, an association
finally made explicit when Norman spies on Marion in Psycho. Second, the
typically furtive use of the rooms also suggests that the spies’ activities within
them are in some sense a displaced expression of their concerns. Third, the emphasis
on such settings would also seem to be a feature of the general sexualisation
of the espionage world (see HOMOSEXUALITY).
There is often also a sense, albeit coded, that the bathroom is a site for the
return of the repressed (or, at least, suppressed): characters enter a bathroom
and ‘buried truths’ emerge, such as Ashenden’s real feelings about being issued
with a wife. In Torn Curtain, Michael had tried to keep the book that Sarah
goes to fetch a secret from her. In North by Northwest, Roger is much more
on the ball: he watches Eve slip out to her rendezvous. In both these cases, the
deception by one partner of a romantic couple is to do with the quest for the
MacGuffin, again illustrating the ways in which this quest damages personal
relationships. In Topaz, the repressed is the MacGuffin itself: André peels back
the book’s cover to reveal the microfilm. Juanita has inscribed the book with
love, but the MacGuffin is her secret gift, for which she has already been killed.
Since we will shortly learn that the Americans have already obtained evidence
of the missiles on Cuba (see THE MACGUFFIN), this in fact an extremely poignant
scene: Juanita and her colleagues have died obtaining redundant information.
The bathroom and the airline toilet in Topaz mark the beginning and the end
of the quest for the film’s two linked MacGuffins, but there is a third confined
space which mediates between them: Juanita’s darkroom at the back of her pantry.
The darkroom echoes Uribe’s bathroom in that both rooms are illuminated
by a naked light bulb, but it is also linked narratively into the functioning of the
motif in that it is where the microfilm MacGuffin is prepared. Moreover, just as
Rico Parra bursts into Uribe’s room and exposes him as a spy, so Rico’s troops
break into Juanita’s darkroom and expose her as a spy, which leads directly to
her murder. This emphasises the sense that, in the spy movies, the bathrooms
and toilets function as displaced versions of the spy’s secret rooms.
A very different bathroom scene occurs in Spellbound. Constance and J.B.
are staying at Dr Brulov’s house, having pretended to him that they are on their
honeymoon. With Constance asleep in the bed, J.B. gets up from the couch and
goes, as if in a trance, into the bathroom. He begins to shave, whereupon he is
confronted with the symbolic expression of his forbidden sexual desires in the
form of the foam on his shaving-brush. He recoils in horror from this, and then
turns and looks at objects and fittings around the room. Each of these – shown
in a series of point-of-view shots – causes him to react with shock. On the surface,
he is reacting in this manner because everything he sees is white, but some
of the fittings are also readable as sexual symbols: for example, there are some
ingenious arrangements of water taps. Here the return of the repressed takes
the form of an explosion of Freudian sexual symbolism, dramatising just what
is being ‘repressed’ on this pretend honeymoon. This is indeed one of
Hitchcock’s emblematic bathroom scenes, conveying – albeit again in a coded
form – the sexual undercurrents so often implicit in such scenes. We can now
see why Louis Bernard’s MacGuffin should be hidden in his shaving brush: he
was Bob’s sexual rival, and the shaving brush is like a comic reminder of this.
In the later examples of such scenes, it is obvious that Hitchcock is taking
advantage of the fact that, since Psycho, it is possible in a mainstream film to
acknowledge the existence of toilets (the offending appliance is hidden under a
record player in Secret Agent), something which he had clearly long wished to
do. But a general point about the scenes is more surprising. Virtually all
Hitchcock’s bathroom and washroom scenes are set in hotels, workplaces (Scotland
Yard in Blackmail, a garage in Psycho, the office in Marnie), on public
transport or at stations (Chicago in North by Northwest). Indeed, since Murder!,
Hitchcock has not staged a single bathroom scene in the home of either the
hero or heroine. There are scenes in which the protagonists in their own homes
go to the bathroom, and occasions when we see through the bathroom door – e.g.
to see Harry’s body in Jennifer’s bath in The Trouble with Harry – but we
do not go into the rooms. Given that we do go into the bathrooms etc. in hotels
and other non-domestic settings, this would seem to mark a curious point about
Hitchcock’s films, suggesting a prurience about the domestic bathroom which
becomes a voyeuristic fascination with those in less private settings.
Confinement and concealment
The bathrooms and toilets in Hitchcock are typically used to hide, or to do
something in private. At the other extreme are confined spaces in which someone
is imprisoned. Only occasionally is this the work of the villain, as when
Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt traps Charlie in the garage in order to kill
her with carbon monoxide poisoning. More usually, it is the police who imprison
people in Hitchcock’s films. The intensity of these scenes is commonly attributed
to Hitchcock’s well-known fear of the police, which he traces to a childhood
incident in which he was briefly locked, as a punishment, in a police cell
(see Truffaut 1968: 22). Hitchcock’s jailed heroes are invariably innocent, and he
conveys the trauma of false imprisonment through some powerful expressionistic
devices, e.g. the circling camera shots suggesting Manny’s mental crisis
when he is first locked up in The Wrong Man or the overhead shot of Blaney
shut in his cell in Frenzy. Here, clearly, the cage metaphor applies. Such scenes
may be contrasted with those in Murder! and The Paradine Case showing the
heroine in jail. Both are much more extended than the scenes for the heroes,
dealing with long periods of imprisonment and with debilitating and degrading
prison routines, focusing in particular on the lack of privacy due to the ubiquitous
presence of female guards. With the heroes, Hitchcock conveys the trauma
primarily as shock and a dizzying loss of personal agency; with the heroines it is
more the steady accumulation of oppressive details which wear away at the
sense of self.
Seeking to avoid capture by the police, Hitchcock’s heroes, like most pursued
figures, try to hide. But there is a particular manner of their hiding which occurs
across a number of films and which is very suggestive. In three closely connected
instances, the hero is with a young woman, but only he is hidden: in
Saboteur, when the police stop the circus caravan and Barry hides on an upper
rack whilst Pat sits below with the other members of the circus troupe; in To
Catch a Thief, when Danielle hides Robie under the foredeck of her motor
boat, and when Eve hides Roger behind the closed upper bunk of her train
compartment. The first and the last examples are particularly close: each heroine
is sitting just beneath the hiding hero and the police question her about
him. In To Catch a Thief, the police are in a small plane flying over Danielle’s
boat and she waves to them.
Concealing the hero in this manner makes it seem as though he is metaphorically
hidden behind a young woman (in two cases, the heroine), as if he were
her guilty secret. The examples also suggest a variation of the childhood game
of hide and seek. In his analysis of children’s games in Playing and Reality, D.W.
Winnicott identifies the strategic role of the mother in the early years of
childhood in creating a safe space within which a child can play (Winnicott
1970: 47-52). The fear implied by these little scenes is that the hero has not been
safely hidden, and that the woman who knows where he is will reveal his presence
to the police. The woman who hides the hero thus symbolises the protective
mother, and the police the hostile, searching father. Once again, the overtones
are Oedipal.
This is illustrated most comprehensively in North by Northwest. The last
scene between Roger and his mother takes place in a crowded hotel lift, which
erupts with laughter at Mrs Thornhill’s question to the pursuing spies: ‘You two
gentlemen aren’t really trying to kill my son are you?’ As soon as the lift stops in
the lobby, Roger flees – in effect, from his mother. The last time he speaks to her
is when he then calls her from a phone booth on Grand Central Station. Both
confined spaces (lift and phone booth) symbolise Roger’s claustrophobic relationship
with his mother, which symbolically ends with the phone call: she is
not heard from again. The moment when Eve releases Roger from the confinement
of the upper bunk is thus, structurally, a rebirth, with Eve herself as the
symbolic mother – a point made by Stanley Cavell (Cavell 1986: 255).
The confined spaces where the hero hides are at the opposite extreme from
those where he is locked up. But the childhood overtones indicate the way in
which the opposition works in the Hitchcockian unconscious: jail is where the
father sends ‘naughty boys’ (Truffaut 1968: 22); the mother’s role is to protect
the hero from such a terrible fate by hiding him.
This implicit paradigm enables the variations of the hiding scene to be analysed.
In The Lady Vanishes, the scene is anticipated by a comic variant and its
basic structure is then inverted. As Iris and Gilbert search the train’s luggage
wagon for the missing Miss Froy, they look in various trunks and other containers,
but the tone is ludic: each disappears in turn into Signor Doppo’s Vanishing
Lady cabinet, and Signor Doppo himself escapes from confinement in a trunk
by using its false side. Without the threat of the police, comedy is possible: the
overtones are of children playing. Then, after the couple have found and rescued
Miss Froy, it is she who is hidden in a closet in a train compartment and it is
Gilbert and Iris who are scrutinised (they are pretending to be unconscious) by
Dr Hartz, the equivalent of the police.
This is I think the earliest example of the hiding scene in Hitchcock. Since
Miss Froy is explicitly a mother figure to Iris, the fact that she is the concealed
figure on this occasion suggests that the elements are there, but they have not
yet jelled into the dominant form of the scene one finds in the Hollywood movies.
Here the children gallantly hide the English mother figure from the murderous
foreign father figure. Oedipal overtones are suppressed in the light of
the eve of war tensions in 1938 Europe.
Similarly in Torn Curtain, where Cold War tensions dictate the articulation
of the motif. Michael and Sarah are hidden in separate costume baskets on a
ship making the journey from East Germany to Sweden. As the ship docks and
the baskets are unloaded, a suspicious Russian ballerina shouts out that they
contain ‘amerikanische Spione’, prompting an East German policeman to machine-
gun them. He shoots the wrong baskets, but it is nevertheless clear that
the ballerina functions symbolically as the dangerous communist mother who
threatens the children of the capitalist West with death.
Stage Fright offers another variation. At the climax, Eve hides Jonathan
from the police in a theatrical coach under a stage. It is only now that she learns
that, far from being falsely accused, Jonathan really is a murderer. And she
learns this from her father, who is with the hunting police and who calls out to
her. This turns everything round. Now it is the heroine who is threatened, the
man she is hiding who is the threat, and the police and her father who are her
potential saviours (see HANDS).
The persistence of the hiding scene in Hitchcock, and the way in which the
basic ingredients are reworked in different forms to suit different agendas indicate
just how patterned his films often are. Perhaps the most remarkable common
aspect is that each hiding place is on a mode of transport, albeit stationary
at the point when the police intervene in Saboteur and a purely theatrical version
in Stage Fright. In ‘Rope: Three Hypotheses’, Peter Wollen mentions that
he once asked Farley Granger why Hitchcock was so interested in trains.
Granger replied: ‘The mixture of claustrophobia with movement’ (Wollen 1999:
82). These scenes go a stage further, dealing with a claustrophobic enclosure
within the means of transport itself. Consistent with Granger’s comment, most
of the hiding places represent a safe space to hide: like symbolisations of the
womb where the hero can feel safe under the protection of the heroine as
mother figure. This emphasises the ideological violation in Torn Curtain, but
also that, when a villain seeks to hide in this manner, as in Stage Fright, the
space is no longer safe.
In Frenzy there is a sequence which seems like a perversion of the hiding
scene: when Rusk wrestles with Babs’s corpse in a sack of potatoes on the back
of a moving lorry. The confined space, here, is like a grave: it’s as if Rusk has
crawled into the grave to retrieve something from the corpse, and he is punished
for this violation by the sheer intransigence of the woman’s dead body
(see THE CORPSE). Yet once again it is fear of exposure to the police which has
prompted Rusk to take this desperate measure, and when he leaves the body in
effect disinterred and out of its grave (the sack), it is the police who immediately
spot it.
There is also a subsequent twist to the hiding scene in North by Northwest.
Although Eve protects Roger from the police, she betrays him to the spies. This
leads to the famous pursuit by the crop-dusting plane (see TRAINS and
PLANES). To escape from the plane, Roger flags down an oil tanker, which
only just stops in time. He ends up supine under the tanker; the plane crashes
into it. Roger’s position here echoes the boxed-in space of the bunk bed, but
now the space is highly dangerous: the plane immediately catches fire and the
tanker will blow up at any moment. The association of the two spaces serves to
undermine the apparent security of the bunk bed; in effect, Roger under the
tanker reveals the mother figure’s duplicitousness: this is where she has really
sent him. Roger has to clamber out and flee for his life.
Cages and bars: fears of imprisonment
In contrast to the generally successful hiding places on the various means of
transport, there is another set of examples in Hitchcock’s films where the characters
are within a confined space but are also highly exposed: when they are in
a glass booth. In Blackmail, Frank invites Alice into the phone booth of the
shop where she works and produces her glove, which he found in Crewe’s studio
whilst investigating his ‘murder’. This cues the entrance of Tracy, the future
blackmailer, who has been watching them. He knows the significance of the
glove (he found the other one); as he comments later: ‘Detectives in glass houses
shouldn’t wave clues.’ In Strangers on a Train, Guy and Miriam go into a
soundproof record booth in the shop where she works. As if confirming the
metaphorical associations of the space, Miriam now traps Guy (in a legal sense)
by declaring that she is not, after all, going to divorce him. Moreover, as she
outlines her intentions – to pretend that the child she is carrying is Guy’s; to
join him in Washington as his wife – he becomes so enraged that he shakes her,
an act observed by those in the shop, including the proprietor. Here, as in
Blackmail, having witnesses to the private scene makes it especially dangerous:
the secrets of the couple are threatened with exposure.
Obviously, in a world in which looking is so important, and, indeed, often so
threatening, to be in a glass booth is to be exposed. Yet once again it is exposure
to the police which is the real threat. This is made explicit in Blackmail, where
Tracy says to the couple in the booth that he wants to phone Scotland Yard. It is
also implicit in Strangers on a Train after Miriam has been murdered: there
are witnesses to Guy’s violence towards his wife shortly before her murder. Later
in the film, Hitchcock actually frames Guy and Bruno together behind some
railings as Guy hides from the police, so that the fear of the police (and imprisonment)
is there expressed directly by the cage imagery.
A parallel example is the scene in I Confess when Logan and Ruth are caught
in the summerhouse by Vilette. The summerhouse is open to observation in a
similar way to the glass booths, and Vilette’s recognition of Ruth as ‘Madame
Grandfort’ provides him with the material with which to blackmail her. Here
the police only become involved after Vilette’s murder, but what happened in
and just outside the summerhouse becomes the basis of their whole case against
Logan, so that here, too, it is exposure to the police which emerges as the ultimate
threat behind this little scene.
The birds’ attack on Melanie in the phone booth in The Birds is obviously a
more literal threat. As with Blaney’s imprisonment in Frenzy, Hitchcock emphasises
the cage metaphor by including an overhead shot of Melanie as she
turns from side to side in her terror. This scene, too, may be connected metaphorically
with the fears implicit in the other examples. The police may be seen
as social embodiments of the superego, judging and punishing (mis)behaviour.
And Margaret Horwitz has argued that in The Birds ‘The wild birds function
as a kind of malevolent female superego’ (Horwitz 1986: 281) (see CHILDREN).
The sense of a ‘malevolent superego’ out there could be seen as broadly complementary
to Bill Nichols’s reading of the way in which the motif of ‘at the window’
functions in The Birds: ‘assault at the window only serves to confirm the
fundamentally paranoid constitution of the subject (or ego)’ (Nichols 1981: 159).
The bird attacks are an extreme expression of such paranoia. More generally in
Hitchcock, it is in the threat embodied by the police that the paranoia so often
apparent in the narratives resides.
Both the images of imprisonment in a glass cage and the examples where the
hero (especially) hides from the police are indicative of specific fears in
Hitchcock’s films where, again and again, the police create the chaos world into
which the characters are plunged. As soon as Roger exits from the phone booth
into the crowds on Grand Central Station, he becomes a man hunted: police are
everywhere. He goes to a ticket office window, the clerk recognises him, alerts
the police and Roger is once more on the run.
Moreover, this scene is in turn a reworking of its equivalent in Spellbound,
when Constance and J.B., on the run from the police, go to buy a train ticket at
Pennsylvania Station. In this case, the ticket clerk is behind bars, and Hitchcock
incorporates the imprisonment imagery into the dynamics of the scene. As J.B. –
who is amnesiac – approaches the ticket window, he is trying to remember a
past destination; as he reaches the window, the shadows of the bars are then
cast on his own face. The stress of trying to remember seems compounded by
the sight of the man behind bars, and the ‘cage motif’ then transfers to the hero:
J.B. collapses on the counter, and Constance has to lead him away. But this little
scene has drawn the attention of a policeman, who comes over and offers assistance.
It’s as if the sense of a trap implicit in the bar imagery produces the policeman,
like a pre-echo of the hero’s eventual imprisonment in jail, where the cage imagery
returns as Constance addresses an unseen J.B. through prison bars.
In short, the fear of the police which haunts Hitchcock’s films manifests itself
in any number of ways: not just in the scenes of incarceration, but in the hiding
scenes, in the cage metaphor, in the recurring imagery of bars. The confined
space motif serves to condense these fears into concrete little scenes, scenes
where the ways in which the characters are visualised (in prison; in a glass
booth; behind bars) is as important as their actions.
Paranoia about the police is not the only feature of this motif which could be
said to have roots in Hitchcock’s childhood. Recalling Hitchcock’s Catholic upbringing,
some of the confined spaces involving two people also evoke the confessional.
In the phone booth in Blackmail, Frank wants Alice to ‘confess’, but
she is too upset to speak. In the theatrical coach in Stage Fright, Jonathan
really does confess. The record booth scene in Strangers on a Train is also
like a confession: Guy learns what Miriam’s real intentions are; Miriam learns
that Guy is ‘serious’ about Anne. When, later, Bruno tells Guy that he has murdered
Miriam, Hitchcock films the scene so that the railings Bruno is behind
pointedly evoke the grille in a church confessional. I Confess contains a genuine
confession in a real confessional, and the subject of the confession – Keller’s
to the murder of Vilette – is not only the equivalent of this scene in Strangers
on a Train, but it also has the same underlying fear as all these other examples:
that the police will find out. The most painful confession scene is, nevertheless,
in the bell tower at the climax of Vertigo. The top of the tower is a confined
space which is exposed in the sense that it has open archways, and this serves
to make it physically dangerous. After Scottie has forced a confession from Judy,
the ‘superego intrusion’ which then occurs is devastating: a nun appears as if
from nowhere, an apparition which so frightens Judy that she steps through an
open archway and plunges to her death (see GUILT AND CONFESSION). All
these examples may in turn be related to the broader theme of confession in
Hitchcock’s work.
Finally, the most famous bathroom scene in all cinema. In Hitchcock’s work
in general, the bathroom is a place of refuge. It may turn out to be threatening,
as in Spellbound, but even there it is not really a trap; albeit somewhat traumatised,
the hero walks out of it. Psycho breaks the rule. Marion treats the bathroom
as her private space, and she begins her shower with a voluptuous surrender
to the water. ‘Mrs Bates’s’ attack violates this space: Marion is trapped and
savagely murdered. The shattering impact of the scene has prompted many excellent
analyses, but the point I wish to make here is in terms of Hitchcock’s
motifs. First, the return of the repressed takes the form here of a murderous
‘mother’: an extension of the negative representations of mothers in Hitchcock
(see MOTHERS AND HOUSES) into a veritable monster. Second, a confined
space which has hitherto functioned as a place of retreat from the chaos world
is suddenly and violently transformed into the chaos world. In effect, the ‘malevolent
superego out there’ bursts into the confined space, with annihilating
force. The bathroom has become like the phone booth in The Birds, but with
an even more devastating outcome: the attacking intruder not only traps the
heroine, but brutally murders her.
In his references to the cage imagery in Hitchcock’s films, Hartmut W.
Redottée concentrates primarily on the sense of a trap implicit in the motif
(Redottée 2000: 34-36). My argument throughout this discussion has been that
there are as many examples in which a confined space functions as a hiding
place or refuge. However, hiding places can be precarious, so that it would be
more accurate to say that there is often a dialectic in play: a confined space
which seems to be a refuge could also be a trap, and the two contrasting functions
may well be in tension. Nevertheless, Marion’s murder is quite exceptional.
Although Hitchcock repeats the brutal attack on the heroine in the attic
bedroom assault on Melanie in The Birds, the shower-bath murder is the locus
classicus of such scenes. Apart from the brilliance of the realisation of the scene,
and the fact that it is the film’s heroine who is being slaughtered, another reason
is surely the shock of the violation of the hitherto safe space of the bathroom.
Indeed, it is partly because of this violation that I have grouped together, under
one motif, otherwise diverse spaces such as bathrooms and phone booths. I
mention at the beginning that the motif functions in two broadly contrasting
ways. In this scene, the contrasting ways are collapsed.
See also APPENDIX I.
Washrooms and the police
The involvement of the police in this motif has been as threatening figures: looking
for people who are hidden; locking people up. I would like therefore to
mention two contrasting examples: the washroom scene in Scotland Yard in
Blackmail, and that on the Chicago station in North by Northwest. In the
former, Frank and his colleague join other policemen at the end of the day’s
shift, and the men’s room camaraderie of the scene is most unusual for
Hitchcock, especially for Hitchcock’s policemen. Here, for once, we see the police
as a community, enjoying one another’s company: all are chatting and joking;
one is using his handcuffs to open a tin of tuna. This is really quite a relaxed
little scene, indicating that, even in Hitchcock, the police – albeit when off-duty
– are allowed their moments of cheerful spontaneity.
Unfortunately, in the second scene, the police are back in their more familiar
role of looking at someone they are pursuing and not recognising him. As Roger,
his face covered in shaving cream, prepares to shave, the two detectives
from the train burst into the washroom and look wildly around. Since they do
look (briefly) at Roger, his disguise is clearly a good one. Off-screen, we then
hear the rhythmic crash of them opening the toilet cubicles; they then leave. In
fact, what perhaps saves Roger is that he is not the only man shaving, and the
other man also has a face covered in shaving cream. It could be that the detectives
are still looking for Roger in his redcap disguise. It could equally be that
the sight of two shaving men simply fooled them.
EXCERPTS 2 - Tony Lee Moral on Marnie
EXCERPTS 3 - Thomas Leitch on Irony; Jamaica Inn
EXCERPTS 4 - Lesley Brill on Mr and Mrs Smith
EXCERPTS 5 - Jane Sloan surveys critical writing on Hitchcock
EXCERPTS 6 - Donald Spoto on Stage Fright
EXCERPTS 7 - Jack Sullivan on Franz Waxman and Suspicion
.
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