REPORT: PATRICK MCGILLIGAN'S ALFRED HITCHCOCK: A LIFE IN DARKNESS AND LIGHT (2003; pb and hb)
Part Two: film by film (continued)
[For a long defence of this article, please click here: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/defence.html.]
Straight to films of the the American period
The sound films, 1929-1950
Blackmail (1929)
With Blackmail,
McGilligan all of a sudden 'expands', and devotes some 15 pages (pp.
112-27) of his reportorial, anecdotal writing to the film and its
background. But most of the material is familiar (reference to
Anny Ondra's sound test, for example). On the other hand, almost
none of the following (from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story') makes it into McGilligan:
The sound version of Blackmail was
particularly well served by Hitchcock's knowledge of some of the new
broadcasting techniques and by his extensive theatre-going
experience. For example, this version ends to the accompaniment
of ringing laughter, an effect used previously in the famous Pirandello
play Right You Are! (If You Think So)
to comment on its characters' assumption that truth is simple and
knowable. (The play had its first London performance in 1925,
when it starred Claude Rains.) In Blackmail,
Hitchcock puts with the sound of laughter an image of a jester pointing
directly at the audience. Whether this is another case of our
being implicated in original sin [cf the symbolism of the snake-like
bangle in The Ring], the fact
is that none of the film's three main characters is innocent.
Even Frank [John Longden], whose concealing of evidence appears to have an honourable
motive - protecting Alice [Anny Ondra] - is selfishly driven: he wants to get his
girl back, and to keep her.
... The British
Museum climax was suggested to Hitch by Michael Powell, who was
familiar with the Reading Room and its glass dome. [McGilligan
notes as much.] In turn, Powell may have got the idea from seeing
John Longden in Palais de Dance (Maurice Elvey, 1928), whose glass-domed locale had been similarly exploited.
Also, Hitchcock himself certainly
remembered the Madame Tussaud's climax (Chapter XXVI) of Mrs Belloc
Lowndes's novel 'The Lodger' (1913). Its eponymous character, Mr
Sleuth, is suddenly 'affrighted' by 'those curious, still, waxen
figures which suggested so strangely death in life' when he comes upon
them in the first gallery, 'up the great staircase'.
More from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
Another misconception about Blackmail is
that the famous scene on the morning after the artist's killing, in
which a gossipy neighbour repeatedly uses the word 'knife', is all a
matter of technique. [Cf McGilligan, p. 123, where he refers to
the 'hilarious "knife" recitative'.] Striking the scene may be,
but it works for other, deeper reasons. It draws attention to
itself for a purpose, being a study in the psychology of Alice, who has
gone all night without sleep. At such times, the mind plays
tricks - here the word 'knife' seems to lunge at Alice, still aghast at
last night's events. [Shades of 'Macbeth'!] The scene's
showiness also sets up the audience for what's coming, including
Tracy's breathtaking show of bravado as he virtually takes over the
premises, even using Mr White's own chair. The growing tension
until the moment when the parlour window shatters, and Tracy [Donald Calthrop] flees,
represents the sort of 'crucible' situation that Hitchcock would
sometimes make the subject of a whole film, such as Rope.
In sum, with Blackmail Hitchcock develops still further his trademark emphasis on subjectivity,
an emphasis both technical and thematic. It had featured in
practically every one of his silent films, and by now was capable of
yielding profound effects and commentary.
Juno and the Paycock (1929)
McGilligan (pp. 127-32) reports
that Hitchcock met several times with Irish playwright Sean O'Casey,
whose tragi-comic 'Juno and the Paycock' (1924) Hitchcock greatly
liked. Hitchcock tried to sell O'Casey on the power of the camera
- 'it could take into itself all in heaven, on the earth, and in the
sea under the earth; there was nothing beyond its sweeping eye'.
But like Arnold Bennett's attitude to cinema, O'Casey's was 'pigheaded'
(McGilligan's word). In the event, a screenplay of 'Juno
and the Paycock' was written by Hitchcock and his wife Alma, without
collaborative input from the playwright.
But the resulting
film was stodgy, despite a by-now predictable emphasis on
subjectivity. Here 's 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
Along with The Skin Game [1931] and Rope, Juno and the Paycock
is one of the most intellectual plays that Hitchcock filmed. Both
Johnny [John Laurie] and his mother [Sara Allgood] express a hope that
their expected wealth will allow them to move somewhere they're not
known [in effect, away from the present Irish 'troubles']. But of
course escape is never so easy. Beyond the opening credits we see
cramped-up Dublin buildings - with no trace of sky - photographed as if
through the frame of a window. The view in effect is doubly
constricted, both objectively and subjectively. Later, views out
of windows recur, accompanied several times by the sound of machine-gun
fire. Also, in a comic moment, [neighbour] Joxer hides from Juno
by scrambling onto a window-ledge, but gets caught in a sudden
downpour. All of this suggests that the outside world will exert
its rigours, in spite of every effort to the contrary.
It is the
'crucible' situation again. Revealingly, Joxer is given the line
from Burns - 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn'
- that Hitchcock once quoted to critic Richard Schickel to sum up the
human condition. However, Juno and her daughter's departure at
the end does lend the film a slightly upbeat note [and thereby
anticipates the endings of The Wrong Man and The Birds].
Elstree Calling (1930)
McGilligan (pp. 132-33) confirms
exactly what Hitchcock contributed to this musical-review film, using
recent work by Prof. James Vest (with some input by yours
truly). Originally, Hitchcock 'guided only the unmusical framing
segments'. But when producer John Maxwell demanded retakes,
'Hitchcock was ordered back to work, fixing up the segments of other
directors. He was obliged to reshoot [Adrian] Brunel's burlesque
of The Taming of the Shrew ... and the comic sketch about a jealous husband (Jameson Thomas) who breaks into a flat and shoots the wrong lovers'.
'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' has additional information. For example:
Gordon Harker,
here unshaven and grumpy, was making his fourth appearance for
Hitchcock. Hannah Jones, as his beady-eyed little wife [in one of
the framing segments], was by now no less a Hitchcock 'regular', having
already appeared in Downhill, Champagne, and Blackmail. The gag
involving the recalcitrant television set was simply an elaboration of
one involving a crystal-set owned by the elderly couple, Patsy's
landlords, in The Pleasure Garden.
Already, then, Hitchcock was sticking to his adage that if you've found
a promising bit of business, bring it back and refine it!
Murder! (1930)
McGilligan's entry (pp.133-39) on Murder! and its German-language version Mary
is thoughtful and relatively meaty. For example, we learn that
Hitchcock based the circus performer Handell Fane [Esmé Percy] on the real-life
Vander Barbette, a transvestite trapeze artist who had just appeared in
Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet where
Cocteau put 'him in a Chanel gown and [had] him applaud a card game
that ends in a suicide'. (However, McGilligan slips up when he
claims that this character with a 'split personality' was 'Hitchcock's
first sketch of a character later realized as Norman Bates in Psycho'. That was certainly the Ivor Novello character in The Lodger:
see my earlier note on that film, including how the flashback scene was
influenced by a Jekyll-and-Hyde reference in Chapter XI of the novel.)
But none of the following (from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story') makes it into McGilligan:
'We are apt to forget', writes J.B.
Priestley, 'how many playhouses there were at one time in
England.' Whole 'circuits' existed where touring companies
performed their repertoires consisting of melodrama, rough farces,
comedies - and, invariably, Shakespeare. But gradually these
circuits dwindled. After the First World War, a new type of
actor-manager appeared, who hated touring and depended entirely on West
End runs. In effect, Sir John [Herbert Marshall] in Murder!
is a satirical portrait of one such actor-manager, based on Hitchcock's
friend Sir Gerald du Maurier; and the touring company we see represents
a tatty, down-at-heel remnant of the sort of companies that had once
flourished.
Murder! is based on the 1929 novel Enter Sir John
by 'Clemence Dane' and Helen Simpson. Dane, whose real name was
Winifred Ashton, was the inspiration, a few years later, for Noël
Coward's most famous character, Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit. In Enter Sir John,
the authors lampoon their title-character by having a reviewer suggest
that Sir John should 'go out in the highways and hedges of real life
for a model, instead of depending on his shaving-glass'.
Hitchcock seized on that passage, which is the key to his film [and
foreshadows such films as Stage Fright (1950) and North by Northwest].
'This is not a play but life,' Sir
John says, awakened from his narcissism. The trouble is,
everywhere Sir John turns, people insist on playing roles! Even
his fellow jurors behave as a 'chorus' [or 'the masses'!] and smother the spark of insight
he has had concerning Diana's innocence. ...
Sexual ambiguity always fascinated Hitchcock. In the acquarium scene in Sabotage [1936],
a rather cissy-looking youth (a young Charles Hawtrey) tells his
girlfriend how, 'after laying a million eggs, the female oyster changes
her sex'. In Murder!,
Hitchcock dwells on related matters [befitting 'theatricality' and 'the
world of the theatre']. The various members of the touring
company nearly all have characteristics of both sexes.
There's Tom Druitt, for example, a married man but with a squeaky voice
like a woman's. And Doucie, when we first see her in jodhpurs, is
described by her husband as a versatile performer. Recently she
was 'pure Tallulah' - meaning Tallulah Bankhead, the bisexual
actress. In the courtroom scenes, we see both mannish women and
effeminate men.
The general idea underlying these conceits is like that of The Ring: finally, 'it's all one'.
The Skin Game (1931)
By the time he made Murder!,
Hitchcock in his films was already beginning to systematically pose a
question like 'What is reality?' His intuitive answer, seeming to
combine Shaw (and Nietzsche) with Shakespeare, was that it involves a
worldly struggle for power, but finally there is just (degrees of)
'life'. In turn, 'life' is but a dream or a cruel
jest. Hence the need for fellow-feeling and compassion - and such
other saving graces as one can muster, such as wit and a sense of
personal style.
Had McGilligan read a book like John Carey's 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' - cited in 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story' - he would surely have had more feeling for how
and why Hitchcock was prepared to broach so-called 'big' questions in
his films. Those questions are there, beyond a doubt. And
Carey's book is a seminal one for understanding the 1920s and 1930s in
Britain. It shows, for example, just how much the literary
intellectuals of the time loathed and feared the masses. What I
suggest in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' is that Hitchcock found himself in the middle of this 'struggle'. Quote:
I can't
emphasise enough the importance of Hitchcock's membership in the late
1920s of the Film Society in London. Here he rubbed shoulders
with some of the leading intellectuals of the day - for whom both
Nietzsche's and Bergson's vitalist ideas were currently fashionable -
and announced his ambition to create 'art' movies that were also
'popular' movies ...
All of the above seems to me to
bear on Hitchcock's adaptation of John Galsworthy's first big stage
success, 'The Skin Game'. McGilligan (pp. 139-41) notes that
Hitchcock had seen the play on its first production in 1920, and had
also seen an Anglo-Dutch film version Hard tegen hard, made in Holland the same year. To McGilligan's credit, his assessment of Hitchcock's film is perceptive and favourable:
The Skin Game
surprises on several levels; today it seems more multi-faceted and
gripping, more coherent, and ultimately a more personal Hitchcock film
than Juno and the Paycock. Hitchcock may have felt more comfortable addressing English class hypocrisies than Sean O'Casey's Irish troubles.
Well, yes. There is probably
more inherent conflict, and drama, in the Galsworthy. Also, a
comprehensiveness. I cited Shaw and Nietzsche, as well as
Shakespeare, above. But in 'The Alfred Hitchcock
Story' I cite another figure, an English-educated philosopher who was
also a passionate theatre-goer, Arthur Schopenhauer:
Many of
Hitchcock's films, in their outlook, bear a resemblance to the
philosophy of the German, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), whose work
had been promoted by such writers as George Bernard Shaw.
Schopenhauer, who believed in a life-force, taught that people are
driven by a basic egotism plus varying amounts of compassion and
malice. Objectivity, he felt, was something few of us are capable
of - though great art may point the way. There's more than a
touch of that outlook in The Skin Game
where, for example, Jill Hillcrist [Jill Esmond] denies that 'the big
point of view exists. We're all out for our own,' she says.
Apropos Murder!, McGilligan mentioned Cocteau's Blood of a Poet. He might further have invoked Cocteau apropos The Skin Game. Here's 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' again:
Technically, The Skin Game
is Hitchcock's most accomplished sound film to this time. He'd
kept in touch with both the American and European cinemas, and learnt
much. His admiration for Jean Cocteau's Le sang d'un poète
(1930) led him to imitate that film's opening and closing shots of a
factory chimney being demolished - only Hitchcock, in a nice touch,
showed a tree being felled [in his opening
and closing shots]. The symbolism is complex. The
felled tree represents not just 'progress' but a life-force inseparable
from destructiveness. Shades of Vertigo [which is full of 'wood' symbolism], in fact.
Hitch even included some charming rural footage from The Farmer's Wife. Already he was well aware of the importance of having an audience feel matters being discussed onscreen, not just think about them.
Rich and Strange (1931)
McGilligan (pp. 141-46) fudges how the Rich and Strange
project seems to have been from the start a co-operative one between
Hitchcock and Australian journalist and novelist (and intrepid sea
voyager) Dale Collins.
'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' reports:
Rich and Strange
faithfully adapts a 1930 novel by Australian writer Dale
Collins. Researching the matter, Charles Barr found that Hitch
and Alma had met Collins and his wife socially, and suggests that the
story may have begun as a possible film project which was realised
first as a novel, then somewhat later as a film.
McGilligan, by contrast, writes this ultimately nonsensical sentence (p. 142):
Rich and Strange
was likely developed first as a lengthy treatment by Collins before he
turned it into a 1930 novel, whose publication coincided with the
film's release [in 1932!].
There is no doubt that the novel
was in fact published in 1930. The copy held by the library of
Monash University, in Melbourne, appears to be a first edition and
contains this publishing information at the front: 'First published
1930 by GEORGE G. HARRAP & CO LTD, 39-41 Parker Street Kingsway,
London, W.C.2'.
Still, McGilligan has found out why
the provocative scene that Hitchcock described to Truffaut - of Fred
(Henry Kendall) diving between the legs of the phoney princess (Betty
Amann) - never made it into the finished film. The scene was shot
on a bitterly cold morning at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, and was so
obviously not what it purported to be - 'a gay dip in the Red Sea', in Kendall's words - that it was cut from the film.
But the scene is in Chapter IX of
the novel, and begins by describing Fred swimming underwater towards
the entrancing 'alabaster arch' - the pale legs of the princess - just
ahead. Becoming momentarily trapped, he struggles free and
eventually surfaces:
The Princess Olga laughed and applauded.
"Splendid! Splendid!"
"Gosh, you nearly did for me!"
The Princess slipped her arm about his waist and gave him an affectionate hug.
"But think how nice," she teased. "You would not mind to die like that, mon cher?"
Embrace and reminder intoxicated Fred. The arm of a
princess, the legs of a princess! - who would not be a vassal, a slave?
"A beautiful death!"
"But I had to deny you it because that I want you so much -
not dead!" said the Princess Olga, who wore only a film of flame and
was more refulgent than the sun.
There were people - clerks and the like - who thought they knew what it meant to be alive.
That last line, like the novel as a whole, is in fact lampooning people
like Fred - himself a clerk - so despised by the literary intellectuals
of the time. As John Carey notes, clerks were the intellectuals'
constant butt. And following the publication of T.S. Eliot's 'The
Waste Land' in 1922, which seemed to say that the masses weren't really
alive, the attitude of the intellectuals hardened further.
As Carey puts it: 'Largely through Eliot's influence, the assumption
that most people are dead became, by the 1930s, a standard item in the
repertoire of any self-respecting intellectual.' (John Carey,
'the Intellectuals and the Masses', Faber paperback edition, 1992, p.
10.) Of course, Collins's novel and Hitchcock's film may be read
as sympathetic to poor Fred. But that would be only the half of
it. An implicit Fred-criticism remains ...
Number Seventeen (1932)
A couple of times in 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light'
McGilligan refers to director Thomas Bentley - but never identifies him
as the famous collaborator of the even more famous Cecil Hepworth who
with Bentley made five silent Dickens adaptations. (By 1932
Bentley was reduced to doing 'quota quickies', and hence his passing
mention by McGilligan as a BIP employee who inherited Hitchcock's London Wall project when Hitchcock turned instead to Number Seventeen.)
McGilligan has nothing good to say (pp.146-48) about Number Seventeen.
Fair enough. As 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' notes, the film was
itself little more than a 'quota quickie' - though it can be fun to
view.
Almost none of the following is in McGilligan:
The original play was conceived
as a vehicle for the actor who plays Ben, Leon M. Lion, who also
produced it. Lion eventually put money into Hitchcock's film
version. At about the same time, he rented the Garrick Theatre in
London where he successfully staged a series of Galsworthy plays
(including Escape, one of
Hitch's favourites). But it was as Ben that Lion appears to have
first made his reputation [or consolidated it, as in 1926 he had
starred in his own earlier production of Escape, its premiere season]. The play [i.e., Number Seventeen]
promised to become 'a hardy annual'. J. Jefferson Farjeon, its
author, wrote other plays and novels featuring the character, who, in
his scarf and cropped hair, is supposed to be in the 'endearing
Cockney' mould. Nonetheless, one can see why film historian
William Everson isn't enamoured of him. He does tend to '[seem]
in the way all the time'.
The best things about Number Seventeen
are its liveliness and wit, and the chase sequence that Hitch dreamed
up to resolve the troublesome plot. Ben is established as partial
to alcohol, and on the train he finds himself amidst crates of 'Emu
Tonic Wine' (a surreal touch). After imbibing generously, he
proceeds across the swaying carriages to where he'd seen Nora [Anne
Grey] and the crooks jump aboard. The train's movement doesn't
seem in the least to upset the tipsy Ben - a variant, this, on the gags
involving shipboard drunks that Hitch used [or intended to use] in Champagne and Rich and Strange ...
Waltzes From Vienna (1934)
McGilligan (pp. 150-52) sums up this one as 'a deft, glittering
imitation of a German light musical'. So it is, for its original
source, via a London stage production, was indeed a German stage
musical and its film version called Waltzerkrieg (1933).
Some other things that McGilligan doesn't say (from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'):
Hitchcock would have preferred to film Dennis Wheatley's first novel, The Forbidden Territory (1933), a thriller set inside Communist Russia, but his producer insisted he stick with Waltzes From Vienna,
'a musical without music', as its director once inaccurately called
it. (What he meant, probably, was that the film has no big
production numbers.) ...
The basic situation in some respects resembles that of Rear Window.
Rasi [Jessie Matthews] wants Schani [Esmond Knight, as Strauss Jnr] to
settle down and take a steady job in her father's bakery. The
Countess [Fay Compton] wants him to realise his potential as a great
popular composer. To do that, Schani will have to defy his
jealous father [Edmund Gwenn, as Strauss Snr]. Similar conflicts
of ambition operate in Rear Window,
which climaxes in the violent confrontation of photographer hero Jeff
with his would-be nemesis Thorwald - effectively an evil-father
figure. Also, during both films we follow the gradual composition
of a piece of music ('The Blue Danube', 'Lisa') to its realisation in a
full orchestral version at the story's climax. Eventually all
disharmonies are resolved. In Rear Window, Jeff and his fiancée reach a modus vivendi for their future together (rather than apart). In Waltzes From Vienna,
Schani is set to marry Rasi and may not need to work in her father's
bakery - where, however, he'd earlier had a moment of musical
inspiration. Either way, it looks like he may get to eat his
pastry and have it too.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
McGilligan's anecdotes about The Man Who Knew Too Much
(pp.157-67) have two highlights. The first concerns the hiring of
Joan Harrison to be Hitchcock's personal assistant. The newspaper
advertisement had called for a 'young lady, highest educational
qualifications, must be able to speak, read and write French and German
fluently'. Taking off her hat, a well-bred girl - just what
Hitchcock was looking for - was revealed to be, in addition, 'beautiful
enough to be a leading lady' (in McGilligan's words). Also,
though her German was lacking, she had an Uncle Harry who was an
important official at the Old Bailey, one who knew the grisly details
of all the major cases that had been tried there ...
McGilligan also mentions Peter Lorre's appreciation of Hitchcock's
occasional party shtick: when sufficiently libated, the director might
be coaxed into doffing his shirt, wrapping a shawl around his
shoulders, and becoming 'a sexy belly dancer with enormous breasts,
undulating to music and hysterical applause'.
So what doesn't McGilligan mention about the film itself? Some brief excerpts from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
In the Bulldog Drummond novel Temple Tower
(1929) by H.C. McNeile ('Sapper'), there's a passing reference to
Drummond and his wife Phyllis having a baby. Seizing on
this passage, and probably also thinking of some recent headlines from
America (the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping case), Hitchcock and
screenwriter Charles Bennett asked themselves what Drummond would do if
his child were kidnapped. The resulting story eventually became
the screenplay of The Man Who Knew Too Much - though Drummond had gone [transmuted into Bob Lawrence, while Drummond's monacled pal Algy had become Uncle Clive] ...
A highlight [of the film] was the thrilling climax based on the
celebrated Sydney Street siege of 1911, in which a group of anarchists
fought a gun-battle with police. [This much is noted by
McGilligan.] The scene compares favourably with the similar
one in Howard Hawks's gangster film, Scarface (1932).
Indeed, the Hawks film seems to have been in Hitchcock's mind,
influencing, for example, his conception of Abbot [Lorre], who is given
an impressive scar of his own, running down his forehead and through
his right eyebrow. Also, Hitchcock would have noted in Scarface the
hint of incest between Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) and his sister (Ann
Dvorak), not so different, after all, from the [hinted] brother-sister
relationship in The Lodger. The relationship in The Man Who Knew Too Much
of Abbot to his companion 'Nurse' Agnes (Cicely Oates) is decidedly
strange - it sometimes seems like that of mother and son, and yet is
different from that. [McGilligan mentions Agnes's possible
lesbianism!] At the climax, the anarchists barricade themselves
upstairs in their hide-out behind a steel door (cf Tony Camonte's steel
shutters) and prepare to do battle. Nurse Agnes fights alongside
Abbot until the moment she's shot. Whereupon, Abbot's horror and
grief are every bit as great as Tony Camonte's had been at the death of
his sister, likewise killed by a police bullet.
... In an early scene, Abbot asks a fellow anarchist to ensure
that the dumpy housekeeper, Mrs Brockett, attends them for the evening
instead of going home to give her husband his supper. The man,
Rawlinson, orders Mrs Brockett to remove her skirt. Abbot, seeing
her in her bloomers, chuckles loudly. (This incident was drawn
from an actual account of the Sydney Street anarchists!)
Mischievously, the film adds a joke of its own. Rawlinson seems
to pinch Mrs Brockett on the bottom, but then we see that he was merely
reaching for some hors d'oeuvre on a plate behind her.
The 39 Steps (1935)
It's fair to say that McGilligan (pp. 169-78) is as merely specious about The 39 Steps
as he is when describing many other of Hitchcock's films. For
example, he writes that Charles Bennett 'reshaped [Buchan's] "The
Thirty-nine Steps" into a Hitchcock film that bore scant similarity to
the book'. Compare a brief passage from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
At first sight, the film doesn't
much resemble the book at all. But many of Buchan's details did
find their way into the film. The traditional box-bed in the
crofter's cottage has its counterpart in the novel as a 'press' or wall
cupboard. A whistled tune ('Annie Laurie') used by Hannay in the
novel as a kind of password becomes in the film the tune that Hannay
can't get out of his head until he hears it again at the climax, and
realises that it's the signature-tune of Mr Memory. (The tune in
the film has a suitably music-hall lilt, resembling the famous Laurel
and Hardy 'cuckoo' tune.) Mr Memory is another of the film's own
creations, based on a real music-hall performer called Datas [as
McGilligan notes]. But in the novel there's an episode where the
master-spy obtains access to, and memorises, top secret naval documents by impersonating the First Sea Lord.
And so on.
Let me be clear. McGilligan tries to give the impression that he
has read everything of consequence on Hitchcock, often quoting - in his
book's Filmography if not in the main text - some little-known passage
on a given film. What I am noting here, in all modesty, is that
McGilligan completely ignores 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story' which summarises half a lifetime's findings
about Hitchcock and his films by someone said to know 'more about
Alfred Hitchcock and his milieu than any other film critic'. This
ignoring of 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' is unjust not
only to me (and my own extensive reading and thinking about the films)
but to McGilligan's readers who suppose that he is giving them the most
'advanced' findings on Hitchcock.
Again very briefly, some things not reported by McGilligan:
1. The inspiration for the famous handcuffs sequence in The 39 Steps
comes from the novel 'Mr Priestley's Problem' (1927) by Anthony
Berkeley Cox. This was reported by me on p. 78 of 'The Alfred
Hitchcock Story' and in subsequent pieces I wrote on the Web: e.g., in
my review of Mark Glancy's monograph 'The 39 Steps' (2003) for the 'Screening the Past' website of La Trobe University. Charles Barr agrees with me on this.
2. The prototype of several Hitchcock villains in films of the 1930s and 1940s (and beyond) is the Übermenschfigure
Julius Pavia in John Buchan's 1912 novel 'The Power House'
(whose title deliberately evokes Nietzsche's notion of 'will to
power'). In a passage in Chapter 8 of the novel (cited in 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story', p.70), the hero, Leithen, dismisses Pavia thus:
'You love power, hidden
power. You flatter your vanity by despising mankind and making
them your tools. You scorn the smattering of inaccuracies which
passes for human knowledge, and I will not venture to say that you are
wrong. Therefore, you use your brains to frustrate
it. Unhappily, the life of millions is built on that smattering,
so you are a foe to society.'
(Put the above passage alongside ones from John Carey's 'The
Intellectuals and the Masses' already cited - for example, in my
discussions of The Skin Game and Rich and Strange
- and you have a significant pointer to Hitchcock's always ambivalent
attitude to what he called 'the moron masses'. I'll return to
this.)
3. The climax of The 39 Steps offers a 'Bergsonian' riposte to Mr Memory, who knows only 'facts' (cf 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story', p. 46 and p. 49). I have written
elsewhere on the Web (e.g., on the 'Screening the Past' website) about
a 'quickening' process undergone by Hannay [Robert Donat] and Pamela
[Madeleine Carroll] that is both literal and metaphorical. It
involves their attaining a new intuition about 'life' and how the film
has shown them coming more fully alive. Significantly, as Mr
Memory lies dying, Hannay and Pamela join hands in the
foreground. They are no longer merely handcuffed together.
And in the background, the show's chorus-line kicks up its legs to the
tune of 'Tinkle, Tinkle, Tinkle' from the suitably-named Victor Saville
film Evergreen (1934). (In what is virtually a remake of The 39 Steps, Hitchcock's North by Northwest, hero Roger Thornhill will say in the pine forest scene, 'I never felt more alive!')
Secret Agent (1936)
McGilligan's entry on Secret Agent (pp. 181-84) is slight, but strikes this true note:
Hitchcock ... was the rare
director who could stand to blame himself. In later years, he
would admit on more than one occasion that he had committed mistakes,
had never conquered the material. "I liked Secret Agent quite a bit," Hitchcock said. "I'm sorry it wasn't more of a success."
There is much information in 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story' that a Hitchcock biographer should have been
aware of (but apparently wasn't). For example:
Unlike The 39 Steps, Secret Agent
isn't based on [a motif of gentlemanly] sexual frustration.
Indeed, Ashenden and Elsa [John Gielgud and Madeleine Carroll, here
posing as husband and wife] eventually sleep together, with him telling
her afterwards, 'There are times, Mrs Ashenden, when it's almost a
pleasure to be alive.' But, by design, Secret Agent
lacks the obvious liveliness of its predecessor. Its sardonic
tone wasn't always appreciated by 1930s audiences. Today, the
film still challenges 'our complacent assumptions about the possibility
of purity or heroism in war' (Maurice Yacowar).
. . .
Hitchcock and [Charles] Bennett ... changed and added material.
... For the film's central scene of Caypor's death, in which a
man's dog several miles away appears to sense what is happening, the
screenwriters remembered one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown
stories. (Called 'The Oracle of the Dog', it has a scene in which
a dog lets out a great howl of woe at what is later found to be the
exact time of its master's murder.) [In turn, Somerset Maugham's
Ashenden story 'The Traitor' includes such an incident in its final
paragraph. But Hitchcock and Bennett decided to expand the
incident into an entire sequence. None of this is in
McGilligan.] And the part of the Hairless Mexican was built up
for Peter Lorre, to become easily the film's most intriguing
character. In the story [itself called 'The Hairless Mexican' and
again involving Ashenden], he has smooth skin like a woman's, and no
eyebrows or eyelashes. Ashenden comments: 'with that frightful
appearance can he really be the lady's man he pretends?' (It's
worth remembering that author Somerset Maugham was gay [and more than
once created disguised gay characters: e.g., the club-footed doctor, a
self-portrait, in 'Of Human Bondage'] ...
Anticipating in some respects Bruno in Strangers on a Train,
the General (as the Hairless Mexican is also known) represents the dark
side of the hero. In this case, he may be said to represent the
[primitive] allure that espionage holds for a relative innocent like
Ashenden. After Ashenden has agreed to Elsa's request that he
abandon the mission, the General arrives and tells him that the Germans
are using a nearby chocolate factory in their operations.
Ashenden can't resist the temptation to investigate. Elsa pleads
with him not to go, but he follows the General out. At the door,
the General gives Elsa a knowing smile. ...
. . .
Above all, Hitchcock and Bennett saw that espionage has its realpolitik aspect.
In a scene set in a London steam-room between intelligence-boss 'R'
(Charles Carson) and his uniformed adjutant (Tom Helmore, who would
play Gavin Elster in Vertigo),
the colonel thinks nothing of dispatching the Royal Flying Corps to
shoot up a train carrying both the fleeing German spy and several
British agents, as well as innocent civilians.
In sum, this complex film deals from its opening scene (a fake funeral)
in the deceptions of supposedly civilised people and indeed of all
appearances. Drawing on earlier films like Murder! and The Skin Game,
it shows what Robin Wood calls in another context 'the lure of
irresponsibility' (and what the philosopher Schopenhauer called
unbridled 'Will'). Parts of it anticipated such later films as Notorious (1946) and even Vertigo.
Sabotage (1936)
McGilligan is sometimes left floundering by Hitchcock's Cockneyisms
(and by his own imperfect recall of the films). Unless there was
one print of Sabotage for America (where it was called The Woman Alone)
and another for the Commonwealth, I think that McGilligan is mistaken
to say that Verloc (Oscar Homolka) shows films described as a 'bit too
odd'. The phrase in the prints I have seen is 'bit too hot'
(meaning risqué, like some of the goods sold from under the
counter by Verloc in Joseph Conrad's original novel, in which Verloc
runs a seedy little stationery shop).
(McGilligan proceeds to interpret a 'bit too odd' to mean that Verloc
probably shows German Expressionist movies, which is clearly not
likely, nor what we see.)
Altogether, McGilligan's pages on Sabotage (pp.
184-92) are stale stuff. They might have been complemented by
material in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'. For example:
As in Juno and the Paycock, it is the women and children in Sabotage who
end up paying for men's misdeeds. But this time Hitchcock
also gives us the character of Ted [John Loder], who makes a gesture
for reasonableness. In a film set in and around a cinema, two
movies-related moments are expressive. A screening of one of
Disney's Silly Symphonies asks, 'Who killed Cock Robin?' - and as
answer shows one of Cock Robin's rivals, another Cock
Robin. Later, after the dazed Winnie [Sylvia Sidney] has
killed her husband, and Ted is pleading with her to run away with him,
a poster behind them asks ironically, Aren't Men Beasts?
(the title of a recently-shot BIP farce made by Hitchcock's former
mentor, Graham Cutts). [The poster isn't visible in all prints,
but features in a still from the scene. It is included in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', p.42.]
There is thus a pessimism to Sabotage, based on a now-famous novel (The Secret Agent [1907]) ... , as there had also been to ... [Hitchcock's film] Secret Agent,
based on stories by Somerset Maugham. (Revealingly, an influence
on both Conrad and Maugham was the philosopher Schopenhauer, often
called a pessimist.) Conrad has Winnie say, 'life doesn't stand
much looking into', and shows that Verloc himself is only a pawn in an
international anarchists' plot. The film repeats that idea when
Ted's Scotland Yard boss tells him that there are people behind the
sabotage 'that you and I'll never catch.' To offset the film's
dark side, Hitchcock relied on the vitality of its London settings and
the conviction of the performances, even the most minor.
. . .
One detail was the sound of Verloc's creaking shoe as he moves
toward Winnie just before the stabbing. The sound suggests his
fear - he's walking on tiptoe - but also it seems to act on Winnie like
a goad. During [production of] Hitchcock's first sound film Blackmail,
a take had been ruined by a pair of squeaky boots. Hitchcock had
commented that the sound might be used to create suspense in some later
film - Sabotage as it turned out.
Young and Innocent (1937)
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit McGilligan provides about Young and Innocent
is a footnote amplifying how music and lyrics for the climactic
'Drummer Man' number were written by three Americans in England: Sammy
Lerner, Al Goodhart, and Al Hoffman. 'Hoffman had been a
real-life "drummer man" in vaudeville and nightclub bands, while
Lerner, most famous for his ditty "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man," would
write similar specialty material - ersatz folk songs and dances - for The Lady Vanishes.'
About something like the collapsing mine shaft - in which Erica (Nova
Pilbeam) loses her antique car and nearly her life - McGilligan is
purely anecdotal (like the rest of his entry on Young and Innocent, pp. 192-97). He says nothing about the scene's provenance (probably the matching scene in Robert Stevenson's King Solomon's Mines, being made concurrently), its influence on later Hitchcock (notably, part of the Mount Rushmore climax of North by Northwest),
and certainly not its 'meaning' (the loss of her car to which she had become narcissistically attached will force Erica [Nova
Pilbeam] to 'grow up': cf Marnie's loss of her horse Forio in Marnie [1964]).
Some observations from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
... Though a unit was
specifically sent to Cornwall to obtain footage for the opening storm
scene at night, the bulk of the film is palpably set in sunlight on the
flat uplands of Kent with its long straight Roman roads - all of this
consistent with Erica and her 'innocence'.
... Young and Innocent
spans various social levels, from the most patrician (spot the Roman
busts in Uncle Basil and Aunt Mary's house!) to the most humble.
The Film Weekly reviewer
loved the film's Englishness: 'It has something native in its people,
background, humours and ways of thought; and all of those things
unforced.' ...
Seen today, the film justifies Hitch's own high estimate of
it. Beneath the sunny surface is a sly suggestiveness,
anticipating aspects of David Lynch's Blue Velvet
(1986). Both films focus on a youth poised between a married
woman - a public entertainer - and a teenager, the daughter of a
policeman. ...
Everyone remembers Young and Innocent's
climactic crane-shot ... But there's another fine shot, worthy of
equal acclaim. Erica and Robert [Derrick de Marney], on the run,
have stopped their car under cover of night beside a railway
shunting-yard near a town. Hitchcock here employs a model shot,
with a tangible and quite lovely mood. The shot has several
ingredients: an elaborate sideways tracking movement as a steam-train
rushes under a moonlit bridge where we've just seen a car cross; light
playing on house-fronts from the car's headlamps and from a nearby
signalbox; the sounds of the speeding train, of shunting, and of a
tolling bell; and a final downwards-tilt of the camera as, arriving
near the parked car, it shows us the focal-point of the tableau, the
young couple. 'The night,' we hear Robert say, 'always
exaggerates things, doesn't it? Personally, I like the
night. It's much more alive than the day.'
In an often magical film, that is perhaps its most Shakespearean moment.
Gentle reader, you may like to compare that last observation with what I said above apropos The Skin Game, about Hitchcock's Shakespearean sense that 'life' is but a dream or a cruel jest ...
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
McGilligan on The Lady Vanishes
(pp. 205-11) isn't too specific about what changes Hitchcock instigated
to the pre-existing Launder and Gilliat script when he was given the
project. A new opening scene and a new final climax seem
definitely to have been added, with further changes incorporated from
anyone who came up with a better line or a brighter idea.
But writing in the 1980s, Andrew Sinclair seems definite that the
marvellous luggage-car scene was substantially Hitchcock's doing.
He notes (on p. 2 of the screenplay published by Lorrimar in 1984):
At Hitchcock's direction,
[Launder and Gilliat] made significant changes from the novel.
The hero Gilbert was metamorphosed from a dam engineer to a collector
of folk music. A banker became a magician in order to introduce
the sequence of the trick cabinet and the poster of the Vanishing
Lady. Miss Froy was transposed from a gullible governess into a
British secret agent ...
The luggage-car scene certainly looks and feels like pure Hitchcock. As I wrote in 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story': 'The entire scene is brilliant - yet has
almost no plot reason for being in the film. In this and some
other respects, it's like the children's birthday party episode in Young and Innocent, or the McKittrick Hotel scene in Vertigo (another "vanishing lady" act).' Or the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest. Each scene 'defines' what its particular film is about. (Thus North by Northwest appears to be 'much ado about "nothing"'.)
Further excerpts from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
Launder and Gilliat's dialogue
is consistently splendid, and the script overall shows considerable
advance on their earlier train-thriller,
Seven Sinners
(1936). ... Hitchcock gave his screenwriters plenty of latitude.
When Iris [Margaret Lockwood] manages to have Gilbert [Michael
Redgrave] thrown out of his attic-room at the inn for causing a
'noise', it appears he was staying there in the first place because a
German lady had paid his board. Is he, then, another [possible]
gigolo-figure like Robert in
Young and Innocent?
Incidentally, the business of Iris becoming irate because of loud
dancing in the room above hers, caused by the man she will eventually
love, was probably a borrowing from
Top Hat (1935).
... Michael Redgrave saw his role as slumming compared with his
work in the theatre. Educated at Cambridge, where he'd gained
first-class honours, he felt that the cinema was a second-rate
medium. He confessed afterwards that, 'I was half-way through the
picture before I started to try', and added, 'you can see the
join'. Which may be true - such a join comes straight after the
luggage-car scene. But as it corresponds to a transformation in
Gilbert and Iris, Redgrave was probably mixing up the character and the
performance. And he certainly threw himself into the part at the
moment when Gilbert has to hit one of the foreign soldiers over the
head with a chair. The soldier has just explained his command of
English by saying politely, 'I was at Oxford.' Gilbert justifies
his action by remarking, 'Well, I was at Cambridge.'
... [Iris's] character anticipates aspects of Melanie Daniels in
The Birds.
[Her] initial narcissism is signalled by the monogrammed scarf she
wears in the first half of the film - it's discarded after the
luggage-car scene, at which point she takes to wearing a sensible,
English cardigan (until the final scene, when she's in a becoming
suit). ...
. . .
Are there special secrets to why
The Lady Vanishes
continues to work so well? ... Firstly, the excellent story ...
hinges on an intriguing situation that is basic: someone knows, really
knows, a certain thing but meets with opposition based on
self-interest. ...
Secondly, it's fair to say that the film's train journey works
as an unforced metaphor for [shared] life ... Hence the appositeness of
[the villain] Hartz's very sporting, 'Jolly good luck to them!' as the
train finally leaves him behind in the pine forest and heads for
neutral territory. ...
Pre-echoes, in fact, of Vandamm's final line, 'Games? Must we?' in North by Northwest.
(Miss Froy, for her part, had put a vaguely religious slant on the
situation with her parting remark, 'I do hope and pray ...that we shall
all meet again one day.')
Jamaica Inn (1939)
McGilligan (pp. 222-25) garbles his account of the content of Jamaica Inn.
For example, a footnote purportedly about the scene in which a horse is
led by its groom into Squire Pengallan's dining hall ends up describing
a quite different scene from later in the film. Also, and
interestingly, McGilligan refers to composer (and Frederick Delius
amanuensis) Eric Fenby's including a snatch of Weber's 'Invitation to
the Dance' in the film's score, but doesn't realise, apparently, that
the released film is without music except in its opening moments.
Among McGilligan's anecdotes this time is one from Sidney Gilliat about
how Hitchcock had to acquiesce when producers Eric Pommer and Charles
Laughton brought in J.B. Priestley to add period flavour to the
script. 'Priestley churned out "scenes more or less straight out
of Ashden's 'End of the 18th Century', a famous source book," according
to Gilliat, while the resigned Hitchcock let Laughton develop them
almost as apron speeches.'
This failed film nonetheless has a fascinating subtext (anticipating the line in Psycho,
'They moved away the highway!') about a man from whom 'life' and
aspiration have nearly all departed, and who finally goes
mad. Stuck in remotest Cornwall, Pengallan (Charles Laughton), a would-be
Byronic hero, finds consolation in horses and objets d'art the way that
Norman Bates (whose favourite gramophone record was once Beethoven's
'Eroica'!) does in taxidermy. His murderous role as head of a
gang of wreckers expresses the rage beneath his respectability.
Some excerpts from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
... For the
director's part, inasmuch as he was engaged with the film deeply at
all, he said that he was mainly interested 'in the Jekyll-Hyde
mentality of the Squire'. ...
Pengallan lives in near-isolation, and lacks stimulating company,
especially the company of women. And he's constantly bawling for
his manservant, 'Chaaadwick!' It looks like Hitchcock had seen
John Ford's Wee Willie Winkie
(1937), set in a remote part of India, in which the garrison commander
(C. Aubrey Smith) lacks for female company, and has become excessively
rigid in manner and outlook. Revealingly, he's forever bawling
for his adjutant, 'Baaagsby!' But Ford's film has all the energy
and extroverted action that Jamaica Inn
lacks. In making the latter film more of a character study of a
decaying and corrupted individual, Hitchcock became too negative.
True, he attempted ingenious parallels with the wreckers themselves:
for instance, one of the gang, known as 'Salvation' (Wylie Watson),
speaks of himself and Joss [Leslie Banks] - and by extension the Squire
- as 'lost souls together.' But it was all overly self-conscious
[on Hitchcock's part]. ...
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The American period
Rebecca (1940)
McGilligan's anecdotal treatment of Rebecca (pp.
235-53) includes his astute comment that Hitchcock deliberately
intimidated Joan Fontaine - when he wasn't facilitating just such
treatment of her by other members of the cast, including Laurence
Olivier - thus 'forcing a novice actress to become her
character'. 'The actress felt as alone, as terrified, as de
Winter's young bride felt in Rebecca's world.' Though McGilligan
doesn't say so, such a technique of Hitchcock's - transcending words -
corresponds in every way with what I call a Hitchcock film's
'subjective' technique, whereby a camera image or effect forces the
audience to feel as a character does. For example, the abrupt
edits, inelegant phrases, red suffusions, etc., in Marnie all work to unsettle and offend the viewer, creating an edginess that matches Marnie's own.
But McGilligan's appreciation of Rebecca itself is limited. For what they're worth, then, some excerpts from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
Though Hitchcock seemed reluctant to fully acknowledge the fact, much of the power of Rebecca comes
from the original novel. That power is expressed as [a certain]
atmosphere - part ghostly, part psychological - and arises from the
mysterious domination over the present exercised by the dead
woman. Hitchcock recreates and sustains that
atmosphere brilliantly [see below], but he could not have managed it
without the character of the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers.
She is seldom seen moving. Revealingly, Daphne du Maurier appears
to have based the character on another, called Mrs Unthank, found in
the novel The Great Impersonation (1920) by espionage writer E. Phillips Oppenheim. Here's how Oppenheim introduces his malevolent
housekeeper: 'A woman whose advent had been unperceived, but who had
evidently issued from one of the recesses of the hall, stood suddenly
before them all. She was as thin as a lath, dressed in severe
black ...' And here for comparison is how du Maurier introduces
Mrs Danvers: 'Someone advanced from the sea of faces, someone tall and
gaunt, dressed in deep black ...'
... In turn, the fascination exerted on readers and audiences by the absent Rebecca is something of an archetypal
matter: as discussed below, Rebecca is a 'Great Mother' figure, and Mrs
Danvers acts as a chilly high-priestess at her 'shrine'.
Hitchcock told Truffaut that 'there was a whole school of feminine
literature at the period' [no mention of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
(1847) ...], but that du Maurier's story lacked humour.
Elsewhere, he criticised her work in general for being 'derivative'. ...
. . .
What, then, is Rebecca 'about'? In the novel of Jamaica Inn,
du Maurier's villain had been a man out of sympathy with his age: [an
albino] clergman whose real allegiance is to paganism, to a time 'when
the rivers and the sea were one, and the old gods walked the
hills'. In Rebecca,
what so shocks Maxim [Olivier] about his first wife is that she is both
promiscuous and - apparently - bisexual. In effect, she is what
Camille Paglia calls the Great Mother, [t]he supreme symbol of
fertility religion ... a figure of double-sexed primal power'.
Maxim, by contrast, is an arch-conservative and patriarch; someone who
firmly believes, he tells 'I' [Fontaine], in mastering an action by
performing it 'over and over again'. When he learns the true
nature of the [polymorphous] Rebecca, and afterwards (in the novel)
kills her, he is virtually traumatised, and a pall descends on
Manderley.
... Conveying the same idea [in the film] is the fact that all
of Manderley's menfolk seem to have become 'impotent' and denatured.
... Typical is a remark made about 'Barmy' Ben (Leonard Carey),
that he's 'perfectly harmless'. And the person who makes that
remark is the estate-manager, Frank Crawley (Reginald Denny), a
bachelor, whom Maxim calls 'as fussy as an old mother hen'.
[Likewise, in one of Hitchcock's Freudian touches, the butler Robert
(Philip Winter) is reportedly having trouble with his teeth.] As
for Maxim and 'I's' marriage, it is evidently one of mere
'companionship'. A suppressed epilogue to the novel, not
published until 1981, confirms this, revealing that the couple are
still childless several years later.
In sum, Rebecca can be read as something of an allegory about
the woes of civilisation (cast in the form of a so-called women's
story). Rebecca herself may be 'a foe to society' [like John
Buchan's Julius Pavia in The Power House - see my discussion above of The 39 Steps],
but the novel captures well the sort of subversive questioning that was
quite commonplace in England between the wars, at least in the circles
in which Daphne du Maurier moved.
Foreign Correspondent (1940)
McGilligan's evocation of Foreign Correspondent (pp. 260-63) centres on two rhetorical questions: 'Was [Hitchcock] snoozing and dozing [on the set] because he could direct Foreign Correspondent with one hand behind his back? [And/or because] on most shooting days there was little to rouse his insincts?'
To be fair, 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' speculates in
similar vein about why the film contains so many borrowings from other
sources, including British spy fiction, and suggests: 'Hitch was
"running for cover" after the rarefied atmosphere of [Selznick's] Rebecca, and felt the need to be self-indulgent'.
Re-united with screnwriter Charles Bennett, self-described (with
reason) as Hitchcock's 'best constructionist', the director would
indeed have felt more able to relax. His film contained many
brilliantly inventive set-pieces: the famous assassination on the
rain-swept steps of Amsterdam Town Hall with a gun hidden in a camera;
the sinister windmill whose sails turn against the wind as a signal;
the death of the genial but murderous Rowley (Edmund Gwenn), falling to
his doom in an attempt to push Johnnie Jones (Joel McRae) off
Westminster Cathedral; the climactic clipper-plane crash.
'In fact', notes 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', 'all of these scenes (and several more) are derived from other sources!':
Many of the film's most
celebrated moments echo the Bulldog Drummond stories by 'Sapper'.
Notably, the assassination of a man's double to conceal the fact that
he has been kidnapped combines two separate incidents from The Third Round
(1924), in which the kidnapped man is a Professor Scheidstrum, who has
invented a formula for manufacturing cheap diamonds. There are
also echoes in the film [e.g., the Rowley character] of John Buchan's Mr Standfast (1919).
Foreign Correspondent is even more indebted to one of the most famous of all English spy stories, Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands
(1903). The film's Stephen Fisher [Herbert Marshall] is
clearly based on Herr Dollman, a disgraced officer in Her Majesty's
Navy who goes over to the Germans, taking his unsuspecting daughter,
Clara, with him. Eventually, however, Clara marries the young
Englishman, Davies, who has earlier alerted her to the truth about her
father. The film's watery climax is a direct borrowing from
Childers' novel. In both works, the renegade father apologises to
his daughter for his past actions, then quietly slips away and
drowns. The episode, in chapter twenty-eight of the novel,
concludes: 'We cruised about for a time, but never found him.'
... Foreign Correspondent
contains many more borrowings than the literary ones above.
Here's a partial list of films (including two produced by [Walter]
Wanger, and two from Gaumont-British) whose influence is detectable in
Hitchcock's movie [the list being based on an article that appeared in
'The MacGuffin' #16 (August 1995)]: Frankenstein (1931), Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931), A Night at the Opera (1935), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), Seven Sinners (1936), Non Stop New York (1937), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), History is Made at Night (1937), Trade Winds (1938), Espionage Agent (1939).
Mr and Mrs Smith (1941)
McGilligan (pp. 276-78) never engages with Mr and Mrs Smith.
With Hitchcock's career trajectory his principal focus, he concludes
that if there were some sharply negative reviews, 'they didn't hurt
Hitchcock in Hollywood, where duty and versatility were expected of a
director'.
In 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', I call Mr and Mrs Smith 'hugely underrated':
In 1938, J.B. Priestley wrote a farce called When We Are Married
in which some stuffy Yorkshire bigwigs suddenly find that their
marriages are invalid and that they are 'living in sin'. Perhaps
coincidentally, American playwright Norman Krasna used a similar
situation soon afterwards in his screenplay for a screwball comedy to
be called No for an Answer,
about a New York couple. It was this screenplay that RKO bought
for Carole Lombard, and which was later filmed by Hitchcock. The
film is hugely underrated, and belongs with Hitch's own brand of
'remarriage comedies' (cf The Farmer's Wife and Rich and Strange). Carole Lombard is vivacious and sexy, yet once again a wife proves to be at least 'half a mother' [as Rich and Strange has it].
. . .
... A defence of Mr and Mrs Smith may start by noting that the film is defining the
commonplace in marriage, and in a manner worthy of a philosopher
(Kierkegaard, say). Thus it emphasises the egotism of both David
[Robert Montgomery] and Ann [Lombard], and it implies that marriage,
however inglorious, is the best medicine for that [commonplace human
condition]. For good measure, it shows that [David's rival], the
over-gentlemanly Jeff [Gene Raymond], is inadequate [perhaps because,
as a lawyer, he knows that 'legality' isn't everything - a theme, too,
of Marnie - and that the technically available Ann can never be his]. ...
One scene bears Hitchcock's indelible stamp. Ann and
Jeff get stuck on a broken-down Ferris wheel at the New York World's
Fair. Hours later, wet and bedraggled, they're finally brought
down. The sign [alongside] the wheel reads 'Life'.
Like the home-movies scene in Rebecca when
the film breaks in the projector, the Ferris wheel scene works as a
metaphor for the woman's and the man's separate dilemmas. For the
woman, there's a reminder of her imperilled marriage - Ann is left
feeling literally uncomfortable, if not unbowed. For the man,
there's a reminder that life is always forcing itself [and its truths]
on us. ...
A perceptive article in Film Quarterly (Winter 1946-47) remarked that 'Mr and Mrs Smith
has been insufficiently appreciated', and singled out for special
praise the scene where David takes Ann back to Momma Lucy's, the
restaurant of their first romantic meetings, now sadly run-down.
(The scene legitimately derives from one in King Vidor's 1938 vehicle
for Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell, The Citadel.) Like that scene, much of the film is both humorous and touching, in a wry sort of way.
Suspicion (1941)
Thanks largely to his consulting Bill Krohn, McGilligan on Suspicion (pp.
278-90) succeeds in indicating some of the film's inner dynamics.
In passing, McGilligan also deals with Hitchcock's involvement on Forever and a Day (1941/43). Though he garbles the content of the latter film - it isn't Queen Victoria's funeral procession that the Hitchcock-designed segment feaures, but Her Majesty's 1897 jubilee procession
- McGilligan is right to say that the segment 'might be considered
another "quasi Hitchcock".' Indeed, after examining the film
recently, I suspect that Hitchcock's (and Alma's) work on the segment
was much greater than has yet been understood: the segment in its
entirety is extensive, running a good quarter of an hour, with every
indication that Alfred and Alma designed all of it. (In the end,
though, the segment was directed not by Hitchcock but, it seems, by
René Clair.)
Some excerpts from the entry on Suspicion in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
Suspicion works
well as a teasing comedy-thriller, but Hitchcock would have preferred
something more extreme. He had wanted Johnnie [Cary Grant] to be
the wife-murderer of the source novel, in which he's also a philanderer
and a mass poisoner. The character is based on one of the most
audacious, and therefore memorable, of real-life British criminals,
William Palmer (1824-56). In fact, the lively Johnnie
is the film's true 'hero' - in the sense that a certain Tom Rakewell is
the hero of Hogarth's famous series of engravings, A Rake's Progress. Hitchcock probably had such a resemblance in mind, for he has Johnnie stay at the Hogarth Club in London.
. . .
... Of course, the film's present ending lacks punch, but it is consistent with what has gone before - that is, if one remember's Beaky's saying that Johnnie can lie his way out of any tight corner! In effect, the present ending is as ambiguous as that of The Lodger,
a film it often resembles. Moreover, on the evidence, Johnnie
really is lying. He tells Lina [Joan Fontaine] that he went to
Liverpool to try to raise money on their insurance policy, but an
earlier close-up of letters from Johnnie's insurers had shown that both
had London addresses.
One can only speculate about how good a film Suspicion might
have been with the ending Hitchcock wanted. Clearly, it's at once
romantic and anti-romantic [pure Hitchcock!], with Lina sacrificing her
life to the man she loves, yet at the same time betraying him.
... More broadly, the life-death struggle [also pure Hitchcock!]
that runs through the film, and which is encapsulated in the early
hillock scene (where Lisa resists yet encourages Johnnie's advances),
provides the basis for practically every Hitchcock film thereafter.
Mr and Mrs Smith and Suspicion form
a remarkable pair of films about marriage (in its psycholgical and
secular aspects, at least). But their dynamics run deeper still,
akin to the 'pessimistic' insights of Schopenhauer.
Saboteur (1942)
Of Saboteur, McGilligan
(pp.294-306) provides this assessment: 'While today it may not have the
same electrifying immediacy, the film is still full of vigor and
panache. Then, as now, critics regarded it as minor Hitchcock,
but in 1942 Hollywood saw it differently. Saboteur was the first film by the English director that truly looked American.' Hmm. Presumably, it also felt American,
thanks in no small measure to Hitchcock's command of the techniques of
'pure film'. I'll quote examples in a moment.
But, yes, there is no denying the look of the film. McGilligan
itemises the landmarks on view: 'Besides the Statue of Liberty, the
film would visit Hoover Dam, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall
[albeit this was disguised in the finished film, after objections from
the management], and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There would even be
side trips to a western ranch and ghost town.'
Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) is established as a California munitions
worker forced to flee across country from suspicion of sabotage and
trying to prove his innocence. McGilligan: 'Dragged along with
him on this "double chase" is a blond billboard model (a tweaking of
Hitchcock's friend, the model and beauty consultant Anita
Colby).' When the pair quarrel and a passer-by in a car mistakes
what is happening, telling her husband, 'My, they must be terribly in
love', McGilligan attributes this line to Dorothy Parker.
Actually, of course, it's a reprise of what the innkeeper's wife says
in The 39 Steps. And
McGilligan contends that Barry Kane's surname dates 'from the first
script sessions with John Houseman', which rather contradicts something
in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story': 'The character's
surname was changed from "Ford" to "Kane" at the last minute'.
(However, McGilligan may be
right on this - I'm not sure.) As for Anita Colby, she was also
an actress - I recently saw her name in the credits of John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936).
Some further excerpts from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':
... The early scenes tend to
show a disunited country whose citizens are restless or lonely - an
over-inquistive neighbour, a bored truck driver, a hermit. ...
But then comes the sequence that reverses all of this. Pat
[Priscilla Lane] finds herself imprisoned high up in the Rockefeller
Building, and hits on the idea of tossing a 'help' note out of the
window. The message takes forever to reach the ground, but as it
floats down we hear a broadcast describing the launching of a ship
called Alaska at the Brooklyn
Navy Yard. This, we know, is the ship the saboteurs have
targeted. And it seems the whole city is listening in.
Hitchcock cuts between several different locales where the broadcast is
being received, including a taxi carrying Barry to the rescue ...
In short, by means of melodrama, Hitchcock gives us a sense of
disunity overcome. Further, we have constantly been reminded of
the initial arson (cf Barry's line in Soda City, 'the ground's burning
up under my feet'), and who caused it. At [socialite] Mrs
Sutton's, Barry and Pat manage to joke about chasing Fry over a glacier
at the North Pole, an allusion to Frankenstein's monster. [The
reminders of 'fire and ice' do seem purposeful, and also anticipate a
film like Torn Curtain
(1966).] At the same time, the scene establishes a solid social
milieu - Mrs Sutton seems based on real-life socialite Countess Dorothy
di Frasso, who was friendly with Mussolini, though in public she
proclaimed the opposite.
Thus by the time the final sequence arrives, our attention is
firmly focussed. Under the very torch of liberty, citizen Barry
Kane and arsonist Frank Fry meet to determine the destiny of
America. After some initial music drawn from the studio library,
evoking serials like Don Winslow of the Navy
(1942), the scene plays in silence punctuated by wind noises and
distant boat whistles. Hitchcock uses some trick cutting at the
moment Fry appears on the torch parapet; and for a couple of close-ups
of Fry's agonised face [after he overbalances], he momentarily gives
him fangs! (This anticipates the 'subliminal' skull-shots in Psycho.)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
McGilligan is at his best when discussing Hitchcock's collaboration with his writers, and his pages on Shadow of a Doubt
(pp. 306-22) include substantial discussion of how Hitchcock and
Thornton Wilder developed an original story idea by Gordon
McDonell. (McGilligan calls the playwright Hitchcock's 'bard of
Americana'.) Points, too, to McGilligan for independently finding
out that the film's Uncle Charlie was part-based on American
serial-killer Earle Nelson (as well as on the French murderer Landru) -
though the information was always available in 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story'! The latter makes this additional
point: 'When he was ten, Nelson was knocked down by a street car
which rendered him unconscious for six days with concussion.
Hitchcock's film cites that detail practically verbatim.'
McGilligan effectively corrects another
passage in my book when he notes that Hitchcock didn't exactly want to
show a 'typical' small American town - at least, not one with stock
characters. Hitch and Alma therefore modified the idea for the
town into 'a place invaded by modern evils ("movies, radio, juke boxes,
etc.: in other words, ... life in a small town lit by neon signs"),
with a sympathetic, individualized family'. (In the 1960s,
Australian filmmaker Brian Davies gave me one of my first insights into
Hitchcock when he asked, 'Is there any Hitchcock film that doesn't
have a neon sign in it?') Mind you, in referring to Santa Rosa as
'typical', my book was only quoting the film's cinematographer Joseph
Valentine: 'There was an indefinable blending of small town and city
... a much more typical background of an average American town than
anything that could have been deliberately designed.' And I
commented: 'Indeed, Hollywood kept coming back to make such films as Happy Land (1943), a Kenneth MacGowan production, and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), directed by Francis Coppola.'
In an email, Richard Allen has praised my Shadow of a Doubt essay from 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story'. So I feel entitled to quote here a few
more passages from that book (which, as I say, McGilligan consistently
ignores in 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light'):
In Saboteur, Hitchcock felt that he'd spread himself too thinly, and had literally tried to cover too much ground. Shadow of a Doubt,
by contrast, combines a detailed picture of life in one small town with
a brilliant study of adolescent psychology. Young Charlie's state
of mind in the early part of the film resembles what the philosopher
Kierkegaard called 'dread', a state of innocence or dreaming that
awakens a thirst for the prodigious and the mysterious. Later,
when Charlie learns the truth about her uncle in the public library
scene, the camera's upward retreat evokes The Fall. ...
. . .
According to Robert Boyle, art director on several Hitchcock
films, the director liked to 'tell his fairy-tales against
reality'. If young Charlie is perhaps Little Red Riding-Hood, her
uncle is the wolf. ...
. . .
Uncle Charlie is a complex figure. With his cape and
knobbed stick, he's not only the Devil, he's also a dandy. In
turn, his attitude to his sister Emma is at times less that of a
brother than of a son. When he says, near the end of the film,
'Emmy, you're a dream!', we think of the recurring shot of waltzing
couples, the film's most dream-like
- and nostalgic - image. But earlier, he'd chided his sister with
the remark, 'Emmy, women are fools! They fall for
anything!' Here the word 'fall' seems significant.
Hitchcock's The Lodger [of which Shadow of a Doubt
is a virtual remake - something that McGilligan notes] offers a
clue. The Ivor Novello character appears to have killed his
blonde sister at her coming-out ball, then later turned to killing a
succession of blonde look-alikes. [The film has further
emphasised the lodger's closeness to his mother.] It's as if he
considered his sister to have desecrated his 'ideal' mother-image [by
'coming out', or 'falling', into society], and that all such persons
must thereafter be 'punished'.
... Joe and Herb's interest in detective stories matches
Hitchcock's own. In essence, these two characters are perfectly
ordinary - if harmless - bourgeois-types. The clue this time is
how they are modelled closely on two characters in one of Hitchcock's
favourite plays, J.M. Barrie's Mary Rose
(1920). Joe corresponds to Mary Rose's father, Mr Moreland.
By the end of the play, using the device of Mary Rose's supernatural
comings and goings, Barrie has succeeded in showing the audience
something beautiful and important about his 'average' family, the
Morelands. The effect is very similar to that achieved by
Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938).
On the other hand, all of Hitchcock's films are about the
life-force and sexuality - in effect, change. George Orwell has
pointed out the typically 'incestuous atmosphere' of happy endings in
nineteenth century novels: such endings aren't to be found in
Hitchcock. [Rather, Hitchcock's films finally repudiate the
Lodgers and
the Uncle Charlies of this world, though not without ambiguity and
regret.] ...
Lifeboat (1944)
McGilligan on Lifeboat (pp.
328-43) is again at his best in discussing elements of the treatment
and screenplay, and who did what. Adducing 'incontrovertible
evidence buried since the 1940s in studio and legal files', he shows
that the virtual novelette handed in by author John Steinback was
unusable, and that Hitchcock instructed screenwriter Jo Swerling to
start writing from scratch, using the basic idea. Hitchcock
himself contributed the most original idea, of making the lifeboat 'the
world in minuscule'. Swerling went so far as to comment: 'I would
say that Hitchcock was entitled to the credit "Original Story by Alfred
Hitchcock," provided he had chosen to make a claim to it.'
McGilligan attributes the description of the scene where the boat's
passengers turn on the German, Willie, and kill him - 'an orgasm of
murder' - to the Office of War Information (who objected strenuously to
this and other parts of the script). But the phrase is actually
in the script itself, as I'll have cause to note again below.
A passing comment by McGilligan is this: 'In the frustrated-hairdresser
fashion of other characters in Hitchcock films, [the ship's radio
operator called 'Sparks'] is always fiddling with the ribbon in the
nurse's hair.' Did McGilligan realise, one wonders, that such
'fiddling' is given a specific Freudian significance in the script,
which identifies it as the symbol for being in love?
Of young Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt,
Hitchcock told critic Charles Thomas Samuels that she becomes quite
ruthless when the time comes to give Uncle Charlie his marching orders
(the scene where she comes downstairs wearing the ring). Now, in Lifeboat, Hitchcock depicts what is perhaps his most ruthless character of all, Willie. Here are some excerpts from 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story':
Hitchcock's wartime allegory Lifeboat is
about the War itself and the need of the Allies to settle their
differences. But in the way of Hitchcock's films, it is also
about the life-force [or life/death force], as its title
indicates. On this occasion, that 'force' is very broad, akin to
what philosophers call the world's 'Will' (in German, 'Wille'),
symbolised chiefly in the film by the surrounding sea. (Cf
another 1944 film, Lewis Allen's The Uninvited, in which the sea is called 'a place of life and death and eternity, too'.) It's fitting that when the would-be Übermensch-figure
called Willie [Walter Slezak] fails to share his secret water supply, what betrays him
are the drops of salt water, sweat, on his forehead [cf the stuttering
Brandon in Rope].
Willie has tried to embody the Nietzschean notion of a will-to-power,
but that notion was always 'perverted' (as discussed below).
Beyond the individual's 'will', there's a universal 'Will', to which
all individuals are finally subject.
. . .
Certainly Lifeboat is a
key Hitchcock film. Its depiction of humanity adrift on a sea of
contrasting moods, and its climactic scene where the Allies engage in
what the script calls an 'orgasm of murder' against the treacherous
German, both conform closely to the view of 'Will' set out by the
philosopher Schopenhauer, who was Nietzsche's predecessor.
Schopenhauer saw Will as a life-force that is also a death-force,
blindly pervading all of nature [and in humans manifested principally
in the sex-drive, much as Freud also taught]. He did not speak
of a will-to-power in nature. That was a 'perversion' introduced
by Nietzsche. The Nazis then in turn 'perverted' Nietzsche's
concept by making 'will-to-power' a dogma, a political
imperative. Effectively, Hitchcock's film asks us to consider
Schopenhauer's original position on all of this. Not least, it
asks us to be less cold-hearted [cf Schopenhauer's call for
compassion]. That is the implicit meaning of its last line,
spoken by Constance, appealing to the lesson that the dead Mrs Iggley
and Gus would teach us.
My readers may like to compare the ideas in the preceding paragraph
with (1) Hitchcock's famous remark, which is very Schopenhauerian, that
'everything's perverted in a different way'; and (2) the anti-Übermensch speech from John Buchan's 'The Power House' quoted in my discussion of The 39 Steps (and which is echoed in Barry Kane's denunciation of the fascist Tobin [Otto Kruger] in Saboteur).
Spellbound (1945)
McGilligan on Spellbound (pp. 354-64) is much less interesting than McGilligan on Shadow of a Doubt or Lifeboat, perhaps because he takes the conventional attitude that Spellbound is just another melodrama and that its 'depiction of psychoanalysis never really [rises] above the level of simplistic vulgarisation'.
'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story' offers the following:
Spellbound is
an impressive Hitchcock film, full of bold effects. Near the end,
everything hinges on a simple slip of the tongue - a Freudian slip? -
made by Dr Murchison [Leo G. Carroll]. By repeating the line as
if inside Constance's head, and by adding an echo-effect and other
elements of stylisation, Hitchcock ensures that nobody misses the
line's importance. Nonetheless, many ingredients of the film do elude
conscious appreciation by audiences. A key to this complex film
is Constance's remark, 'We have the word "white" on our side.'
. . .
... Composer Miklós Rózsa included a Russian
instrument, the electronic theremin, in the film's score. It is
first used in the credits sequence, to eerily suggest the wind that is
blowing away the leaves on a tree; later, the same musical passage
accompanies the onset of each of Ballyntine's anxiety-attacks that
begin soon after he meets Constance. This suggests the working of
a [life/death] force that's at once [external and internal. Also,
one thinks of Shelley's famous lines about driven leaves, 'like ghosts
from an enchanter fleeing'.]
. . .
To begin to appreciate a deeper, more poetic Spellbound,
one may start with the 'opening doors' shot [seen at the moment when
the lovers first kiss]. Hitchcock's own derisory comment was
aimed at the music. 'Unfortunately,' he told Truffaut, 'the
violins began to play just then. That was terrible!' But
the film is full of doors references (cf Marnie),
so the metaphor for 'unblocking' is central. Even more central is
the radiant whiteness behind the final door. That image is the
film's symbol of freedom, based on time-honoured associations found in
poetry - such as Shelley's line, 'the white radiance of
Eternity'. [The image might also be considered a symbol of Will
itself, or of the numinous.] Earlier, it's true, Constance
[Ingrid Bergman] had mocked the idea of love as portrayed by
poets. And the film's subsequent allusions to whiteness - an
operating theatre at Green Manors, white bathroom fixtures at Dr
Brulov's, a glass of milk - do in fact revert to more mundane
imagery. [Will is both 'worldly' and quite otherwise ...]
But then comes the Gabriel Valley sequence. The novel calls the
locale the 'Gorge du Diable', which clearly did not suit Hitchcock's
purposes at all. The archangel Gabriel, whose name means 'man of
God', is traditionally seen as one of God's chief messengers. In Paradise Lost, Milton makes him 'Chief of the angelic guards' placed over Paradise ...
[But a white snowfield, such as the one at Gabriel Valley, is a typical 'lost paradise'
image - a frozen 'garden'. It's an image, almost Dali-esque, of
our human condition. Freud has an explanation. Infancy, he
says, is indeed a 'Paradise', corresponding to the 'unashamed period of
childhood', which he defines as lasting until the end of the third year
of life. But with the onset of the Oedipal period, we lose our
innocence. Significantly, Ballyntine (Gregory Peck) now recalls
an event from just this time in his own childhood. It involves an
'accident' in which he had killed his brother. But of course
Freud taught that there is no such thing as an accident (and Hitchcock,
in Marnie and elsewhere,
clearly felt the same).] In psychoanalytic terms, what happened
to Ballyntine and his brother was a case of 'sibling rivalry'
manifesting itself as a realised wish ...
Furthermore, sibling rivalry is related to a child's Oedipal desire to possess one or other parent exclusively - and can be very fierce.
As far as John Ballyntine is concerned, he is both innocent and guilty
of his brother's death. Thus Hitchcock finds in Freud one more
metaphor of original sin. At some level, this explains
Ballyntine's erratic behaviour towards Constance throughout the
film. Fortunately, in the final scene a prediction of
Ballyntine's comes true, and it marks the typical Hitchcockian
resolution. Ballyntine had told Constance that she was going to
look wonderful wearing white and with orange-blossom in her hair.
In a worldly sense, then, and perhaps rather more than that, the colour
white has indeed favoured these two truth-seekers.
Another highlight of Spellbound besides the Gabriel Valley
sequence is the Dali-designed dream, which has often been
misunderstood. For example, one critic refers to a pair of
'phallic' pliers that Selznick removed; but in fact the pliers are
still visible and are not so much 'phallic' as 'castrating'! This
final part of the dream represents Ballyntine's Oedipal fear of what
marriage to Constance may involve. (Fear of 'castration' is a
fear in several Hitchcock heroes after Spellbound.)
Including the segment that was cut, the dream has four parts: the
gambling segment; two men on a roof; the ballroom segment; the
downhill-uphill segment.
The first segment is the most elaborate, and is patently based
on the idea that dreams are wish-fulfilments. The gambling-hall,
which combines elements of Green Manors and the 21 Club (where
Ballyntine had dined with Edwardes), might almost be a bordello, and is
full of suggestive Dali symbolism: [fleshy] drapes that hang in folds, alluring
eyes nestling between them; tables that have women's
legs (against which the legs of the male card-players rub); swaying
metronomes also painted with eyes (suggesting masturbation or
copulation). In the background, a male figure wields what this
time is very definitely a huge phallic pair of scissors, which he uses
to cut the eyes on the drapes (recalling the 1928 Dali/Buñuel film, Un Chien Andalou).
Finally, if there were any doubt that this gambling-hall is a male
province, a pedestal holds aloft another suggestive object (which the
pliers in the final segment are clearly designed to grasp and crush).
Notorious (1946)
McGilligan on Notorious (pp. 374-81) is mainly anecdotal as usual, with
some interesting observations on the casting. (But I don't think
he mentions that Hitchcock's initial choice to play Alex Sebastian was
Clifton Webb.)
'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story' includes some closely-reasoned material on why the basic situation may have appealed to Hitchcock:
Early in 1945, Hitchcock and Ben Hecht completed a fifty-page first draft treatment for their film to follow Spellbound.
The treatment was based, rather remotely, on John Taintor Foote's
two-part story, 'The Song of the Dragon', which had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post
in late 1921. The story is about Mary Brannigan, an
eighteen-year-old actress who, appalled at the carnage being inflicted
by the War on her country's young men, agrees to become a counter-spy
and sleep with a foreign agent to get secret information. Later
she becomes an Army entertainer, singing Irish songs, and falls in love
with a young Captain. The boy's formidable mother is
understandably suspicious, but finally, told the full facts, gives her
blessing to her son's marriage.
Here was no more than the germ of Notorious [a good but tainted woman's attempt to rehabilitate her image, as in Easy Virtue],
but it would have reminded Hitchcock of something else again.
Foote's story closely resembles a central episode in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
(1919), which is also set during the War, and in which hero Richard
Hannay's future wife, the eighteen-year-old Mary Lamington, conceives
of a bold move to undo a top German spy calling himself Moxon
Ivery. The first half of the novel ends dramatically when Mary
comes to Hannay and his intelligence boss, Macgillivray, and announces,
'Last week Mr Ivery asked me to marry him.'
Hannay is nonplussed. Unofficially, the blonde Mary, half
his age, is his adored girlfriend. However, she and several of
their colleagues have been aware for some time of Ivery's activities,
which have lately become even more threatening to the Allies.
Mary therefore plans to entice Ivery into a trap. When Hannay,
red-faced, protests that he won't let her go through with her
'infernally degrading' scheme, a colleague reasons with him: 'It isn't
pretty, but war isn't pretty, and nothing we do is pretty.' Mary
herself then addresses Hannay affectionately, saying that she knows
what she's doing. She notes that 'women were always robuster than
men', and asks Hannay to have faith in her. Contrite, he submits.
Buchan's novel has a startling climax. Ivery is captured,
put into Allied uniform, and sent into the ranks - where he dies on the
battlefield, shot by a German bullet. That irony matches the one
at the end of Notorious.
In fact, a comment of Hannay's catches something of the film's
Hitchcockian ruthlessness (in which Alicia [Ingrid Bergman] can smile
at Alex's likely fate): 'I had no more pity for [Ivery] than I would
have had for a black mamba that had killed my friend and was now caught
to a cleft tree.'
The Paradine Case (1947)
[See earlier discussion.]
Rope (1948)
McGilligan (pp. 399-414) brings plenty of perception and commonsense to Rope.
Of Rupert [James Stewart], he notes that he 'offers the film's
thoughtful, Hitchcockian articulation of goodness ("an obligation to
the society we live in") and evil ("something deep inside you from the
very start")'. There are thus echoes here again of the hero-villain confrontation in John Buchan's 'The Power
House' ...
Once again, though, McGilligan's limited knowledge of the film lets him down. The film's Mrs Wilson (Edith Evanson) is heard
to remark that Rupert got his limp from a war wound (which no doubt
reminded Hitchcock of Hemingway). Nor does McGilligan dream of
offering an interpretation of what is clearly a symbol! (I'll
come back to this.)
Indeed, all of the film's ironies and ambiguities seem to elude McGilligan.
Before writing the entry on Rope in 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story', I looked at the film's script (and re-read the original play). Some excerpts from what I wrote:
Often in Hitchcock, one film complements another. In The Paradine Case, the barrister Keane, self-described as 'the greatest realist in the country', falls victim to a Fatal Woman. In Rope,
Brandon [John Dall] and Phillip [Farley Granger] are blinded by their
intellectual theory that murder is 'a privilege for the few'.
[This neatly parallels the attitude of the Nietzsche-quoting literary
intelligentsia portrayed by John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses.] Both films are about hubris and its consequences. In The Paradine Case,
serpentine camera movements associated with Mrs Paradine suggest the
way she deceives Keane [and he deceives himself]. In Rope,
the famous 'ten-minute take' gives the impression that the film is one
continuous shot - which becomes a metaphor for Brandon and Phillip's
[entrapment in] subjectivity. [Again, for some reason, I think of Hitchcock the
animal-lover, and Schopenhauer's remark that 'the animal is in essence
absolutely the same thing that we are'. By contrast, Nietzsche's
notion of will-to-power invites hubris, whether towards other humans or one's fellow creatures.]
. . .
... One of the qualities of Rope, in its play and film versions,
is the study it offers not of gayness, exactly, but of how one partner
dominates the other (creating a folie à deux
situation). The screenplay is explicit here: it describes Brandon
as 'psychopathic' and Phillip as 'neurotic ... [someone who] wants to
be and needs to be dominated'.
... Stewart follows the play in giving Rupert a limp, the result
of a war wound. The play suggests that Rupert's war-service makes
him, too, a murderer, but the film doesn't go into this, perhaps
because Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) had just stressed a similar irony. [However, in Strangers on a Train, Bruno is given the subversive line, 'What's a life or two, Guy?' And of course Rupert's wound, like Jeff's broken leg in Rear Window,
has connotations of impotence.] The screenplay merely
observes that one cannot be sure whether 'Rupert is essentially good or
essentially evil'. Rupert's former job of housemaster in a prep
school seems apt: not too intellectually demanding, it would have
let him use Nietzsche's ideas to show off his 'brilliance' without
having to be fastidious about how his words were understood (or
misunderstood). A similar theme occurs in To Catch a Thief [1955] where the Cary Grant character reproaches Grace Kelly: 'To you, words are just playthings.'
... The film's finale, in which Rupert disarms the two youths
and waits with them for the police to arrive, takes place while the
room is flooded by red, green and white light from a neon 'STORAGE'
sign just outside. Hitch likened this to a musical effect.
He probably took it from the novel Enter Sir John (1929), on which Murder! was based, where the three colours evoke Harlequin. Its use in Rope may
imply that the three characters are all 'merely players' and that
there's little essential difference between them - for all that Rupert
tries to deny it.
Even so, Rupert's denunciatory, 'Did you think you were God,
Brandon?' carries great weight. Phillip has repeatedly been heard
playing the film's 'theme' music - the gay composer Francis Poulenc's Perpetual Movement No. 1 (1918) - on the piano, but never right through. Among other things, this suggests that both Phillip and Brandon are out of touch with the life-force and its perpetual
movement. In any case, if Brandon is 'psychopathic', Phillip
'neurotic' and Rupert 'wounded' - i.e., if they're all flawed - then
Rupert does, at last, seem to be speaking words to be heeded.
Under Capricorn (1949)
McGilligan (pp. 416-29, passim) is unenthusiastic about Under Capricorn.
Of Lady Henrietta's 'confession' scene, he remarks that it's 'one of
the highlights of a film with few to recommend it'. And of course
there are unresolved structural problems with the second half (just as
there are with Shakespeare's 'Macbeth'), so the film is fair game for
McGilligan's dismissal. Right?
Actually, I like the film a great deal.
But McGilligan is the least revisionist of critics and
biographers. (Without Spoto's excesses to correct, his book would
be bland.)
At the very least, a less America-centric biographer of Hitchcock would
have located the film in its British context, including several recent
films, such as Gainsborough costume dramas. And Olivier's Hamlet (1948)
is another obvious influence, both technically (the roaming camera -
note: even up staircases) and, in broad terms, subject-matter
(poisonings; 'the time is out of joint'; etc.). See the
film in a good print and its cinematography is exquisite, as you would
expect of Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus).
But here are some points from 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story':
[It's] a moody, stylised film
where people talk endlessly while their real points stay
unspoken. A key line is given to Flusky [Joseph Cotten], who
complains about the unfeeling legal process, which goes 'on and on and
on'. The line is significant because beyond all the legality -
and the talk - lies hope of something else, a return to a lost
paradise. Under Capricorn may be Hitchcock's finest film to explore that theme.
. . .
... Its fluid design suggests life itself, at times wasting
away, sometimes being savoured. Typical in this respect is the
verandah scene between Charles [Michael Wilding] and Lady Hattie
[Ingrid Bergman] that begins with a view of the house bathed in
afternoon sunlight. Actually, the view is a painting, which
proves appropriate. (The matching passage in the novel is
also picturesque, describing Hattie's head 'seen against red feathers
of cloud' as she sits at a French window.) The scene has an
audible stillness, and one almost hears sunset
approaching. Meanwhile, the light is growing fiery.
Hitchcock has caught an Australian sub-tropical feel perfectly,
doubtless reflecting his researches into light and cloud effects for Rope.
Everything in the scene is integral. Firstly, its famous
climax is the moment when Charles holds his jacket behind the window so
as to make for Hattie what the novel calls 'a mirror impromptu':
irradiated by the sunset, her beauty proclaims that she may yet regain
her 'kingdom'. Charles, whose inspired gesture with the jacket
bespeaks his own nobility, will later keep telling her that she's
'coming back'.
Secondly, the fiery colour is one of several reminders that Hell
haunts this harsh land 'down under', this 'infernal place' as the
Governor [Cecil Parker] calls it. Men and even animals are
repeatedly described as having 'a bit of the Devil' in them. The
contrast is with the 'Emerald Isle' back home, a remembered paradise,
associated most of all with Hattie. When Charles speaks of taking
her boating 'on the bay' (Sydney Harbour), or riding, as part of her
rehabilitation, the phrasing recalls her beloved Galway Bay and how she
used to ride beside it. Flusky remembers that 'she'd go at a
fence as if it had the Kingdom of Heaven on the other side'.
But Australia's very harshness has its own beauty. Some
things, Flusky will tell his wife, are 'all in your mind'.
[Hamlet makes a similar remark!] Thirdly, then, the same fiery
light that suggests the proximity of Hell is allowed, whenever it
strikes Hattie's auburn hair (as in the verandah scene), to invoke a
contrary condition. Several times during the film her hair is
emphasised in this way [cf a motif of Marnie],
and each time we're invited to feel that Heaven may not be so distant
after all. (One may think of William Blake's lines about building
'a Heaven in Hell's despair'.)
. . .
... From this point on, Charles runs the risk of falling in love
with another man's wife and losing control. His situation thus
duplicates Milly's apropos Flusky, and in fact Under Capricorn
well illustrates its director's famous remark that 'everything's
perverted in a different way'. Implied is the existence of a
basic life-force (in which screenwriter James Bridie believed), plus a
whole set of attendant ambiguities. Charles is a nobleman and
Milly is a commoner, and they end up taking opposed courses of action
[until the end, when both depart
the household], but the film is lucid about the hard choices
involved. Charles, luxuriating in his upper-class idleness, and
Milly, prepared to 'work to the death' for her master, both seemingly
do what they are fated to do.
Cinematographer Jack Cardiff's work on Under Capricorn is thoroughly professional. Perhaps, though, his book Magic Hour
(1996) misses the point when it suggests the film was 'fatally
inhibited' by its trundling camera and resulting loss of tempo.
The film's motif of life's ebb and flow supports a case for technique
drawing attention to itself in this way. There is fine work too
from the composer Richard Addinsell, whose evocative score suggests, in
its principal motif, the young Australian colony vigorously pressing
on. Costumes were designed by Roger Furse, who also made an
important contribution to the film's sense of style. An inspired
touch was giving Hattie a tiara for the Governor's Ball where, for a
few moments, she really does seem to have returned to her
'kingdom'. Hitchcock had chosen his co-workers shrewdly.
Laurence Olivier effectively complimented him a few years later by
choosing the same triumvirate of Cardiff, Addinsell and Furse to work
on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).
Stage Fright (1950)
'Stage Fright was shaping up as
a cozy return to the English thrillers that were Hitchcock's safe
haven', begins McGilligan's account of that film (pp. 429-37). He
has some interesting tidbits. For example, the Hitchcocks watched
Alastair Sim in Sidney Gilliat's London Belongs to Me/Dulcimer Street (1948) - which rather confirms my claim in 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story' that the titles-sequence of Gilliat's film provides the inspiration for Frenzy's, nearly twenty-five years later.
Also, McGilligan notes that Whitfield Cook and Alma opposed Hitchcock's
decision to make Jonathan (Richard Todd) the film's villain and to
begin the film with Jonathan's lying flashback. What I think
Hitchcock wanted to do here was emulate the most famous - and
controversial - of Agatha Christie's devices, in her book 'The Murder
of Roger Ackroyd' (1926), of having the murderer turn out to be the
narrator. (Further, Hitchcock is being 'psychological'
here. His life/death motif in film after film typically opposes
dash and vigour to passivity and low cunning. The Selwyn Jepson
novel gives Jonathan a note of self-pity when it has him say, 'I had a
difficult war ... rather more mental as well as physical strain ...
than some chaps had to take.' The screenplay calls him 'a trifle
weak'.) In 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story', I note that another Christie book, 'Lord
Edgware Dies'/'Thirteen at Dinner' (1933), provides the scene in Stage Fright where Charlotte (Marlene Dietrich) tries on mourning clothes and complains in her prima-donna-ish way that they lack colour.
Hitchcock himself, McGilligan reveals, chose the almost-forgotten Cole
Porter song 'The Laziest Gal in Town' for Dietrich to perform in Stage Fright.
(It afterwards 'entered Dietrich's permanent repertoire'.)
According to McGilligan, 'Hitchcock's camera is fixed on [Dietrich]
throughout the song. Vincente Minnelli couldn't have filmed it
more simply, or effectively.' In fact, the camera cuts away
several times to watchers in the theatre's wings - including Jonathan
on his way to Charlotte's dressing room - and I've always thought that
one particular sideways shot of Charlotte cavorting on her stage-prop
sofa deliberately mocks the character and her persona. (The
emphasis of course is on a suggestive languidness, the opposite of the
constant rushing around by Eve [Jane Wyman] throughout the film.
I think that we're supposed to regard Charlotte as out of touch with
the lives of 'mere mortals' with whom she nonetheless condescends to
deal at times. She isn't a wicked person, exactly, just
self-centred and manipulative - including of Jonathan.)
Nor does McGilligan choose to note the story's connection to the famous
Thompson-Bywaters murder case of the 1920s, to which Hitchcock himself
had a personal connection (he had known Edith Thompson's father and
sister, perhaps even Edith herself). Jepson's novel refers to the
case more than once. Charlotte is clearly part-based on Edith who
may have incited her lover Bywaters to murder her husband, which is
what happens in the novel. (Both Thompson and Bywaters were
hanged.) Mrs Thompson's appearance and demeanour in the dock,
notes 'The
Alfred Hitchcock Story', were said to resemble those of a theatrical star.
More from my book:
... [Few people have] noticed
how ingeniously Hitchcock pursued his theatrical metaphor. The
scene where Charlotte tries on mourning clothes (i.e., one more
costume) is typical. When Eve introduces herself as [the
fictitious] 'Doris Tinsdale', she receives the reprimand, 'Not so loud, dear', as if she were back at the Academy,
rehearsing. But Charlotte quickly finds Eve/'Doris' a
part, telling her to be ready to introduce the doctor when Charlotte gives her a
cue by coughing. During this scene, Charlotte actually keeps forgetting her new maid's name [which is like
forgetting lines], despite some
prompting from
Eve. And when, as bidden, Eve then goes into the next room to
await the doctor, the ensuing action is photographed as if from the
wings of a theatre. There, Eve does seem for a moment to be suffering from
stage fright - she doesn't want Detective Smith [Michael Wilding] to spot her - but eventually she manages to
speak the lines she's been given.
Nor have many people noticed Hitchcock's other main metaphor,
which is about the life-force [or life-spirit] in [a rather drab]
post-War England. [This elaborates a motif of
The Paradine Case.]
The film opens with a shot of St Paul's Cathedral standing defiantly
amidst a wasteland of rubble caused by the Blitz. Later, the
film's most remarkable scene contains another reference to the War: the
theatrical-benefit garden party is being held to raise money for war
orphans. All the main characters turn up to help, except for
Jonathan. In addition, Hitchcock peoples the scene with a rich
collection of English 'types', such as the cheery Joyce Grenfell and
even the weak little man [a Mr Pooter type] from the jury in
Murder!
Crucial to the scene's concept is the rain, which makes everyone 'bear
up' against this latest 'downpour' from the skies. (In 1987, Jane
Wyman claimed that the filmmakers merely took advantage of some passing
showers on the day of shooting, but an inspection of the screenplay
shows that the rain was always scripted for the scene.)
* * *
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