To contact K.M. (whose website this is), click here: muffin@labyrinth.net.au

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

1. 'Editor's Day'/'Editor's Week': April 19, 26, May 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, June 7, 14, 21, 28, July 5, 12, 19.  2. News and Comment (last revised 26 April).  3. Links to our other pages.

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

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

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

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

   


                                                                           

The Pleasure Garden], my parents had their first - and rare - disagreement.  It had to do with the editing of the picture, which my mother supervised; my father said it was "flashy"!  What I believe he meant was that the scenes were more edited than usual.  With her editing skills, Alma had made the film more dynamic but might have overdone it a bit.'  (Pat Hitchcock and Laurent Bouzereau, p. 42)  'Accordingly', I wrote in 'The MacGuffin', 'I wonder whether the film wasn't released in two versions, with Alma's cut perhaps approximating the Rohauer print and Hitchcock's version being represented by the statelier NFTA print [which, by the way, pretty well matches a third extant print, held at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas].  The latter sacrifices some comedy business with Mr and Mrs Sidey [Patsy's landlords], for example, but gives more footage to the audition scenes in the Pleasure Garden theatre and considerably extends the Lake Como sequence.'  ('The MacGuffin' #29, p. 17)  For the record, the full Lake Como sequence (as seen in the NFTA print) includes some charming footage in which a young man serenades his girlfriend in a boat drifting on the lake in the moonlight, while Patsy and her husband Levett (Miles Mander), who will later betray Patsy with the Native Girl, wander together at the lake's edge.  But Hitchcock perhaps isn't being entirely free of irony, even here.  Eventually we realise that Levett may have paid for the boat to be there, part of the bridal package which also includes the hire of the vast bridal suite itself in a large villa.  And next day, to further sober us up, Hitchcock works in a shot of the same boat (or its twin), now moored and skeletal-looking.  (He would use a similar night/day contrast in Downhill [1927] to characterise a Paris dance hall: first alluring and offering romance, then merely drab and deserted.)  Something else I noticed when watching the film this week is a detail early in the film that is quite subtle.  By means of some elaborate cross-cutting early in the film between Jill taking tea at the Sideys' house and her ambitious friend Jill (Carmelita Geraghty) somewhere across town 'trying out' a new costume with the appreciative (and lecherous) theatre manager Hamilton (George Snell), Hitchcock prepares us to see Jill supplant Patsy as the theatre's featured chorine.  At the beginning of the film, we had watched Patsy in that role.  Now the film cuts to Jill wearing her distinctive new costume - but this time she is wearing it onstage, while Patsy (in blonde wig) has been relegated to the chorus line behind her.  (See frame-capture below.)

                                                                           

May 10 Back on February 23 (above), I reported on how I was working on my 'files'.  That work continues!  Accordingly, here are some random items I came across this week, and some comments.  First, according to the Paramount 'Showmanship Manual' for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), it might seem that James Stewart and Doris Day took a risk in filming on location in North Africa.  However, they were adequately protected: '[I]n Marrakech, French Morocco, ... the sinister alleys and teeming bazaars are actually too dangerous for foreigners to wander in without escort. ... With permission from the Pasha [governor], who provided armed police for protection, Hitchcock spent two weeks filming in the incredible labyrinth of streets. ...  [T]he movie-goer is treated to fascinating views of the exotic bazaar called the Souks, [to] the street of sewers [sic] where veiled Arabian women ply their ancient needle craft at the most modern of Singer sewing machines, [to] the area of the dye shops where one of the local villains falls into a vat of blue dye, and [to] the luxurious Mamounia Hotel with its strange eating house.'  (Elsewhere in my files this week I came across Roald Dahl's 1987 story "The Bookseller" which mentions how Winston Churchill loved the Hotel La Mamounia and often painted the Atlas Mountains from his balcony there.)  Next, here's a shameful item from a Selznick publicity manual for The Paradine Case (1947): 'The skins of 250 Iceland Sheep were used on a luxurious bedroom suite in The Paradine Case.  The wool of the Iceland Sheep is much like Angora, and the skins made a luxurious floor covering of light beige.'  (This of course is Mrs Paradine's bedroom suite that reminded Peter Conrad of a scene from a Cecil B. DeMille film.)  Finally, some thoughts on Saboteur (1942).  During my filing this week, I came across a 2003 email from Michael Walker in which he provided background for why, during the cross-country car drive from the Hoover Dam to New York, a couple of the saboteurs sing "Tonight We Love" set to music from Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto.  (See frame-capture below.)  Michael quotes musicologist Sigmund Spaeth: '[In 1941] America discovered the opening melody of Tschaikowsky's Piano Concerto in B-flat minor.  The band-leader, Freddy Martin, first turned it into "Tonight We Love", with words by Bobby Worth and some helpful arranging by Ray Austin.  Then came "Concerto for Two", with Jack Lawrence supplying a text for Robert C. Haring's adaptation.  Eventually there were no fewer than sixteen different versions of the same tune ...'.  Interesting!  Bill Krohn has told me he feels that Hitchcock is subtly sending up the relative effeteness of the saboteurs, remarking that the bespectacled saboteur in the back seat has just waxed nostalgic about how, 'When I was a child, I had long golden curls ...'  (Tchaikovsky of course was gay.)  This makes a lot of sense.  For one thing, it contrasts with how Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) had earlier in the film whistled a different, more robust tune, the so-called 'Fate' passage from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.  (If the saboteurs can sing a tune composed by a  Russian composer, then presumably 'our' Barry may whistle a tune composed by a German composer!)  In turn, I think of further evidence for this idea.  At the film's climax, Barry will come up against another of the saboteurs, Fry (Norman Lloyd), whom Theodore Price, in his book 'Hitchcock and Homosexuality' (1992), has no doubt is gay.  (The Saboteur climax prefigures that of North by Northwest between Thornhill [Cary Grant] and the sinister Leonard [Martin Landau].)  And tonight I was struck by the very first remark we hear spoken by socialite Mrs Sutton (Alma Kruger) when Barry is taken to the saboteurs' New York lair.  As Barry enters the upstairs room where Mrs Sutton is addressing a couple of her male colleagues, she reprimands them thus: 'I have to hover over you like an old hen.'  This is precisely the line Hitchcock uses in Rebecca to characterise the somewhat de-natured estate-manager Frank Crawley (Reginald Denny) - nearly all the men in the film are so afflicted - and will use again in The Paradine Case to characterise the gay Latour (Louis Jourdan).  Frank Crawley is 'as fussy as an old mother hen'; Latour, we're told, had been 'like an old mother hen' to his beloved master, the blind Colonel Paradine.  As John Houseman once remarked, Hitchcock approached his filmmaking with an almost scientific exactitude ...     

                                                                                         

May 17 Still working on my 'files' (such as they are) this week, I came across an article from the 'New York Times', dated 5 September 1937.  It's called "Hitchcock: Master Melodramatist"  by B.R. Crisler, and was written after Crisler met Hitchcock.  'Mr Hitchcock is on his way to Hollywood (his first visit) for a two-week vacation', he notes; 'when we talked to him last week he denied that there is any likelihood of his immediate annexation by America, despite encouraging rumors.'  A couple of things about the article stood out for me.  First, Crisler says this: 'But the whole point of the matter - divorced from all the fine talk of camera angles, the accumulation of suspense, the trick of informing the commonplace with mysterious and terrible significance - [is that Hitchcock] is the only director alive, or active today, who does all his directorial thinking in camera terms.'  Hmm.  Did Hitchcock, already his own best propagandist, tell Crisler that?  His point, years later, to Truffaut, that too many directors make 'pictures of people talking', is already being made by Crisler, who refers to pictures that 'talk themselves to death'.  It's a point that may even be broadly true (though with apologies to, say, John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, and Sergei Eisenstein), but at the same time I wouldn't want to downplay the Hitchcock 'trick of informing the commonplace with mysterious and terrible significance', which Crisler almost does here.  Which brings me to what Crisler calls a 'purely playful idea' of Hitchcock's that is quoted later in the article.  Here it is, and I think it's fascinating in the context of Hitchcock's work to come.  '[O]ne thing he longs for is the opportunity to do a conventional Keystone sequence of cops being consecutively bopped on the head as they emerge from a hole (he has a Freudian complex of cop-hatred).  At about the seventh cop, he would have the camera move in, showing the blood streaming down the face of the victim, then the arrival of the ambulance, the victim borne away on a stretcher to the operating table, the family waiting tearfully outside.  Then back to the hole again, bopp, bopp, bopp - one flatfoot after another.  He thinks it would illuminate the proceedings no end.'  More than a quaint or 'purely playful idea', this is a splendid, even brilliant, exemplar of how things are in the Hitchcock universe.  (Note, by the way, that it simply won't do to speak of Hitchcock's 'Freudian complex of cop-hatred', even in the context of the anecdote itself.  In that very year, Hitchcock had made Young and Innocent which simultaneously makes gentle fun of cops performing their prescribed duties and gives us a sympathetic portrait of a local Chief Constable who is clearly a humane man who is open to the possibility of innocence in a man accused.  He anticipates, say, Chief Inspector Oxford in Frenzy [1972].)  Much more than a satire on cops, the anecdote both critiques and educates the Hitchcock audience.  It shows us to be very often conditioned by what the philosopher Schopenhauer called 'ordinary consciousness' and which he, Schopenhauer, contrasted to the truer consciousness of the artist, who can see the bigger picture.  Actually, I thought of a line the screenplay of Saboteur (1942), five years later, would give to one of the circus 'freaks', the one known as 'the Human Skeleton' or 'Bones' (Pedro de Cordoba), who says that normal people are 'normally cold-hearted'.  (That's the element of critique in the anecdote, note.  See frame-capture below.)  But I also thought of something that Hitchcock remarked about the people in his film The Birds (1963), that they may normally be complacent and 'unaware that catastrophe surrounds us all' (which is pure Schopenhauer) but that when crisis comes, 'people are all right' and can rise to the occasion, as, commented Hitchcock, the British did during World War Two.  (Here, as in his anecdote, Hitchcock is educating and appealing to the good nature of his audience.)  Of course, as Raymond Durgnat did in 'The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock' (1974), you may see this dual way of thinking by Hitchcock about his audience as all rather shallow, a mere eddying back and forth, before, with the voice of the moralist, insisting that people 'grow up, a little'.  But the anecdote (rather like one by Schopenhauer about a boatman complacently rowing his boat on a wide sea with a storm approaching) is too vivid and too true, to be dismissed as simple-minded, which Dugnat would have us do.  Hitchcock's admirable capacity for dual-mindedness and seeing the bigger picture informs a film like Stage Fright (1950), which I'll talk about next time.            

                                                                           

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

                                                                                          

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

                                                                           

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

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