Movie directors are supposed to be larger than life, Caesars of all they survey. From the birth of cinema—from the silent epics of Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance, and D. W. Griffith into the sound era—the film director has doubled as field commander. John Ford re-creating cavalry movements in Utah’s Monument Valley, Leni Riefenstahl supervising Nazi parades, Cecil B. De Mille staging biblical spectacles with throngs of costumed extras, David Lean bracing himself against the raging winds (Ryan’s Daughter) and desert sands (Lawrence of Arabia), Sam Peckinpah detonating a horse-crowded bridge in The Wild Bunch—of such stuff fearless leaders are made. But there is another traditional role, less grand but equally enduring, of the director as nimble chef, whipping up treats which contain nasty surprises. In this camp, which encompasses practical jokers from Luis Buñuel to John Waters, no one served death as a cold dish with more Jeevesian aplomb than Alfred Hitchcock. A pudgy man who seemed to hold on to his baby fat for protective padding, Hitchcock elevated the voyeurism implicit in all filmmaking into an explicit stare and aesthetic statement. Popularity meant more to him than it did to the field-commander directors, who were content to play God. Long before his name became synonymous with his droll brand of macabre, Hitchcock put his own face on his product, introducing his films in coming attractions, making cameo appearances which his fans learned to anticipate (popping up in a weight-loss ad in Lifeboat, walking a pair of dogs in The Birds), lending his name to pulp magazines, book anthologies, and board games, and becoming the only legendary director to make himself at home in America’s living room as the host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where his distinguished-penguin silhouette became the most famous profile in television. Introducing each episode, he enunciated his English vowels to suggest a wry mortician talking shop.
While Hitchcock was alive, his salesmanship made him suspect in the eyes of some American critics. The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann labeled Hitchcock “a successful cynic” in the Somerset Maugham mold, chalking up Hitchcock’s success to shrewd pandering. “In the country of the bland, the wan-eyed is king,” Kauffmann aphorized in 1963. The cultural landscape has been bombed beyond recognition since then, and Hitchcock’s name has not only lasted but retained its catchphrase status as a synonym for suspense. Since Hitchcock’s death in 1980, posterity has done plenty for him. “Hitchcock is the most intuitive and prophetic of all our popular artists,” George W. S. Trow proclaims in his recent book, My Pilgrim’s Progress (Pantheon), voicing the new consensus. Nineteen ninety-nine marks the 100th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s birth, an event that will feature full-scale retrospectives of his work, the publication of Hitchcock’s Notebooks, by Dan Auiler (Avon Books), and a five-day conference being hosted by New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies this October titled “Hitchcock: A Centennial Celebration.”
These forthcoming homages amount to an avalanche on top of an avalanche. In his book of interviews with Hitchcock (Hitchcock/Truffaut, 1983), Truffaut predicted that before the end of the century Hitchcock commentary would rival that on Marcel Proust, a comparison which sounded fanciful at the time but now appears clairvoyant. No director has inspired more word count on every possible aspect of his personal life, creative output, persistent childhood fears, and embedded psychosexual coding. He has been the subject of standard biographies; collections of interviews; “The Making of …” books about individual films; recent memoirs by the actress Janet Leigh (Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller) and the novelist and screenwriter Evan Hunter (Me and Hitch); critical studies of his scare tactics and recurring motifs, with special emphasis on “the MacGuffin,” his term for the deliberately vague pretext used to set the plot machinery into motion (a stolen briefcase or a microfilm involving unspecified “government secrets”); Lacanian-Derridean deconstructions, such as Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory, by Robert Samuels; scene-by-scene and even frame-by-frame studies of individual films (Camille Paglia’s tour de force tribute to The Birds and Stefan Sharff’s The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’s Rear Window); a scholarly newsletter published in Australia called The MacGuffin (which has its own Web site, www.labyrinth.net. au/~muffin); and a journal called Hitchcock Annual, whose latest issue offers an interpretation of Hitchcock’s cameo appearance in Torn Curtain—“In Torn Curtain we see a progenitorial Hitchcock sitting in an armchair (suggestive of a director’s chair) reacting when the infant (an extension of himself, his double, his film, his future) creates chaos in his lap.” Chaos being a soggy diaper. The Gore Vidal phrase “scholar-squirrels” applies to the Hitchcockians and their nut-gathering activities as they go theme-spotting and detail-quibbling. That same issue of Hitchcock Annual scrutinizes The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, correcting the author for saying the newlywed husband is wearing white shorts when “he is actually wearing blue pajama bottoms.” Like Trekkers, Hitchcockians have no trivia threshold.
Born in 1899, in a suburb east of London, Alfred Hitchcock was raised Catholic and educated by the Jesuits, a moral education that wedded free-floating guilt to logical rigor, a combination guaranteed to leave one clear-minded but uneasy. In his biography Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (1978), John Russell Taylor describes the discipline at St. Ignatius College, where corporal punishment—caning—was applied with psychological subtlety. “Once the errant child was sentenced to corporal punishment, he could choose for himself when it should be administered—first morning break, lunchtime, mid-afternoon or the end of the day. Naturally the child put off the fateful moment as long as possible, sweating all day.” This desire to postpone inevitable pain as long as possible may have been the source of the delay tactics and wicked teases Hitchcock refined as a director. He made the audience wait for a violent act it both dreaded and desired.
As Hitchcock wrote in an article called “Why I Am Afraid of the Dark” (1960), “In cinematographic style, ‘suspense’ consists in inciting a breathless curiosity and in establishing a complicity between the director and the spectator, who knows what is going to happen.” He distinguished between surprise, which makes audiences jump, and suspense, which keeps them in a state of anticipation. From an efficiency standpoint, suspense is much more time-productive. As Hitchcock explained to Peter Bogdanovich:
You and I sit talking here and there’s a bomb in the room. We’re having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn’t mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! The bomb goes off and [the audience is] shocked—for fifteen seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, insert the bomb, show that the bomb is placed there, establish that it’s going to go off at one o’clock—it’s now a quarter of one, ten of one—show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. “Look under the table! You fool!” Now they’re working for ten minutes, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds.
After St. Ignatius, Hitchcock studied engineering and worked as a graphic artist in the advertising department of a manufacturing firm. Drawn to movies, he began designing title cards for Famous Players–Lasky, which set up a British production shop in 1919.
It was here that Hitchcock had his first opportunity to direct. Some of his work was filmed theater (The Farmer’s Wife, 1928), while other movies, such as The Lodger (1926), had intimations of the cat-and-mouse games Hitchcock would later play in Suspicion (1941) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Hitchcock always maintained that silent film was invaluable schooling in how to tell stories without words, through composition, editing, and punctuating detail. He even married a film editor, Alma Reville, whose eye would prove invaluable. Silent film also brought out his resourcefulness regarding optical effects. He devised a trick shot involving a monocle in Easy Virtue (1927), had a glass floor built for The Lodger so that pacing feet could be shown from below, and developed a muralist’s eye for matte backdrops. “The beauty of a matte is that you can become God,” he told Bogdanovich. With the introduction of talkies, Hitchcock employed sound as an element to be used as precisely and expressively as any other film element. The lasting triumphs of Hitchcock’s English period are The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, remade in 1956 with Doris Day and James Stewart), The 39 Steps (1935), which was Phoebe Caulfield’s favorite movie in The Catcher in the Rye, and The Lady Vanishes (1938). In 1938 the producer David O. Selznick invited Hitchcock to Hollywood to direct a movie based on the story of the Titanic, which will remain one of those great what-if projects. Hitchcock and his wife left England and relocated to Los Angeles, where he instead directed Rebecca (1940), the Joan Fontaine–Laurence Olivier romance, in which he thwarted Selznick’s meddling designs by shooting the bare minimum of the script and leaving no alternative takes and angles for outsiders to reassemble. “Hitch’s material was a jigsaw which permitted of only one solution: his” (Taylor’s Hitch). Rebecca, which won the Academy Award for outstanding production, was followed by Foreign Correspondent (1940), in which Joel McCrea climbed into the trench coat to defend democracy. Alfred Hitchcock was on course to becoming the British institution that America would adopt as its own.
But enough chronology. The arc and highlights of Hitchcock’s American career are so well known that they need no narrative recap. What interests me are the misperceptions about Hitchcock and his work which persist to this day. Re-seeing his films, I was struck by how much verbal blockage clogs the drain. Hitchcock told Truffaut, “In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.” Given such an emphasis on fluent storytelling, it’s remarkable how often his films bog down in explanatory blather—the psychoanalytical rigmarole of Spellbound (1945), the tiresome business about switched keys in Dial M for Murder (1954), the long-winded diagnosis of Norman Bates’s mother complex at the end of Psycho (1960). The entire script of Rope (1948) is a witless twitter of Broadway banter; filming it in long, continuous takes was a stunt that didn’t make the movie version any less stagy. As late as Frenzy (1972), there are comic-relief exchanges in Hitchcock which present the actors like pheasants under glass. Clearly there was something about the enclosure of theater that satisfied Hitchcock more than he would admit.
Another myth about Hitchcock is that he was a perfectionist whose films are models of meticulous pre-production, surface plausibility, and narrative coherence. Using his celebrated storyboards (many of which are reprinted in Hitchcock’s Notebooks), he would map out the movie like an extended comic strip. The actual filming would be a faithful transference of his sketchbook to celluloid. Hitchcock undeniably did his homework, but his homework often had a lot of holes. Reviewing Secret Agent (1936) in the London Spectator, Graham Greene noted such laughable absurdities as “the secret agent who loudly discusses his instructions in front of the hall porter of a Swiss hotel and who brandishes his only clue to a murder in a crowded casino,” and lamented, “How unfortunate it is that Mr. Hitchcock, a clever director, is allowed to produce and even to write his own films, though as a producer he has no sense of continuity and as a writer he has no sense of life.”
Hitchcock’s work was always glitchy. The critic Manny Farber cited “a speeding car in which the only thing moving is Ingrid Bergman’s overteased coiffure” in Notorious (1946); Rope has a scene in which Farley Granger, giving one of the worst performances of anyone’s career as a member of a Leopold-Loeb pair, smashes a glass he’s holding in a moment of fright and soon after sits down at the piano to play, both hands unbandaged (he would have been bleeding all over the keys); and Camille Paglia considered the New England accent of the shopkeeper in The Birds (1963), which is set in Bodega Bay, California, “a major gaffe.” In Hitchcock’s later work—papier-mâché puppetry of Cold War intrigue such as Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969)—the fakery (rear projections, tacky sets) showed Hitchcock unable to keep up a good front. Recording such flubs is not to engage in revisionism at Hitchcock’s expense but to place his strengths and flaws in perspective. As Manny Farber wrote, “To put Hitchcock either up or down isn’t the point; the point is sticking to the material as it is, rather than drooling over behind-the-camera feats of engineering.”
Hitchcock’s greatness is as a pictorial showman—a creator of billboards—not as a conscientious realist. With the possible exception of Michelangelo Antonioni (whom Hitchcock admired), no director has shown a greater aptitude for framing and pitting actors against architectural surroundings. Buildings in Hitchcock’s films have mystery, presence. In so many post-70s films, the intermediate zone between the actors and their backdrops—the middle distance—is rendered indistinct as directors cram in as much production-value verisimilitude as the screen will hold. In Hitchcock’s films, everything is cleanly delineated, angled, emphasized, and juxtaposed. Foreground and background appear scissored and pasted against each other to create a dynamic clash. As he told Bogdanovich, “You see, the point is that you are, first of all, in a two-dimensional medium. Mustn’t forget that. You have a rectangle to fill. Fill it. Compose it.” He objected to having “air space” around actors’ heads and bodies because it padded the screen with useless depth.
The glamorous faces of Hitchcock’s stars are legendary façades set against other legendary façades, icons versus sites. A scenic tour through Hitchcock’s world would include the Spanish mission in Vertigo (1958), groved in shadows, and the museum rooms where the lateral pan of his camera makes the walls look like sliding panels; the office building in the opening sequence of North by Northwest (Hitchcock’s trains-planes-and-automobiles excursion, in which Cary Grant confronts every mode of transportation), whose windows reflect the streaming bustle of New York City, and the Frank Lloyd Wright–like house perched on a cliff which serves as the enemy agents’ HQ, a weaponlike structure with jutting edges; the drab, almost government-issue Phoenix office Janet Leigh embezzles from in Psycho, and the Gothic-gingerbread bat house looming above the Bates Motel, where she meets her fate. Hitchcock also made classic use of national monuments—the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) and the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore, down which Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint skitter in North by Northwest. Hitchcock said he wanted to have Cary Grant sneeze in Lincoln’s nose. That was the limit of his impudence. Where contemporary filmmakers don’t hesitate to demolish national landmarks (the White House incinerated in Independence Day, the Statue of Liberty’s lopped head sinking underwater in Deep Impact), Hitchcock played with American iconography, Pop-art-style. He didn’t believe in breaking his toys.
Women are the other wondrous artifices in Hitchcock’s work. Not because of their physiques (he wouldn’t have known how to handle Marilyn Monroe’s milk-shake wiggle), but because of the trim structural integrity of their wardrobes, accented colors, accessories, and hairstyles—their glossy-magazine look. Where a sexpot flaunts her assets, a lady keeps something piquant in reserve. A woman of elegance, he wrote, will never cease to surprise you. Probably a virgin until he was 25, married to the same woman his entire life, Hitchcock practiced a “Look, don’t touch” form of female idolatry. Like George Balanchine with his favorite ballerinas, he was a Pygmalion with his leading ladies, fussing over every aspect of their appearance. Preparing North by Northwest, he sat with Eva Marie Saint at Bergdorf Goodman’s as mannequins modeled outfits, quarreled with Kim Novak over the gray suit he selected in Vertigo, and chose a soft-green suit for Tippi Hedren in The Birds. He wasn’t just playing pasha. The designer Edith Head said that Hitchcock had a “psychological approach to costume,” a sophistication that has become almost extinct. (He also had a psychological understanding of coiffure. Seen from James Stewart’s point of view, Novak’s French twist in Vertigo resembles a nautilus shell, a small symbolic vortex.) One of the reasons Hitchcock remakes look so déclassé is that young actresses today don’t know how to walk, much less dress. Compare Tippi Hedren’s clicky entrance in The Birds (to which Camille Paglia pays honor in her book on the film) with Gwyneth Paltrow’s mopey slouch in A Perfect Murder, the remake of Dial M for Murder; or Grace Kelly’s pearled sophistication in Rear Window with Daryl Hannah’s droopy deportment in Christopher Reeve’s misconceived TV remake. The gold standard in blondes has been devalued since Kelly. What we have now are pretty doll heads mounted on stems—attenuated girlishness.
If Hitchcock’s interest in women had been merely decorative, acquisitive, his work would have dated as badly as an old copy of Esquire. It hasn’t. Women for him weren’t pinups or figurines, but passports into unknown realms. Like Balanchine, Martha Graham, and Ingmar Bergman, Hitchcock placed women at the center of the universe, at the source of creativity, eros, and mortality. One reason that Vertigo becomes more haunting with age (aside from the manic-depressive attack of Bernard Herrmann’s score, which harks back to Wagner and ahead to Philip Glass) is that it is perhaps the last film to treat woman as archetype and Romantic ideal. James Stewart’s shattered Scottie, having lost one woman, tries to remake another in her image, telling her how to dress and fix her hair, much as Hitchcock did with his actresses. Where women in movies today seem expendable, interchangeable, their dewy replacements being bred like guppies on Dawson’s Creek, Vertigo’s lyrical hunger derives from the obsessive belief that there is only one woman—one spiritual-corporeal ideal—who can salvage its hero’s racked soul. The movie is a modern Orpheus myth: like Orpheus in pursuit of Eurydice, Stewart reclaims his lost love from the regions of the dead only to lose her again after a dark, treacherous ascent (for Orpheus, the steep trails leading from the underworld; for Scottie, the dizzying, telescoping stairs of the Spanish bell tower). For both couples, the brief reunion results in a tragic fall. “Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air!” (Bulfinch’s Mythology). The last shot of Vertigo, of James Stewart standing bereft with empty, useless arms, is like the final page torn from a dream.
If Vertigo is Hitchcock’s art masterpiece, Rear Window is its entertainment equal. I can’t think of any movie I enjoy more and get more out of each time I see it. From the blinds being raised under the credits like curtains on a three-act play, Rear Window is a big Broadway production transplanted to a studio set, as James Stewart’s globe-trotting newsmagazine photographer L. B. Jefferies (“Jeff”), sidelined in a leg cast, clocks the comings and goings of his courtyard neighbors from his wheelchair. It’s summer, windows are flung open in the un-air-conditioned city, and every apartment seems to be putting on a floor show: a dancer, whom he nicknames “Miss Torso,” flings herself around to the brassy strains of Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free; an aspiring songwriter in another apartment tries to bat out a hit tune; a pair of cuties sunbathe on the roof (ogled by a helicopter); a newlywed couple conducts an all-out honeymoon—the husband leans on the windowsill, looking depleted—while an older couple bickers. “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms,” says Jeff’s physical therapist, Stella (Thelma Ritter), in case we didn’t get the point. That’s part of the charm of Rear Window—it’s wittily up-front about its agenda.
As George W. S. Trow notes in My Pilgrim’s Progress, Rear Window is Hitchcock’s most theatrical film, the cross section of lit rooms reminiscent of urban-tenement dramas like Dead End. Yet it isn’t stage-bound and marking time, like Rope or Dial M for Murder. The roving eye of Hitchcock’s camera follows a perfect diagram across the screen as it tracks the aftermath and cover-up of a murder, creating the illusion of infinite maneuverability within an enclosed setting. Aside from a Toto-like dog who digs up the garden, a subtle nod to The Wizard of Oz, the movie’s one Cinematic Moment arrives when Grace Kelly’s golden-toned face fills the screen for the first time as she bestows a kiss on her undeserving lover, her shadow eclipsing his face like a celestial sphere. Hitchcock uses slow motion to arrest the touching of lips and lend it luxury value. He never needed to follow his lovers into the bedroom. Kisses in his films are climaxes. (Orgasmic fireworks light the sky when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly connect lips in To Catch a Thief [1955].)
Voyeurism is only one of Rear Window’s themes; the other is marriage. Jeff and Kelly’s Lisa have reached a stalemate: she wants marriage, he doesn’t. A Peter Beard type with a tanned hide, Jeff considers socialite Lisa too chic, spoiled, and picture-perfect to share his life of rugged adventure. Why, she wouldn’t last a moment on the front lines! “Did you ever eat fish heads and rice? … Those high heels, they’ll be great in the jungle … ” Stella, the audience’s mouthpiece, thinks he’s nuts trying to punt a great girl like Lisa, whose every gown-swirling entrance is a fashion event. Stella’s tart advice, Lisa’s pampering, the caged birds and newlyweds in the opening sequence, all are part of a conspiracy within the suspense machinery of the movie to undermine Jeff’s obstinance—his dumb male pride. His bachelor resistance is no match for the silk web being spun around him. At the end, Lisa, having proved herself a valiant trouper, lounges triumphantly while a recuperating Jeff naps, both of his legs now in casts: her captive. Seeing he’s asleep, she sets aside her book, Beyond the High Himalayas, which the viewer assumes she’s reading for his benefit, and picks up a copy of Harper’s Bazaar, paging through it as her name is sung on the soundtrack. The feminine realm has been restored to its rightful order.
The champagne afterglow of Rear Window is the reverse image of the romantic desolation of Vertigo. It’s difficult to think of any director living or dead who could express either joy or abandonment with such a fine wallop, much less both. (Brian De Palma, Hitchcock’s most imaginative imitator, can sow devastation—see Blow Out and Casualties of War—but is too cynical a bystander to portray bliss. He can work only one side of Love Street.) Cool operator though he may have been, Hitchcock worked both extremes of the emotional spectrum.
Unlike field-commander directors, whose ambitions lure them like siren songs toward bigger budgets, wider canvases, all-star casts, and loftier themes (Terrence Malick, for example, breaking his 20-year sabbatical with the thick vegetation and poetic voice-overs of The Thin Red Line), Hitchcock wasn’t afraid to divest himself of Hollywood pomp and start with a clean slate. Psycho was the cinema-altering product of Hitchcock’s experimental primitivism; it’s an exploitation film that turns into a threshing machine of Eisensteinian montage. Inspired by the box-office payoff of American International’s cheap quickies, Hitchcock decided to do a cut-price horror film of his own, based on a pulp novel by Robert Bloch about a homicidal mama’s boy. He and the screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, spent six weeks consulting about the film, piecing it together scene by scene, then Stefano went off and wrote. Hitchcock shot the first draft (something almost unheard of in second-guess Hollywood) with the camera unit from his TV show. The famous shower scene, which took seven days to shoot with 70 camera setups (for 45 seconds of footage!), was done with a nude body double for Janet Leigh, since nudity didn’t conform with Hitchcock’s notions of proper use of a star. The movie was shot in black and white “to avoid a wash of Technicolor blood,” according to Hitch. (That is one reason among many why Gus Van Sant’s recent color reproduction was a mistake. Anne Heche’s orange outfits were also an affront.)
Psycho is a half-movie which itself is divided neatly in two. The opening sequences of Janet Leigh with her lover lounging in bed after enjoying a matinee, her embezzlement and flight, the rainy drive in the dark (windshield wipers have never had such a threatening rhythm), have a classic noir propulsion. Once Leigh steps into the shower of her room at the Bates Motel, the movie enters a different aesthetic dimension. Shadows are banished in a white blare of hospital light. The images are wrested from their social milieu into pure abstraction. The slashing knife, which mimics the editing cuts, introduces a formal virtuosity for which the routine functionality of the embezzlement story has left the viewer totally unprepared. The shower scene isn’t just a trap sprung on the unwary; it’s an art piece, the shower itself an art installation—an upright sacrificial altar. The Zapruder clip of Hollywood horror, the shower scene is one of the most parodied sequences in cinema (Mel Brooks took a limp stab at it in High Anxiety), yet copycat versions and 20 years of slasher films have not dulled its impact.
Critics were divided on the shock tactics of Psycho (Dwight Macdonald called it the product of “a mean, sly, sadistic little mind”), but it was a popular smash. One of the interesting finds in the otherwise verbatim tedium of Hitchcock’s Notebooks is that after the humiliating failure of Torn Curtain, a clunker starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews (a film in which Hitchcock also had a falling-out with Bernard Herrmann), Hitchcock considered another, even bolder return to basics. In 1967, Hitchcock and the screenwriter Benn W. Levy, with whom he had collaborated on his first sound film, Blackmail (1929), began planning a film based on the true-life story of Neville Heath, a soft-spoken young man who seduced his victims before murdering them. Suave knockoff artists were nothing new in Hitchcock—Joseph Cotten’s “Merry Widow” killer in Shadow of a Doubt comes to mind. What would make this treatment unique was Hitchcock’s intention to shoot the film on New York City streets cinéma-vérité-style, using unknown actors in natural light and actual locales and showing bohemian nudity, like in them fancy Antonioni films. The most remarkable item is that Hitchcock planned to shoot the film with a portable camera, a radical break from his cinematic principles. As he told Bogdanovich, “Hand-held [camera] is against all the rules of cinema—cinema is montage—it’s pieces of film, three frames long if you want it, placed next to other pieces of film.” Hand-held camera took one into Cassavetes territory, where snapping, unruly heads go in and out of focus and frame. Hitchcock hired the photographer Arthur Schatz to conduct film tests using faster color stocks by shooting a rough draft of the script. “This footage, shot without sound and, to this day, still unknown actors, is an incredible glimpse into what could have been,” the author of Hitchcock’s Notebooks writes. Had this project, originally called Kaleidoscope, been produced, “its brutality and cinema verité style would have been ahead of the films from this period that did break down the studios’ stylized violence: Bonnie and Clyde, even Easy Rider. Here was one of cinema’s greatest directors (perhaps the greatest) proposing a groundbreaking film that would have eschewed the American studio style for the kind of filmmaking Hitchcock was seeing in France and Italy.”
Maybe, though you have to wonder about a script that has the half-naked protagonist, in a moment that anticipates Beavis and Butt-Head if nothing else, removing a pinecone lodged in his crevice. “close-up—willie’s hand and his bare behind.” Even if this project weren’t the world-beater conjectured by the author of Hitchcock’s Notebooks, it would have been interesting to see Hitchcock navigate the fleshpots of hippiedom. The proposal was rejected by Universal, which understandably wanted Hitchcock to concentrate on more commercial properties. Instead, Hitchcock tackled Leon Uris’s espionage novel Topaz and was thrown for a loss. The international cast, led by John Forsythe, appeared to be drowning in aftershave, the sets seemed constructed of office partitions, and none of the several endings shot for the film resolved the confusion. The withering reviews, perhaps the worst of Hitchcock’s career, consigned him to the glue factory. “The embarrassment of Topazis that Hitchcock is lazy and out of touch,” Pauline Kael wrote. Hitchcock recouped some of his spent reputation with Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976), pictures that were patted on the head by the favorably inclined when they were released but look wobbly today. Although he continued to sketch out possible films to direct, Hitchcock slowly withdrew into himself, hampered by alcohol and the infirmities of old age, re-emerging to collect honorary awards. (Incredibly, he never won a best-director Academy Award.) He was knighted in 1980, and died in his sleep on April 29 of that same year. His wife, Alma, died two years later.
There’s always an unaccountable factor to genius, a shadow area which is never resolved. Fittingly, for a man who made detective films, Hitchcock left behind a lot of clues. Of all his motifs and signature strokes (staircases, keys, birds), the one I find most intriguing is his fascination with falling. Steep falls were his dramatic crescendos. There is a beautiful mountain fall in Secret Agent, the death plunge of the Fascist agent from the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, James Stewart’s plummeting from ledges in Rear Window and Vertigo, Eva Marie Saint’s slipping down Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, and Martin Balsam’s backward tumble in Psycho. The falls are usually photographed from a high angle, the camera often focusing on hands clutching one another for dear life, the figure dropping or about to drop into a whirlpool abyss. (The director Jonathan Demme constructed a whole neo-Hitchcockian thriller around this desperate tug of outstretched hands in his 1979 film, Last Embrace.) What do these swoons signify? They occur too often and too vividly in Hitchcock to be mere plot devices. Let’s ask the Big Guy.
“Dreams of falling are more frequently characterized by anxiety,” Sigmund Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams. “Their interpretation, when they occur in women, offers no difficulty, because they nearly always accept the symbolic meaning of falling, which is a circumlocution for giving way to an erotic temptation.” In Hitchcock’s case, fear of falling may symbolize loss of control, letting go. His career was based upon fixing all the variables of filmmaking in advance and leaving nothing to chance, and he personally shied away from confrontation or intrusion that might have had awkward, unforeseen results. He was incapable of hailing his own taxi without becoming white with terror. Physically soft, inwardly unbudgeable, Hitchcock was a meek control freak who plowed himself into his work and used courtesy and “amusing” anecdotes to maintain a protective zone. A supreme sublimator, he made the most of his repressions and avoidance maneuvers—he transformed them into psychosexual cliffhangers and paranoid chases that filled the screen. His movies seem bright and shiny on the surface, jet-age fantasies and merchandise, and yet here we are, on the eve of his 100th birthday, still peeling away layers, as if hoping to find encoded messages under the film emulsion. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock is the most obvious of thrill vendors, and the most stubbornly cryptic. Ravens belong on both men’s shoulders, perched forevermore.
