Alfred Hitchcock (115 page)

Other critics, unable to make up their minds, had to see the film more than once and vote both ways.
Time
thought it was “gruesome,” a heavy-handed “creak-and-shriek movie,” but by 1965 was praising another film, Roman Polanski’s
Repulsion
, as in “the classic style of
Psycho.
” Similarly, Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
, who had been qualified in his reaction to Hitchcock’s films for over two decades, initially described
Psycho
as unsubtle and even “old-fashioned”; but the controversy over the film led him, as he had done with
Lifeboat
almost twenty years earlier, to reappraise the Hitchcock film in a Sunday piece—this time upgrading his opinion (
Psycho
was now “fascinating” and “provocative”). By the end of the year, the
New York Times
critic had decided
Psycho
was among the year’s Ten Best—“bold,” “expert,” and “sophisticated.”

One perceptive assessment came from V. F. Perkins, writing in England’s
Oxford Opinion.
Reacting to
Sight and Sound’s
verdict that
Psycho
was “a very minor work,” Perkins disagreed, and prescribed repeated viewings to prove his thesis. “The first time it is only a splendid entertainment, a
‘very minor film’ in fact,” Perkins wrote. “But when one can no longer be distracted from the characters by an irrelevant ‘mystery’
Psycho
becomes immeasurably rewarding as well as much more thrilling.” Perkins went on to praise the “spectacularly brilliant” acting and “layers of tension” in the film, concluding that the subject matter was “fit only for a tragedian. And that is what Hitchcock finally shows himself to be.”

Up to that time no film boasted as many return viewings.
Psycho
capped ten years of sustained creativity for Hitchcock. And, along with his other 1950s films that crisscrossed a dangerous land, it showed him to be an American tragedian indeed—tragedy delivered, as always, with a wink.

Once, standing in the middle of a square in Copenhagen, the director heard a siren blaring and spotted an ambulance heading straight for him. The ambulance screeched to a halt, and out jumped a man, crying, “Autograph, please!” Hitchcock scrawled his autograph, the man jumped back into the ambulance, and off it went, siren blaring. “I don’t know if the autograph was for the patient or the driver,” he mused later.

Another time, stepping off a plane in Tel Aviv and heading down an escalator, Hitchcock was spotted instantly, and the whole airport seemed to pause and look up at him, showering him with applause as he descended. “That was very nice,” he admitted.

When he traveled to Tahiti for a vacation, choosing such a remote place partly in order to escape his fame, even children recognized him, clustering around him on the beach. When he toured the Vatican, the Papal Guards standing around quietly hummed his television theme song.

It can be said without exaggeration that by 1960 thanks to the boost from
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and
Psycho
, the short, portly film director was indeed a citizen of the world.

Psycho
was nominated for four Academy Awards: Joseph Hurley, Robert Clatworthy, and George Milo for Best Black-and-White Art Direction and Set Decoration; John L. Russell for Best Cinematography; Janet Leigh for Best Supporting Actress; and Hitchcock for Best Director.
^*

The favorite that year, with ten nominations, was Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment.
Wilder was at the peak of his reputation and enjoyed widespread industry support whenever he was nominated, attracting votes from both the Writers and Directors Guild memberships. The controversy over writing credits for
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(a story that had become common knowledge in the Writers Guild) no doubt hurt Hitchcock at Oscar time, even at this high point of his career; but he was probably hurt more, ironically, by his proud refusal to take a writing credit. Wilder’s unique cachet came from being a writer
and
director. (Like Hitchcock, he also produced his films.) Hitchcock certainly could have claimed to have cowritten
Psycho
, but on principle he didn’t.

Hitchcock admired the cynical, sophisticated Wilder as much as any director, always privately screening the latest Wilder film. He may even have voted for Wilder himself. Philip K. Scheuer wrote a sympathetic piece in the
Los Angeles Times
, trying to spark an underdog campaign: If Hitchcock won Best Director, he mused, all Hollywood would be shocked, and it would be “not so much for
Psycho
as to atone for having left the Master at the post the four previous times.”

On April 17, 1961, Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock sat up front at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Alas, there were no surprises during the evening: not a single
Psycho
nominee went home with an Oscar. That night the Best Set Decoration and Best Editing honors went to
The Apartment
, and the Best Script, Best Director, and Best Picture Oscars went to one man—Billy Wilder.
^**

Psycho
would be Hitchcock’s last Best Director nomination. In his offices at Paramount and later at Universal, an increasingly crowded wall featured his many international awards, plaques, and trophies—including five certificates of Best Director nomination. He would point out the latter to visitors and shake his head ruefully, saying, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” The statue is just a fancy doorstop anyway, he’d note, adding, “The studios run those things.” But his joking, close friends say, masked a deep private disappointment.

He said little publicly about the Oscars. Once, when a BBC interviewer asked him directly if he was disappointed at having never received the Best
Director prize, he replied, “We’re on dangerous ground here. I won’t talk about myself,” and quickly changed the subject.

“Oscars aren’t the end-all of our business,” John Ford once crustily told an interviewer who pursued the same line of questioning. “The award those of us in this profession treasure most highly is the New York Film Critics Award. And those of us in the directing end treasure the Directors Guild of America Award. These are eminently fair.”

But Hitchcock, despite being named a “finalist” and “quarterly winner” on occasion, never won Best Director from the Directors Guild of America, either. He was nominated a record
eight
times from 1948 to 1960: for
Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, North by Northwest
, and
Psycho
^*
And he fared little better with the New York Film Critics, who, after honoring him for
The Lady Vanishes
, shut him out of further awards for the rest of his career.

Almost by default it had fallen to the French to lionize Hitchcock, and the young cineastes of
Cahiers du Cinéma
and
Positif
had been turning up the volume. Hitchcock’s incomparable run of films during the 1950s, climaxed by
Vertigo, North by Northwest
, and
Psycho
, made him an exemplar of “auteurism”—their theory that described directors as the true authors of the consistent ideas and themes of their films. The incessant French “propaganda” (Truffaut’s words) gradually took root in America among the younger critics.

Foremost among the young American auteurists was Andrew Sarris, not only the U.S. correspondent for
Cahiers du Cinéma
, but a critic for New York’s alternative weekly, the
Village Voice.
Writing in the
Voice
, Sarris compared Hitchcock to Orson Welles, and hailed
Psycho
as the “first American movie since
Touch of Evil
to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films.” In 1962 Sarris went further, comparing Hitchcock to a French filmmaker widely regarded as an artist, and boldly stating that he was “prepared to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on the proposition that Alfred Hitchcock is artistically superior to Robert Bresson by every criterion of excellence.” The lionization spread, and would give Hitchcock solace even as the Oscar receded from his grasp.

“What will you do for an encore?” Lew Wasserman is said to have asked after
Psycho
earned controversy, acclaim, and the greatest box office a Hitchcock film ever enjoyed.

In fact, for nearly a year after
Psycho
was released, Hitchcock himself didn’t know the answer. He busied himself in the second half of 1960 supervising the publicity and distribution of
Psycho
outside the United States, dubbing the film in several languages (a process that Hitchcock, unlike most Hollywood directors, personally oversaw), giving numerous interviews to foreign outlets, and touring England and the Continent for five weeks in the fall.

Hitchcock’s only production meetings in the fall concerned the coming 1960-61 season of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, for which he was slated to direct two episodes, “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” and “The Horseplayer.” (The latter was a piece of black comedy, with Claude Rains as a church priest who has two problems: a leaky roof that costs too much to fix, and a parishioner whose luck at betting on horses improves with prayer.)

The man who introduced his television shows with such flair was also becoming a toastmaster at public events unrelated to film. In the early and mid-1960s Hitchcock was invited to address college students at graduation ceremonies, businessmen’s clubs, organizations of writers and editors, even presidential inaugural events. Each time an invitation was accepted, James Allardice would troop into the office to discuss Hitchcock’s speech; the more important occasions usually demanded several drafts and revisions, with the director going over the lines as meticulously as if he were preparing a scene in a Hitchcock film.

These were time-consuming distractions, as were the protracted negotiations with Paramount that would enable Hitchcock to move his offices to Universal later in 1962. The biggest, best bungalow was being set aside for him on the Universal lot, including offices for his design staff and a writer; adjoining rooms with editing equipment; a separate office for his assistant, Peggy Robertson; a kitchen, cocktail lounge, and bathroom attached to his spacious private office; a dining room; and a projection room seating eight.

With several film projects competing for his attention, Hitchcock spread the assortment out on his desk like travel brochures, trying to decide where he wanted to go. In midsummer he talked with Ernest Lehman about an original story called “Blind Man,” which would have starred Jimmy Stewart as a blind jazz pianist (referred to in script notes as “Jimmy Shearing,” a combination of Stewart and pianist George Shearing, on whom the character was loosely based). The pianist regains his sight after an operation in which he obtains the eyes of a murdered man, and then develops strange memories and “disturbing feelings towards a man he meets who proves to be the murderer of his doctor,” according to film historian Greg Garrett. “The musician and the murderer play a game of cat and mouse that leads them both aboard an ocean liner. Disneyland was also to be an important setting,” as Garrett pointed out, “a vastly expanded carnival in the tradition of
Strangers on a Train.
”

Among Hitchcock’s “crazy ideas” for “Blind Man,” according to Lehman, were a scene where “the heavy throws acid in Jimmy’s face and dies, blinding him for life, and he winds up just where he started”; and an opera with Maria Callas witnessing a murder while onstage singing—the note she is singing would then become “a scream which the audience applauds,” in Lehman’s words.