Alfred Hitchcock (142 page)

*
LeRoy directed
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
, the only sound film Hitchcock listed in 1939 as among his ten favorite films.

*
“We
cleaned up
the story,” Hitchcock shot back in one interview. “In the original [book], the murderer was found by fingerprints left on a potato. The potato had been stuffed into a questionable area of the victim’s body.”

*
“Hammor horror”—as in the low-budget, blood-and-gore horror films in lurid color churned out to huge success by England’s Hammer Films.

*
The relatively obscure actor playing the psycho killer had caught his attention in
Twisted Nerve
(which also featured Billie Whitelaw) and, before making his final decision, Hitchcock attended the West End play Foster was appearing in.

*
In the book the incriminating clue is a spare room key. Hitchcock, sensitive to having used keys before, changed it to a tiepin for the film, and then linked the tiepin to Rusk’s dandified appearance.

**
Hitchcock wasn’t far off. In February 1975, writing to Michael Balcon, he confided that
Frenzy
would end up grossing $16 million. “The London cost, including studio overhead, was $1,250,000. Of course, by the time the studio added the overhead of the cost of my office and staff here and my own salary we got up to $2,200,000. This picture,
Frenzy
, was also sold to television for $2 million, for three runnings.”

*
Movement
and
cutting: the staircase sequence was also a special effect. Indeed, it annoyed cameraman Gil Taylor that after all the bother necessary to create the shot on location in London (laying tracks, etc.), Hitchcock later insisted on reshooting part of the scene on a set back at Universal. The editing made it all look seamless.

*
Frenzy
was named as one of the best pictures of the year by the National Board of Review and the Golden Globes, which also nominated Hitchcock as Best Director and Anthony Shaffer for Best Screenplay.

*
Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) has an artificial leg, and at one point in the film she takes it—and everything else—off, displaying herself nude to her aged guardian Fernando Rey.

*
Like Hitchcock, Lehman never won a competitive Oscar, despite three nominations, and would have to wait for an honorary Oscar until age eighty-one, in 2001. His Oscar was the first ever voted to a screenwriter not for any individual film, but for his body of work.

**
Actually, though La Bern’s publisher did rerelease his book as
Frenzy
, Canning stuck with his title through all editions.

*
The working title kept shifting between “Deceit” and “Deception.”

*
Aghast at being cornered by the unhappy Thinnes at Chasen’s one night, Hitchcock had to tell the actor something by way of explanation. “You were too nice for the part, too
nice
,” the director insisted.

*
“What particularly appealed to Hitchcock,” said François Truffaut, in his more oblique defense of the film, “was the passage from one geometric figure to another. First, two parallel stories are introduced, then the gap between them gradually narrows, and finally they mesh, winding up as a single story.”

*
Characteristically, Hitchcock had been dreaming of this scene for years, and had in fact described a variation to Truffaut almost fifteen years earlier: “There’s just so much one can do with a love scene. Something I wish I could work out is a love scene with two people on each side of the room. It’s impossible, I suppose, because the only way to suggest love would be to have them exposing themselves to each other, with the man opening his fly and the girl lifting her skirt, and the dialogue in counterpoint.”

*
The menu featured lobster, wrote David Freeman in his book, and “Hitchcock hadn’t eaten shellfish of any sort in fifty years. He claimed it made him ill to look at it. The lobster was taken away and they found him a steak, something he considered edible.”

No matter how much Alfred Joseph Hitchcock streaked his films with comedy and entertainment, they portrayed a world tilting toward madness and horror. The films tried to balance darkness and light, and the life was a similar balancing act. “Hitch had moments of delight and triumph,” said Hume Cronyn, “and also moments of confusion, despair and failure.”

Some film directors achieve their art by imagining their deepest, darkest fantasies; others do so by means that cannot be analyzed so simply or straightforwardly.

John Russell Taylor’s authorized biography,
Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock
was published in 1978, but its sympathetic portrait was challenged by Donald Spoto’s
Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius
, published two years after Hitchcock’s death. Spoto saw the director as an extreme example of a dark fantasist, “a macabre joker, a frightened child, and a tyrannical artist,” whose obsessions led him toward a lifetime of bloody-minded crime films that trapped beautiful blondes squirming in his grip.

Some who knew Hitchcock tended to agree, based on Spoto’s evidence. These, it must be said, were frequently those who knew the director least, or knew him last, during his most difficult years. Sam Taylor, his friend and the screenwriter of
Vertigo
and
Topaz
, annoyed some in the Hitchcock circle by praising the Spoto book, although he told this author that he read it only up to the pages where he and Hitchcock met.

After the book was published and received prominent acclaim in the
New York Times
, people who knew Hitchcock intimately sent protest letters, only a few of which were printed. Some of these people had excluded themselves from Spoto’s research in a backdoor effort to unite against the emerging dark portrait.

A dismayed Hume Cronyn wrote the
Times
to say that Spoto’s Hitchcock was not the Hitchcock he knew, and to emphasize instead “his generosity, kindness, professional courage, sympathy and the debt I owe him for support and opportunity.” Publicist Albert Margolies (“with my knowledge of him based on twenty years as his press agent and forty as his friend”) also chimed in. Whitfield Cook wrote too, and privately added in a note to Cronyn, “The author’s surmises are often ridiculous. Difficult Hitch sometimes was, but never a monster.”

John Houseman said the biography was melodramatic, simplified, and prurient in parts, but regardless “ends up as a serious book—one that will be of interest to scholars and film buffs.” Norman Lloyd (who didn’t cooperate with Spoto) and Herbert Coleman (who did, but insisted he was misquoted) hated the book, calling it false. Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, who has proved herself every bit her father’s daughter in her shrewd management of his image and estate, also denounced the book, and has stated repeatedly that “Spoto took things and twisted them.”

But the book sold well around the world, undoubtedly eclipsing François Truffaut’s in its number of readers. And Spoto’s portrait has stuck in people’s minds, perhaps because it is easier to imagine a manipulative egoist and monster, a shriveled soul inside a grossly fat man, than to understand the practical artist who gave his life to film.

Some directors die penniless, few die wealthy, and almost none die owning their own films. Most of the directors of Hitchcock’s generation are forgotten, their names and movies treasured by only a small audience of aficionados. Hitchcock was not only the ultimate film director; he also mastered the pitfalls and politics of studio filmmaking that dogged him both in England and America, and emerged as the industry’s consummate professional.

Spoto was indeed “conservative” when he estimated Hitchcock’s net worth, upon his death, at $20 million. His 150,000 shares of MCA stock alone were worth more than that, before the city and county bonds, the oil shares and other stocks (including his beloved cattle), and, most important, the rights and percentages attached to his post-Selznick films. Earnings from the films alone would add up, over time, to more than $20 million, although when the Hitchcock estate sold
Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble with Harry
, and
Vertigo
to Universal (which already owned
Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt
,
and all the late films starting with
Psycho
) in 1983, no price tag was announced.

The value can be guessed by the unusual campaign of restoration and rerelease of Hitchcock’s best-known American films, along with the continued promotion of the video, laser-disc, and DVD reissues. Only a small fraction of older films ever undergo the expense of restoration and the gamble of theatrical rerelease; the expense is exorbitant, and the investment is too often impossible to justify.
Vertigo
reportedly cost an estimated $1.5 million when it was restored by Robert Harris and James Katz for Universal,
Rear Window
another $600,000. When the latter was rereleased in 1983,
before
restoration, it grossed $9.1 million. (Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
called it “the most elegantly entertaining American film now in first run.”)
Vertigo
had a limited rerelease in 1996 and wasn’t as profitable, but Universal’s marketing ensures other dividends on Hitchcock’s reputation.

Seeing
Vertigo
again reaffirmed that it was “as intensely personal as any entry at Sundance,” wrote Kenneth Turan in the
Los Angeles Times
, “an audaciously, brilliantly twisted movie, infused with touches of genius and madness.” In 2002,
Sight and Sound
, the film journal of the British Film Institute, conducted two international polls, one of critics and another of filmmakers, in order to compile Top Ten Lists of the all-time greatest movies.
Vertigo
was named by 144 critics as the second greatest film of all time (up from number 4 in 1992, the last such poll), and 108 directors gave it a sixth-place tie. (
Citizen Kane
was number 1 in both polls.)

There is no real U.S. equivalent of the British Film Institute, but in 1998 the American Film Institute canvassed “a blue-ribbon panel of leaders from across the film community” for the Top 100 American films of all time. Hitchcock boasted four among the top hundred. Billy Wilder also claimed four. Only Steven Spielberg, with five, had more.
Psycho
ranked the highest among Hitchcock’s entries at number 18, but
North by Northwest
(number 40),
Rear Window
(number 42), and
Vertigo
(number 61) also made the list. (
Citizen Kane
also placed number 1 in the AFI’s Top 100 poll.) Most, though not all, critics would agree that these are Hitchcock’s four greatest films, though not necessarily in that order—and also not so far below certain other films on the AFI’s highly controversial list.
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Three years later, when the AFI drew up another list of Top 100 Thrillers,
Psycho
was number 1; and Hitchcock had nine entries, three of them in the top seven (
North by Northwest
at number 4,
The Birds
at number 7). No other director came close.

He would have smiled to know, on the other hand, that when the Zagat organization conducted a survey of “thousands of avid moviegoers” to determine the “Fifty Greatest ‘Feel Good’ Movies of All Time,” not a single Hitchcock film made the list. Hitchcock’s goal was always to make his audiences
feel
—rarely to make them feel good.

Type “Alfred Hitchcock” into the Internet, and you will obtain thousands of hits, including posted articles, Web sites, chat rooms, fan clubs, and personal pages. Hitchcock courses are a phenomenon in colleges, and analyzing his films is a particular lunacy of academics. Starting with the modest Chabrol-Rohmer tome in 1958, there has been an avalanche of Hitchcock books. There are more books about him than any other film director, and in virtually any language (Persian, if you like, or Serbo-Croatian). In English there are at this writing somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred Hitchcock books
in print
and available, everything from
Hitchcock: Poster Art
and
Alfred Hitchcock: Triviography and Quiz Book
to
In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
and
Hitchcock and Homosexuality: His 50-Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute: A Psychoanalytic View.

In several countries (including the United States) you can buy postage stamps with his face on them, and anywhere in the world you can wear a T-shirt with his caricature (or “Bates Motel”), and be as identifiably hip as if you were wearing Che Guevara or Jimi Hendrix.

The Hitchcock name continues to sell, and his movies continue to make money. If, in this modern, callous world, his movies no longer shock, they still afford reliable pleasure, and if he is in heaven—he certainly believed in heaven—this news should afford him pleasure as well.

The centenary of Hitchcock’s birth, in 1999, was an opportunity for worldwide symposia, museum retrospectives, nonstop television airings of the old films, new documentaries—and for reappraisal of a man who in his life sometimes struggled for critical respect.

By now it has become commonplace to rank Hitchcock “as a complex figure comparable with Shakespeare and Dickens,” in the words of Philip French in the
Observer
(though French qualified his remark by adding, “Of all the great directors, Hitchcock’s reputation is the most controversial”).

“I rank him with Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce and Proust,” exclaimed the redoubtable Camille Paglia.

“Probably the dominant figure of the first half century of film,” said the American critic Roger Ebert.

“You can watch Hitchcock’s films over and over,” American director
Martin Scorsese wrote in a moving tribute in
Sight and Sound
, “and find something new every time. There’s always more to learn. And as you get older, the films change with you. After a while you stop counting the number of times you’ve seen them. I’ve looked at Hitchcock’s films in sections. Just like the greatest music or painting, you can live with, or by, his films.”

Indeed, his films were classed with great paintings in an exhibition entitled “Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidence,” which opened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2000 before traveling to the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2001. This show was the brainchild of the Montreal Museum’s Guy Cogeval and Dominique Pacini of the Cinémathèque Française, the institution that had championed Hitchcock before any other. Aiming to reveal the wellsprings of his inspiration, the show offered provocative works in all mediums by diverse artists, which echoed the storyboards, publicity stills, costume designs, memorabilia, and excerpts from Hitchcock films. Museum visitors were led through a series of spaces—“some claustrophobic, others sweepingly spacious,” in the words of one critic—in which material from Hitchcock’s career was juxtaposed with works by Auguste Rodin, Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, Edward Hopper, and other important artists.

“His stature is irrefutably established,” declared Peter Conrad in the
Observer
, joining praise of a show that found Hitchcock as at home in a museum as in living rooms.

Perhaps it is better to say as little as possible about the remakes, except that like everything else they add revenue and luster to the Hitchcock name.

A Perfect Murder
(1998’s loose remake of
Dial M for Murder
) and
Rear Window
(with Christopher Reeve, wheelchair-bound, for television) were solid, if not quite Hitchcockian, a comparison now slung around whenever a disappointing suspense film appears. Brace yourself: new takes on everything from
The 39 Steps
to
To Catch a Thief
are rumored to be in the works. But Gus Van Sant’s “faithful” remake of
Psycho
(also 1998), made from Joseph Stefano’s original script—only this time in color—illustrates that you can copy the script and style, even the exact shots, without getting close to the essence of Hitchcock.

Perhaps more than anything else, the remakes and “Hitchcock-style” films that Hollywood continues to manufacture remind us that he is gone, and that his life’s work, even with the best of intentions, can never be replicated. Quite apart from their craftsmanship, we owe those films to the ceaseless strivings of a remarkable life—and to the spirit of a short, chubby boy, son of a greengrocer, who rose up to transform himself into the truest knight of film.