The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

is appalled at the revelation: “A good, clean, honest, whack over the head with a brick is one thing. There’s something British about that. But knives? No, knives is not right.” Hitchcock told the New York Times that unlike American murders, which tend toward dullness in their blunt brutality, murders in England reveal its people’s understatement, politesse, and “an ingrained racial sense of drama,” which he claimed one could trace back to the work of Shakespeare. American gangsters and professional killers with their clinical gunshot murders were of no interest to him because they were professional crooks; it was the fair-play ethics of amateur gentlemen murderers that made for the most gripping crimes. He explained that there was virtually no gun culture in Britain; as the police very rarely use them, “it’s a matter of courtesy that the criminals don’t.” Gun murders are not unknown to Hitchcock films—The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) climaxes with a lengthy gunfight—but are certainly in the minority. Even in North by Northwest, when Eve (Eva Marie Saint) appears to shoot Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) dead, it turns out to have been a ruse, her gun loaded with blanks. In the United States, said Hitchcock, “people get blasted all over the place. I prefer my own style.”

By his “own style” he meant death by poison and noose, or shoved from the top of a building, in the spirit of his favorite English murders, which were strange, eccentric cases revealing undercurrents of sex, class, and churning, repressed emotions in the lives of outwardly respectable people, often Londoners from social backgrounds similar to his and who shared his emotional reserve. There was the case of Dr. Crippen, which featured adultery and cross-dressing, and that of John Christie, a fantasist and necrophiliac who preyed on young women at 10 Rillington Place, the quiet home he shared with his wife. Hitchcock’s favorite, as he mentioned on many occasions, was that of Edwin Bartlett, a grocer from London (an obvious parallel to his own life) who died on New Year’s Eve in 1885 from chloroform poisoning. Bartlett’s beautiful young wife, Adelaide, was arrested on suspicion of murder, and during her trial the details of a scandalous affair, encouraged by Bartlett, between Adelaide and a local clergyman became public. In a final otherworldly twist, Adelaide was acquitted, because medical experts had no idea how the chloroform could have been administered without causing severe burns to the victim’s throat.

The Bartlett case was obviously tied up with things that could not otherwise be discussed in polite society, which raises the question of what Hitchcock—and other English people—talked about when he talked about murder. First, the act of killing provided a vehicle with which to approach taboo subjects of sex. Young viewers today might still find the shower scene in Psycho disturbing, but it’s unlikely they’d be startled by the film’s opening scene in which John Gavin and Janet Leigh are seen in a hotel room, not entirely clothed. In 1960, the year of Psycho’s release, it caused almost as much uproar as the shower scene. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote Hitchcock to ask for an explanation of why Psycho began with such an explicit scene, for an article Crowther was writing on “the evident trend towards greater candor about sex in our Hollywood films.” Allusions to sex in the moment of death, and vice versa, can be found in many of Hitchcock’s films, Psycho included. In Dial M for Murder (1954), Grace Kelly’s character is attacked by a man who has been coerced into killing her on behalf of her jealous husband. Pinned to a desk with her assailant on top of her, she writhes to free herself, before grabbing a pair of scissors and stabbing him in the back. If the audience hadn’t already been privy to the murder plot, it would be possible to mistake the attack for an attempted rape. Devotees of the canon would also recognize a nod to Blackmail, in which a young woman uses a knife to fight off a rapist. Other Hitchcock murders are loaded with associations with taboo sexual acts: asphyxiation; bondage; homosexuality; transvestitism; incest. As with murder, these were all things that held Hitchcock rapt, but of which he had no—or very little—firsthand experience.

Hitchcock was far from the only English cultural figure of his generation to use murder as a means of exploring a particular idea of Englishness. In 1927, the year that Hitchcock’s first movies received widespread release in the UK, Miss Marple made her debut in the decorous pages of The Royal Magazine. Sweet old ladies sleuthing in manor houses and rural parsonages was exactly the kind of atmosphere George Orwell evoked in his essays “Decline of the English Murder” and “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” in which he cited traditionally “English” homicides—inspired by class resentments and sexual frustration, carried out with good manners and fast-acting poison—as markers of a distinctive sense of Englishness that was being silenced by raucous Americans. From the early to mid-twentieth century, murder was used by mainstream English writers and artists as a statement of their cultural identity. It was comforting, perhaps, for them to think that England’s sturdy middle classes could take even the most diabolical manifestations of modern vulgarity and make them genteel, adhering to the manners of an increasingly distant golden age, before the impact of modern America began to make itself felt. Naturally, this reverie of English gentility obscured a more brutal reality. Orwell conceded that “within living memory . . . kicking your wife to death” could have been called “a typically English crime,” the kind of sudden blaze of domestic rage to which Hitchcock was also drawn.

Orwell thought that England’s “great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925,” the very year, coincidentally, that Hitchcock committed his first murder to celluloid. Hitchcock’s killings fused the two things that Orwell considered opposites. With his films of the