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

urged that other parts should rely on montage. In one section of the film that Hitchcock helped to structure, we are shown unbearable images of body parts, and piles of personal possessions. The sight of mounds of clothing, robbed of their owners, transforms everyday objects into symbols of true evil. As Jean-Louis Comolli has observed, the “juxtaposition of what is familiar with what is horrible is one of the great Hitchcock themes.”

At one point in the section of the film on which Hitchcock worked, the camera takes us to the threshold of a room with a sign above the doorway: “BRAUSEBAD,” German for “shower bath.” At first sight, it looks like a bathroom, albeit functional and forbidding. Once inside, the brilliant white of the room is draped by sinister dark shadows. Most viewers today, familiar with film images of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps, will instantly recognize the deception that Hitchcock and his colleagues are revealing to us. The apertures on the ceiling are not shower heads, but vents for poison gas. This is not a place of cleansing, but of murder.

Once seen, the visual rhyme with the shower scene from Psycho, as profane as it might appear, is difficult to dislodge from one’s mind. Picture that moment when Hitchcock’s camera looks up directly into the shower head, the water pouring onto Marion’s face and chest. For a moment she looks relaxed, having made up her mind to hand back the money she stole and return to being the good, honest person we all know her to be. From nowhere, she is overwhelmed by a force of inexplicable depravity. Within seconds, she lies dead, destined for an unmarked grave.

In 1965, the critic Robin Wood—who, at the time, had never seen the camp footage—wondered whether the experience of working on the documentary had affected Hitchcock’s most famous film. “One cannot contemplate the camps without confronting two aspects of their horror: the utter helplessness of and innocence of the victims, and the fact that human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some measure share, were their tormenters and butchers. . . . Psycho is founded on, precisely, these twin horrors.” If Psycho had been influenced by the images he spent days poring over, Hitchcock didn’t say. He may not even have been conscious of it. Peter Bogdanovich recounts the time in the 1960s when he asked Hitchcock about a scene in his Cold War thriller Torn Curtain (1966) in which Paul Newman and an East German housewife commit the remarkably slow, drawn-out murder of a Stasi security agent, Gromek, played by Wolfgang Kieling. Newman and his accomplice wrestle with Gromek, stab him, and hit him with a shovel, but he clings, Rasputin-like, to life. It isn’t until they drag him across the floor and hold his head in a gas oven that he dies. Bogdanovich asked Hitchcock whether this was an intentional allusion to the gas chambers of the Holocaust. “He seemed genuinely surprised and shook his head no,” but a few years later Bogdanovich saw Hitchcock on a television program, where he “quite seriously and at some length explained the symbolism of this murder sequence and how it related to the Germans’ gassings of the Jews.” This, presumably, was the show in which Hitchcock said of Gromek’s murder, “here we are back at Auschwitz again and the gas ovens. The world today is full of brutality.”

Perhaps Hitchcock had been keeping something back from Bogdanovich, or perhaps once the possible link had been revealed to him, he came to see its truth. Gimlet-eyed in all things, Hitchcock was always open to suggestion. It was Jane Sloan who once described him as a “sponge, eager to adapt the point of view that would sell, and open to any idea that seemed good, insistent only that it fit his design.” Though impossible to prove, it is not at all hard to believe that knitting together the most disturbing real-life footage of human depravity ever captured had, consciously or not, shaped Hitchcock’s feel for his own depictions of murder. The Wildean abstractions of art and sophistication had been superseded by the viciousness of the modern world. Whatever the case, the shower scene had announced a new era. Not long after Psycho, the American Red Cross approached Hitchcock to do a knowing rehash of the film’s trailer for a public service spot in which he would walk around an ordinary home and point out the lethal horrors that lurk in every room—especially the bathroom. Within the blink of an eye, the transgressive violence of Psycho had become part of the fabric of American life. Violence and nudity were taking on new roles in our shared existence. There was no going back for any of us, Hitchcock included.

Over the Christmas holidays of 1969, the BBC treated prime-time viewers to an hour of Hitchcock on his favorite subjects: suspense, sex, movies, and murder. It was a recording of Hitchcock’s interview with Bryan Forbes, a fellow English director, before an audience at Britain’s National Film Theatre. For much of the evening, Hitchcock had his audience in stitches, his answers capped with double entendres and twinkly eyed, ironic understatement. There was even laughter when the scene of Gromek’s murder was played. One audience member, however, struggled to find the humor, and challenged the “nauseating . . . stomach-turning . . . unnecessarily tasteless” manner of Gromek’s protracted death. Hitchcock replied, “I would say the demonstration of the scene is intended to show how difficult it is to kill a man. Because it is a messy business, it is a horrible business.”

In years to come, numerous young directors defended their depictions of murder in precisely the same terms. Sam Peckinpah said that The Wild Bunch (1969) was his attempt to counter the Hollywood tradition in which “people die without suffering and violence provokes no pain.” After Torn Curtain, Hitchcock had one graphic murder left in him, when Barry Foster’s charming psychopath is seen to rape and murder Barbara