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

Leigh-Hunt’s character, Brenda, in Frenzy (1972), a seventies reprisal of The Lodger, tying together the two ends of the Hitchcock murder trail, the fantastical legend of the Ripper, and the disgusting reality of his crimes. The scene took three days to shoot and was difficult for both Leigh-Hunt and Foster. “Just another day and a half and we’ll be through with this,” they said to each other at the halfway point. In the shot that completes their struggle, Foster was struck by the sight of Leigh-Hunt posing dead with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, just as Hitchcock had directed: “the effect is genuinely horrendous. Hitch did experiment with having an extremely close lens at her mouth, getting through makeup, saliva, and blood. Hitch, I think, was trying to plumb the ultimate in horror there.” In the practice of the fine art of murder, there is always some fresh hell to be rent from the murky depths of a brilliant imagination.

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THE AUTEUR

The Lodger catapulted Hitchcock to a level of public notice that no other British director enjoyed. Two more films produced by Michael Balcon followed—Downhill and Easy Virtue (1927)—after which the bright young thing of British cinema was lured to British International Pictures (BIP) by John Maxwell’s promise of superior resources and a hefty pay rise. At £13,000 per year, Hitchcock was the best paid director in Britain.

None of the first four movies he made at BIP had the strange, compelling power of The Lodger, though each explored something that Hitchcock would appropriate as part of his house style—the drama of live spectacle in The Ring (1927), the parochial social comedy of The Farmer’s Wife (1928), the willful child and moralizing parent in Champagne (1928), the themes of guilt, shame, and pariahdom of The Manxman (1929). Each also gave Hitchcock the opportunity to try out ingenious trick shots and inventive ways of photographing a scene, every little flourish a moving trademark for the man audiences could not see but whose presence was constant and unavoidable.

In 1929, his silent career ended with the release of Blackmail, a talkie about the traumatic fallout of an attempted rape. It would prove to be his best, and most important, film since The Lodger, and its production at Elstree Studios was graced by a visit from the Duke and Duchess of York, the future king and queen. Ronald Neame, the assistant cameraman on the film, remembered vividly how the event had been a source of apprehension for everyone on set—everyone, that is, except Hitchcock. When Neame had worked with Noël Coward at another film studio at the time of a royal visit, Coward drilled his crew on protocol and etiquette, “but Hitch didn’t have any of that kind of thing.” When the duke and duchess watched a scene being filmed, they were both keen to explore the miraculous technology of talking, moving pictures. Hitchcock was happy to oblige but didn’t stand on ceremony. “I saw Hitchcock pull her [the duchess], literally pull her hat off and give her the headphones, which he then put on her head.” Manhandling a duchess was, to put it mildly, not the done thing. The message was unavoidable: even when in the presence of royalty, his set was his kingdom. A Hitchcock film was Hitchcock’s creation.

Before the mid-1950s, the idea that Alfred Hitchcock was a great artist was as alien to those who wrote about art as it was to those who spent every Saturday night at the movies. Even Hitchcock disliked public discussion of his films as art, especially once he had become a fixture in Hollywood. “I really hate the word artistic,” he remarked in 1952, explaining that his job was to balance an array of competing commercial concerns—the star system, audience expectations, the nit-picking of po-faced censors— cannily enough to make a hit of which one could be proud. “I have too much conscience to take a million dollars and make a film that would please only me and the critics,” he insisted.

The way the world thought about Hitchcock—and, to a degree, the way Hitchcock thought about himself—began to change thanks to a group of young French critics affiliated with the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. They identified Hitchcock as an embodiment of what we now refer to as the “auteur theory,” a reading of cinematic production that stresses the centrality of a director’s creative vision in the making of a film. Hitchcock, it was argued, didn’t simply direct his films, he authored them. Moreover, his authorship was so rich, innovative, and distinctive that he was more than a Hollywood hit-maker; he was a bona-fide artist.

His first encounters with the French critics caused surprise and not a little confusion on both sides. At a radiant flower market in Nice in 1954, the founder of Cahiers, André Bazin, was permitted to interview Hitchcock during a break in the filming of To Catch a Thief (1955). When Bazin floated questions about the themes, symbols, and meanings of his films, Hitchcock equivocated, partly because he disliked being entirely frank with a journalist when he could tantalize and dissemble, partly because he was genuinely nonplussed by Bazin’s detailed analysis. For his part, Bazin, always less enthusiastic about Hitchcock’s work than many of his colleagues, was astonished by the director’s docility on set, slumped silently in his chair looking “prodigiously bored” as the crew worked busily around him. As afternoon turned to evening, Hitchcock suddenly roused himself and began an animated conversation with Cary Grant. Was he concerned about some subtlety of his star’s performance, or anxious about the dying light, perhaps? “No, the light is excellent,” Hitchcock told Bazin, “but Mister Cary Grant’s contract calls for stopping at six o’clock; it is six o’clock exactly, so we will retake the sequence tomorrow.” This was Hitchcock, a supposed Napoleonic general of the movies, whose armies of the make-believe were under his unwavering control—yet, to Bazin, he looked more like a competition winner than a director,