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

Bazin’s reservations didn’t deter his colleagues. In 1957, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol published Hitchcock, the first full-length critical study of his work. To many in America and Britain, it seemed absurd that the man they’d always seen as an uncommonly accomplished ringmaster was now being hailed as an artistic genius. The new take on Hitchcock—and other Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks—was the stirrings of something that was larger than film criticism, a reevaluation of popular culture that dissolved the stark barriers between art and entertainment. By the end of the sixties such notions would be pervasive. For now, the Hitchcock reappraisal seemed delusional to some. In the British journal Sight & Sound the American critic Richard Roud published a piece about the excesses of French criticism, citing the eulogizing of Hitchcock as Exhibit A. Roud suggested that “one’s first reaction might be to conclude that these men must be very foolish,” and that Hitchcock himself knew that “this Hitchcock idolatry” was risible.

For Anglo-Saxon unbelievers, worse was to come. In 1962, François Truffaut, a thirty-year-old critic turned filmmaker, arrived in Los Angeles for a lengthy series of interviews with Hitchcock that remains the starting point for most analyses of Hitchcock’s life and work. The following summer, Jean Douchet traveled to California for his own piece about Hitchcock. Keenly aware of the publicity opportunities offered by his young French disciples, Hitchcock arranged for a limousine to ferry Douchet to and from his hotel for three days. Douchet’s expenses were covered by Universal Pictures, to whom Hitchcock was contracted, excepting a night at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, for which Hitchcock paid.

Perplexed as he may have been by some of the auteurist theories, Hitchcock agreed with the fundamental precept that behind each great film sat a great man in a canvas chair. As early as 1927, he had expressed the opinion that any films worth watching have their director’s thumbprints on the negatives. “They are their babies just as much as an author’s novel is the offspring of his imagination. And that seems to make it all the more certain that when moving pictures are really artistic they will be created entirely by one man.” It was just such a powerful, creative progenitor that Hitchcock projected himself to be from the start of his directing career, finding various ways to insert himself into his body of work. In his first movie, The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock included his signature in the credits, and in most of his subsequent films he made his famous cameos. A photograph taken during the making of his second movie, The Mountain Eagle,* shows him posing as the kinetic hub of his film set, a decisive young man in masterful control of the most modern of media.

The story of how his third picture, The Lodger, came to be muddies that image. June Tripp (professionally known simply as June, but also sometimes referred to as June Hillman), who played the female lead of Daisy, attested that on set Hitchcock was in absolute control. “Fresh from Berlin, Hitch was so imbued with the value of unusual camera angles and lighting effects with which to create and sustain dramatic suspense that often a scene which would not run for more than three minutes on the screen would take an entire morning to shoot.” It was draining for the cast, but “his brilliance was patent”—though not to everyone. As producer Michael Balcon told the story, Hitchcock’s old director Graham Cutts, perhaps motivated by jealousy at Hitchcock’s rapid advancement, “began to tell anybody who would listen that we had a disaster on our hands. Unfortunately one person who listened to him was C. M. Woolf,” the distributor. When he watched the film, Woolf, who had already delayed releasing Hitchcock’s first two movies because he felt they lacked box-office appeal, said he had never seen such artsy rubbish in his life, and ordered it shelved.

Hitchcock posing as the dynamic young director; Alma Reville looks on, c. 1926.

Balcon stepped in and persuaded Hitchcock to work with Ivor Montagu, a twenty-two-year-old polymath, with the aim of enhancing the film’s box-office appeal. Montagu thought the situation was “as humiliating for the one as it was embarrassing for the other,” but the changes he made saved the day. He slashed the number of intertitles from around three hundred to eighty, shortened some scenes, suggested reshooting certain others, and recruited the graphic artist E. McKnight Kauffer, whose atmospheric designs bolster the brooding expressionism of Hitchcock’s movie. Balcon showed the new version to an audience of journalists, whose glowing response persuaded Woolf that it was safe to release.

On one level, this is evidence of the difficulty of expressing a single creative vision in an industry replete with technical, commercial, editorial, and political forces outside a director’s control. One of the reasons Hitchcock looked back at his work with Balcon with such fondness is because Balcon tried to remove some of those obstacles and let Hitchcock stay as close to his own path as possible. In America, Hitchcock took a producer as well as a director credit from the late forties onward, but in the first few years in Hollywood he bristled at the involvement of powerful producers, especially David O. Selznick, who considered himself to be the key creative presence in any production that bore his name. In such circumstances, identifying a lone “auteur” can be tricky, if not impossible.

However, Montagu stressed that he inserted nothing of himself into Hitchcock’s work; his contribution to The Lodger was “in the nature of that which a gallery director makes to a painting in suggesting how it should be framed, where hung and in what light.” He loved Hitchcock’s original cut and believed that “what the film needed was editing toward, not away from, its exceptional qualities,” emphasizing Hitchcock’s influence on the film, those characteristics that Montagu elsewhere described as his “observation of familiar and unfamiliar pictorial detail” and “an artist’s