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

“the snake’s hips and the cat’s pyjamas.” She acted as his battery as well as a protective layer between him and the daunting unpredictability of other people, oiling the Hitchcock machine with diplomacy and emotional intelligence. Over the ensuing decades, Alma worked, formally and informally, in a variety of roles on Hitchcock films: development producer, assistant director, writer, casting producer, script supervisor, all-around editorial adviser. Aptly, she was sometimes simply credited as “continuity.”

It’s been said that Hitchcock’s idea of the cinematic strongman was something he acquired in the film culture of Weimar Germany. However, his view of himself as a precocious expert was manifest years before his time at Neubabelsberg. Aged twenty-one, and only three months into his first full-time job in the film business, he had an article published in Motion Picture Studio magazine on the secrets of how to create good intertitles. Exhibiting a self-confidence out of step with the anxious, socially awkward youngster he was away from filmmaking, he criticized “one or two of the leading directors in the States [who] have made a practice of illustrating all their titles. The result of illustrating a spoken title can only confuse the reader,” he warned, and urged his peers to avoid repetition. “The hour glass and the scales of justice, their day is ended.” A neophyte in the movie business, and he was already disparaging the visual sensibilities of established directors, sniffing at their reliance on hoary cliché.

From the late twenties, he kept his name in the press in this way, sharing his expertise in articles for numerous publications, and entertaining journalists at his flat on Cromwell Road, west London, where he was in the habit of being interviewed in silk pajamas. He went so far as to establish Hitchcock Baker Productions Ltd., a company dedicated to curating his public image. In 1936 he published a five-part series of biographical articles in the popular British magazine Film Weekly titled “My Screen Memories,” as though he were a grand old man of the business, rather than a thirty-six-year-old on the rise. Yet readers were left in no doubt about the qualities Hitchcock most wanted to stress in those pieces: youthfulness, dynamism, and a sense of mission. The final installment ended with Hitchcock declaring that the nostalgia suggested by these articles was really not his thing: “my most interesting picture is always my next one. I have enjoyed delving into the past in these reminiscences. But the future is much more fascinating.”

As the fame of Hitchcock’s films spread, so did the celebrity of their director. In March 1939, he was invited to lecture a class at Columbia University on his specialist subject: the distinctive work of Alfred Hitchcock. Speaking in his unmistakable voice—“I have some notes here that are mixed up with a letter from my mother”—he caused ripples of laughter from his young audience as he glided his way through the life cycle of a Hitchcock movie, from conception to projection. It reminds one of how Wilde and Dickens constructed their profiles in America, as well as the recent lecture tour of Gertrude Stein, back home after many years in Europe, during which she wrapped the novelty of her work in the homespun eccentricity of her delivery, pitching herself somewhere between a modernist iconoclast and America’s favorite aunt. All three of those august names exploited their looks and demeanor, in concert with their singular voice, to establish themselves as a cultural presence. Hitchcock, as no filmmaker before him had done, followed in their footsteps.

When Hollywood success came his way in the 1940s, his agent—at first Myron Selznick, then Lew Wasserman, perhaps the most important commercial figure in the movies after World War II†—brokered what were essentially licensing deals, attaching the Hitchcock name to a variety of side projects and spin-offs, based around Hitchcock as the personification of his film work. There were books of suspense stories, supposedly compiled by Hitchcock, though his involvement was negligible. In 1947, Hitchcock put his name to an adaptation of Frances Iles’s novel Malice Aforethought for a proposed ABC radio series, The Alfred Hitchcock Show.‡ Though not picked up, the pilot contained the germ of what would become Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the instant popularity of which led to an Alfred Hitchcock magazine, further books for children and adults, and various other Hitchcock-branded ventures.

The television shows were produced by Norman Lloyd, who had appeared in Saboteur (1942) and Spellbound, and Joan Harrison, a Hitchcock protégé who had worked with him in a variety of roles between 1933 and 1941, before striking out on her own. They had Hitchcock’s complete trust and were allowed to take the lead in finding, developing, and producing the two dozen stories needed for each season. At various points Hitchcock would offer criticisms and suggestions, but generally he allowed the series to work not according to his diktats, but in his image, which, by the time the first season aired in 1955, was well established. Hitchcock’s television output is generally considered the destitute relation of the Hitchcock movies, with little of value to say about his work. Yet Alfred Hitchcock Presents—and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which followed it—distills the spirit in which his most successful collaborators approached their work, especially from the late 1940s onward. To Harrison and Lloyd, Hitchcock was also “Hitchcock,” not just a man but an entity, a totem pole, and a guiding spirit. Despite his infrequent involvement, his tastes, sensibilities, and personality loomed over every stage of the shows’ production. Speaking publicly about the series, Harrison channeled Hitchcock: “We don’t show much violence. . . . Our kind of murderer is polite. We like to suggest rather than show.” “Let ’em suffer,” she said, talking of the delightful pleasure of torturing an audience. “Let ’em become participants in the show and twist and turn with every twisting and turning.”

Wherever he could, Hitchcock worked with the same people over and over, those who knew that working successfully on a Hitchcock production meant pouring one’s talents into a Hitchcockian