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

up six Academy Award nominations to Hitchcock’s five; neither won any, though both received honorary awards from the Academy.

¶ Hitchcock’s first choice, Ernest Hemingway, declined the offer.

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THE WOMANIZER

“Hitchcock’s genius is being frittered away on triviality and pettiness.” So stated one British critic in 1931, as Hitchcock’s career began to falter. After the triumph of Blackmail, he applied himself in several directions: adaptations of two serious stage plays (The Skin Game and Juno and the Paycock), a crime thriller (Number Seventeen), a comedy-drama about a bored married couple in search of adventure (Rich and Strange), and two versions of a whodunit, filmed simultaneously (Murder! for Anglophone audiences and Mary for the German market). Each had its merits. None was first-class Hitchcock. There was also Waltzes from Vienna, a delicate drama from 1934 based on a musical about the writing of The Blue Danube and perhaps the trough of Hitchcock’s career.

He only regained his footing when he paired up with the writer Charles Bennett and reunited with Balcon and Montagu to make The Man Who Knew Too Much for the production company Gaumont-British, the first of a glut of espionage thrillers that revived his reputation and brought him to the attention of American studios. In 1939, feeling he had reached the limits of what he could achieve in Britain, Hitchcock packed his bags for Hollywood, on a seven-year deal with the producer of Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick.

Having discarded an initial plan for a movie about the sinking of the Titanic, Selznick handed Hitchcock the task of adapting Rebecca (1940), a modern riff on Jane Eyre by the English author Daphne du Maurier. It was a canny choice; the novel inhabits territory familiar to the best of Hitchcock’s British output: menace, secrets, and the torment of a beautiful young woman. Despite a tussle for creative control between director and producer that set the tone for their future relationship, Rebecca was a success, fusing Selznick’s glamour with Hitchcock’s atmospheric suspense. Recognition at the Academy Awards followed; the film (and therefore Selznick) won Best Picture, while Hitchcock earned his first nomination for Best Director.

Joan Fontaine was also nominated for her performance as the unnamed heroine. Casting the part had been an arduous process. Hitchcock and Selznick traded strong opinions about the many auditionees, each trying to steer the production in the direction of his vision. “Too big and sugary,” Hitchcock said of one actress; “Too Russian looking,” of another. “Grotesque” was all he had to say about a third. Fontaine, always favored by Selznick, got the part but had a fraught time with her director. “We liked each other,” she believed, “and I knew he was rooting for me,” but he had “a strange way of going about it.” Hitchcock wanted Fontaine to act like the anxious, lachrymose wreck described in the script, and he went to remarkable lengths to ensure she did. He told her that other cast members didn’t like her, and that her leading man, Laurence Olivier, thought her role should have gone to his wife, Vivien Leigh. When Fontaine struggled to cry during one scene, Hitchcock asked if there was anything that might help. She ventured that if he slapped her in the face, that might do the trick. “I did,” recalled Hitchcock, and Fontaine “instantly started bawling.”

Rebecca announced Hitchcock in America as a director of “women’s pictures” but also as a director of women, a man with a rare talent for creating, and re-creating, female stars. In December 1940, one magazine told its readers that Fontaine was not a “gorgeous genius” but a “puppet, walking and talking exactly as her Svengali Alfred Hitchcock demands!”

Perhaps no other male artist of the twentieth century dedicated as much time and effort to exploring the lives and identities of women. Certainly no aspect of his legacy is so heatedly contested. Caught between feelings of admiration and resentment, identification and estrangement, an instinct to worship and a desire to control, Hitchcock had a complex, contradictory set of ideas about women and his relationship with them. He surrounded himself with women, sought out their friendship, gave them responsibilities and opportunities that few men of his station did, and proudly championed their work. At the same time, it was through women that he revealed the darkest, most discomfiting parts of himself—and embodied the culture in which he existed, as a filmmaker and as a man.

Hitchcock’s life spanned a remarkable period of change in the lives of women. Born in the age of Victoria, he was raised in the era of the suffragettes, when the popular newspapers that carried those tales of curious murders which he devoured also gave blanket coverage to the “suffragette outrages” of the 1910s, in which campaigning women cast off gender norms in acts of violent civil disobedience. In London, grand locations became scenes of disorder and terrorism, anticipating the way in which Hitchcock would use world-famous landmarks as the venue for perilous climaxes: in the National Gallery, Mary Richardson took a blade to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus; bombs were planted in St Paul’s Cathedral and the Metropolitan Tabernacle; Egyptian mummy cases were smashed at the British Museum, the very place where Hitchcock staged his first great chase scene, at the end of Blackmail, one of his several films about the travails of a preyed-upon woman. The response of officialdom to the suffragettes’ actions included brutal reprisals that had a hint of Hitchcock about them: imprisonment, beatings, the forced feeding of hunger strikers, carried out to punish lawbreakers and to humiliate those who transgressed the social code by not being sufficiently ladylike.

Cinema, in its fledgling state, gave space to women that more traditional industries and art forms did not allow. Charlie Chaplin first appeared as “The Tramp” in a film of 1914 costarring and directed by Mabel Normand, an instrumental figure in his breakthrough success. When the American publisher Houghton Mifflin published a book titled Careers for Women in 1920, it contained a chapter about the