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

job of film director. Of course, the film business was never a haven of equality; even at this early stage, exploitation and marginalization of females was endemic. Yet women made themselves a crucial part of the landscape, as creators and audiences. For young women with increasing freedoms and disposable incomes, movie theaters were places of entertainment and empowerment, where images of their own lives, as well as projections of their fears and fantasies, could be enjoyed. Often, they would go to see stars such as Mary Pickford, a global phenomenon whose movies made her both rich and powerful.

Indeed, Pickford was a turbine that powered Famous Players-Lasky, the Hollywood production company. When Hitchcock started his career at the firm’s London branch, he worked alongside, and beneath, many women, including those who dominated the scenario department. One of those women—identified in some places as Anita Ross but named by Hitchcock as Elsie Codd—wrote the script for Number Thirteen (alternately titled Mrs. Peabody), Hitchcock’s first attempt at film directing, which fell apart during production in 1922. In his predirectorial days, the films he worked on were also heavily focused on female characters. One of those, The White Shadow (1924), starring the American actress Betty Compson, was thought lost until three of its six reels were discovered in New Zealand in 2011. Identifying precisely what contribution Hitchcock made to the film is difficult. The publicity that followed its discovery claimed he was assistant director, screenwriter, art director, and editor, though the British Film Institute gives the credit of editor to Alma Reville, and Hitchcock’s writing work was tweaking and polishing a screenplay already drafted by Michael Morton. Even so, a twenty-four-year-old Hitchcock was heavily involved in the production. The movie is far from a classic—even Balcon admitted that the production team was “caught on the hop,” as it tried to capitalize on the recent success of Woman to Woman, also starring Compson. Still, the surviving reels are intriguing, as they contain themes we now associate with Hitchcock’s directorial work: doubles, mistaken identity, and the danger that lies in wait for young women who will not be tamed. The story concerns twin sisters: Georgina, a chaste, biddable girl, and Nancy, a bobbed-haired rebel “without a soul” who smokes, drinks, gambles, and flirts with men. When Nancy runs away to live a bohemian life of excess, the saintly Georgina protects her sister’s reputation by assuming her identity. Frustratingly, the extant reels end just as the search for Nancy homes in on the Parisian nightclub she frequents. However, the scene is set for moral redemption; when Georgina unexpectedly dies, her soul possesses Nancy, who reforms her ways.

When Hitchcock’s screenplays became more sophisticated—at least partly because he engaged better screenwriters than himself to craft them—the distinction between the good girl and the bad girl was blurred in complex female characters. An early draft of this character came in Hitchcock’s silent film The Manxman (1929), in which Kate, played by Anny Ondra, wrestles with the competing binds of familial duty, social respectability, and individual fulfillment. Perhaps the best example of the type is Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia Huberman in Notorious, written by Ben Hecht. Alicia is the fast-living daughter of a convicted traitor who is persuaded by the American spy Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate a coterie of Nazis in Rio de Janeiro. As part of her mission, she seduces and marries Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), who possesses vital secrets about Germany’s nuclear weapons. The hypocritical American intelligence officers who have recruited her look down on Alicia as “a woman of that sort,” but Devlin, who is hopelessly in love with her, comes to understand her bravery and her moral worth. At the movie’s climax, Devlin saves Alicia from being killed by the Nazis—and in so doing realizes that Alicia has also rescued him. The “fat-headed guy, full of pain” has been taught how to love by the virtuousness of a promiscuous woman.

Characters such as Alicia were crucial to Hitchcock’s success; his identity as a filmmaker rested on his relationship with women, and he held as an article of faith that his audience was predominantly female. In 1931, he said he chose his leading ladies “to please women rather than men, for the reason that women form three-quarters of the average cinema audience.” It was a contention he never abandoned; “80 percent of the audience in the cinema are women,” he remarked in 1964. “Even if the house is fifty-fifty, half men, half women, a good percentage of the men have said to their girls: ‘What do you want to see, dear?’ So, men have very little to do with the choice.”

The need to create movies that women would flock to see was one of the reasons his filmmaking team had a strong female presence at its core. Joan Harrison, the producer of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was a twenty-six-year-old Oxford graduate when Hitchcock hired her to be his secretary in 1933. As often happened with those whom Hitchcock liked and trusted, Harrison’s role quickly grew; she was asked to vet and appraise source material, and soon became part of his scriptwriting team, relocating to the United States when the Hitchcocks moved there. Peggy Robertson came into the fold in the late forties as a script supervisor but became a high-powered assistant, performing tasks more typically associated with a producer or a production manager. Aside from those pivotal figures, there was a roster of female writers, from famous names such as Dorothy Parker, who lent her talents to Saboteur, to the big-screen novice Czezni Ormonde, Ben Hecht’s associate whom Hitchcock engaged for the post-Chandler rewrite of Strangers on a Train.

Principally, there was Alma, variously an assistant director, writer, unofficial coproducer, and a ubiquitous adviser whose opinion Hitchcock trusted unwaveringly. Alma was also the hub of Hitchcock’s private life. In Britain and America, the couple very often mixed business with pleasure by hosting cocktail parties and dinners—cooked by Alma, a marvel in the kitchen—for the latest Hitchcock collaborators. In his pomp, Hitchcock