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

debate about Hitchcock’s treatment of women, on-screen and off, is merely twenty-first-century political correctness. In 1972, on the release of Frenzy, the New York Times pushed back on the reams of positive reviews with an article, “Does Frenzy Degrade Women?” As early as 1935, Film Weekly ran a piece in which Barbara J. Buchanan asked Hitchcock, “Why do you hate women?” The question was prompted by Hitchcock’s recent film The 39 Steps in which Madeleine Carroll is handcuffed to her costar Robert Donat and hauled around the Scottish countryside as he tries to clear his name and uncover a nefarious spy ring. Buchanan said this denied Carroll “her dignity and glamour,” a suggestion that, ironically, if judged solely by today’s standards might be construed as more than a little patronizing toward women. Hitchcock denied that he hated women—though he did, jokingly, call them “a nuisance”—and said Carroll was put through the mill in order to strip away the surface layers and reveal the real person beneath. “Nothing pleases me more than to knock the ladylikeness out of chorus girls!” Paralleling his situation with Fontaine on Rebecca, and Hedren on The Birds, stories also spread—some by Hitchcock himself—that he had deliberately caused Carroll upset when the cameras were off, pretending to have lost the keys to the handcuffs, meaning she was cuffed to Donat for a large chunk of the first day of filming. He assured the public that his scheme was all in aid of improving her as an actress, and she “entered into the spirit of the whole thing with terrific zest. . . . I remember, though, that she had a friend watching on the set one day, who came up to me and reproached me for my rough handling of her!”

Putting a woman through an ordeal was certainly something Hitchcock relished, and which he wove into his public profile. Quoting the playwright Victorien Sardou, he said the key to good drama is to “torture the women!” He knew that statement was provocative, just as he understood that it was essentially true. More than a century on from the Perils of Pauline, our screens are still saturated with graphic depictions of violence done to women at the hands of men, for our entertainment. Hitchcock didn’t create our culture’s appetite for that, but he knew better than anyone how to exploit it—and taunted us for our perversity in enjoying it.

Moreover, rarely do women in his films emerge diminished from their trials. Hitchcock’s heroes are often obstinate and emotionally stunted, their glaring defects softened by wit and charisma. The women have their flaws, too, but grit and constancy usually see them through the worst that men, full of their anger and violence, can hurl at them. Roger Ebert wrote that “sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.” He was only partially correct. It’s true that Grace Kelly, as Margot in Dial M for Murder, is subjected to a terrifying attack in her own home. But as Lisa in Rear Window she puts Jeff to shame by acting with physical and moral bravery, proving Thorwald’s guilt and her own fortitude in the process. In Under Capricorn and Notorious, Ingrid Bergman plays women who are drugged and held captive in their own homes. But they are survivors, whose qualities transform the self-absorbed prigs in their midst. We, the audience, are encouraged to celebrate the strength, tenacity, and guile they display in staying upright in a wind tunnel of masculine hostility. The men who become dangerously besotted with women in Hitchcock films are usually rather weak and pathetic characters; we’re not meant to admire but pity Scottie in Vertigo, Gregory Peck’s Anthony Keane in The Paradine Case (1947), and Jonathan Cooper, played by Richard Todd, in Stage Fright. In Marnie, Hedren’s character takes the awful responsibility of shooting her horse to end his suffering after a bad fall. In so doing, she displays a capacity for courage and selfless love entirely beyond the possessive, controlling Mark. William Rothman may be wide of the mark in questioning whether there is a rape in Marnie, but he’s surely correct that Mark thinks he is acting like a perfect gentleman—because Mark is a self-obsessed oaf unable to appreciate the pain he’s causing the woman he professes to love.

Such is the strange, contradictory nature of Hitchcock’s relationship with women—redolent of Hollywood’s bifurcated treatment of women over the last century. His working life was spent thinking of ways to charm and unsettle female audiences, giving them heroines they would simultaneously aspire to emulate and dread becoming. Yet he used those same opportunities to effectuate his fantasies of control and specialness, making exploitation of women not only a theme of his work but a methodology, at times, even the work itself. “When one is reading criticism defending or attacking Hitchcock’s treatment of women,” writes Tania Modleski, one of Hitchcock’s most thoughtful critics, “one continually experiences a feeling of ‘yes, but . . .’ ” This is probably how Hitchcock felt, too.

5

THE FAT MAN

“Idon’t know who you employ to time your scripts, but whoever did it is misleading you horribly. I will even go so far as to say disgracefully.” In August 1943, Hitchcock found himself immersed in one of his least favorite activities: repelling the encroachments of a Hollywood producer. Several months earlier, Selznick had loaned his star director to Twentieth Century-Fox, who were keen on Hitchcock’s bold idea of making a wartime movie set entirely in a lifeboat. The scripting process for Lifeboat (1944), involving John Steinbeck, had been challenging; now, with filming already under way, Darryl F. Zanuck was insisting that Hitchcock’s finished script was fifty percent too long. Hitchcock was infuriated by this eleventh-hour intervention, especially as he knew Zanuck was incorrect; meticulous in his planning for every movie, Hitchcock had a very firm grasp of schedules and timings. When Zanuck saw a hastily assembled rough cut of the first reel, his tune changed completely: “It has tempo, interest, and