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

favor in the court of the Chinese emperor, mapped the Mississippi, and trekked through the Amazon were precisely the kinds of stories that would have fired the imagination of a young Alfred Hitchcock daydreaming of a world away from Leytonstone and Limehouse. To be a part of the Jesuitical mission was to be part of an exciting adventure that sought to explode mysteries and open up new vistas. Simon Callow, the actor and author, was educated at Catholic schools in London during the fifties and sixties and envied those boys taught by the Jesuits. “They epitomized the romance of the priesthood which still held such a seductive power for the young and religiously inclined,” he says. “They were fearless explorers, both geographically and intellectually . . . fiercely intelligent, practical, effective, radical,” adjectives that could easily be used to describe Hitchcock and his approach to moviemaking.

The sense of corporate belonging embraced an artistic sensibility, too. One Jesuit critic believes that Hitchcock’s connection with German expressionism did not come as a thunderbolt revelation after watching the films of Lang and Murnau, or from visiting Munich and Berlin at the zenith of the Weimar renaissance; rather, it flowed naturally from “the religious and educational atmosphere of St Ignatius College prior to World War One,” which was “heavily baroque and was congruent with the new wave of Expressionism.” One should add that English cultural life in the years of Hitchcock’s childhood and young adulthood was more informed by Catholicism than at any moment since the early seventeenth century, especially in London. In 1850, the Catholic hierarchy in England had been reestablished after an absence of nearly three hundred years, coinciding with a famous Royal Academy exhibition of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which shocked establishment critics with their unapologetic “Romishness.” The Pre-Raphaelites fed into a broad revival of Catholic influence in English art that rumbled throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discernible in painting, neo-Gothic architecture, and the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as in the numbers of prominent artistic figures who converted to the Catholic faith, among them G. K. Chesterton (one of Hitchcock’s favorite writers), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Aubrey Beardsley, and, on his deathbed, Oscar Wilde. In Hitchcock’s home city, this Anglo-Catholic influence, with its notes of ornamentation, theatricality, and otherworldliness, gradually asserted itself from the mid-nineteenth century, and flourished in locations such as the interiors of the Houses of Parliament (designed by the Catholic convert Augustus Pugin); Westminster Cathedral (the location of an attempted murder in Foreign Correspondent), completed in 1903; and the Brompton Oratory, the capital’s second-largest Catholic church, where Alfred and Alma were married in 1926.

In the most superficial sense, many of Hitchcock’s films certainly have a look that could be described as Catholic. In the 1950s and ’60s, his use of color as symbol bordered on the liturgical, especially in the way he selected colors for his leading ladies’ outfits. He explained how he designed a color scheme for Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder that expressed her descent from vibrant soul of femininity to nervous and broken victim. She first appeared in “a bright red dress, her face in full natural makeup. From there, her clothes went to brick red, then to pale brown shades. Her face kept pace, becoming paler and paler until at the end her face and clothes were completely drab.” The following four films he made for Paramount in the 1950s—Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much—are similarly crammed with symbolic use of color. With the autumnal colors of Vermont, and Shirley MacLaine’s vivid purple outfit, there are shots in The Trouble with Harry that look like moving stained-glass windows. Several scenes in To Catch a Thief, bursting with the colors of the Côte d’Azur, put one in mind of Henri Matisse’s “cut-outs” from the 1940s and ’50s, which were inspired by the same region of France, and by Matisse’s reawakening to God and the Catholic Church.

A partiality for the vibrant, the dramatic, and the baroque are features of a recognizably Catholic aesthetic, but they are only surface, the same visual elements of Catholicism harvested by Madonna for her videos and Dolce & Gabbana for their handbags. Gauging the depth of Hitchcock’s faith is a trickier matter. Unquestionably, he was, as boy and man, gripped by the ceremonial aspects of religion, the liturgies and sacraments, which appealed to each of his senses, as well as his adoration of the dramatic and the spectacular. Elements of this crop up in his film work; religious vestments, ceremonies, and places of worship appear in numerous Hitchcock movies that don’t have any explicit religious subject. In a neat bit of bookending, Hitchcock placed a prayer scene early in his first movie, The Pleasure Garden, and made the abduction of a bishop during a church service a pivotal moment in his final film, Family Plot, a movie about births, deaths, marriages, and knotted connections between this world and the next. In the intervening fifty-one films (and hundreds of television episodes), the appurtenances of religion are brought into the frame at the slightest opportunity, evidence of their prominence in Hitchcock’s experience of the world, and in the public’s perception of him. In his ill-fated television collaboration with Hitchcock, Richard Condon had crowbarred some nuns into the script because he thought it seemed suitably Hitchcockian. Hitchcock said he appreciated the gesture but that on this occasion the wimples and cinctures detracted from the story. In his youth, Hitchcock was an enthusiastic participant in Catholic ceremonies, to the extent that he became an acolyte, assisting with the service of the altar, despite not knowing the correct Latin responses to recite during Mass. It was the tactile, sensual drama of the ceremony that captivated him: the surplice, the candles, the bells, and the incense, all deployed before a captive audience in an atmospheric setting that he loved, like the cinema, the theater, the