Alfred Hitchcock Geek

Hitchcock's answer for the cold season

2013-02-27T23:54:00.000-08:00

Amour, at work: Michael Haneke, the Hitchcock for a new generation

2013-02-25T12:50:00.005-08:00

Michael Haneke (left) on the set with Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Michael Haneke’s films are like sunburns: you don't feel their their full brunt until the next day. In his latest film, Amour, Anne and Georges (Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant) are an educated Parisian couple who must deal with the grim reality of old age. Haneke spares us none of the tedium and horror of their final days, measured out in spoon after increasingly bitter spoon. Driving home from the theater, Amanda and I were silent. The next day, we could talk about nothing else.

In this aspect, among others, Haneke’s films resemble those of Alfred Hitchcock, whose films likewise impart a long afterglow. In fact, for years, I’ve maintained that Haneke is the artistic heir to Hitchcock, and each new movie of his confirms it. Their artistic sensibilities are almost identical. For instance, Haneke declared that “the principal theme of all my films” is the question of “What is reality in cinema?” Ground also covered by Hitchcock.

Of course, Haneke is no mere dime-a-dozen “Hitchcockian” director. Instead, I sense a tradition at work. Just as Hitch stood on the shoulders of F. W. Murnau and D.W. Griffith while contributing his ideas and voice to cinema, Haneke stands on the shoulders of Hitchcock. He's an auteur in the old school tradition, and it’s that mastery of his medium, coupled with his singleness of vision, that places him in Hitch’s league. Like Hitch, he deals in the big questions of the human condition, which, it turns out, are also the most urgent and intimate. What is love? What is loyalty? What is sin?

What is the next loving/loyal/unsinful thing to do?

In his universe (as well as in Hitch's), the answer to that question is never simple. Amour demonstrates that the next right act can be as horrific as anything Hitchcock showed us. And then he takes it one step further: while Hitch’s films invite self-reflection, showing us the way to forgiveness (or at least cutting our enemies a little slack in the larger scheme), Haneke’s films scrape down to the next level, causing you to wonder whether you’re up to the task.

With Hidden (French: Caché), he explored the Hitchcockian theme of shared guilt and our collective complicity, not just in sin itself, but in the shared costs its cover-up measures out to our selves, our families and society. Not since Topaz, perhaps, has the subject been mined so ruthlessly. I wrote a bit about the film here.

Psycho, a film about toilets, cross-dressing, taxidermy and serial-killing (not that there’s anything wrong with those things), was conceived by Hitchcock as one long joke. I suspect Haneke would say the same about The Piano Teacher, a film about a psychotic, sado-masochistic conservatory instructor, who, it should be added, has mother issues of her own. Not since Hitch’s 1960 film has the intersection where anger and eros meet been so objectively and I would add, compassionately, understood. And, yes, the humor is pitch-black. Amour, too, is front-loaded with its own quiet, subversive humor, as in this whispered conversation:

Anne: “What would you say if no one came to your funeral?”
Georges: “Nothing, presumably.

Amour is stripped of any suspense. Its opening scene gives us Anne laid out on her deathbed, now a makeshift a funeral bier. The rest of the film is about what comes before. But even without that, as her mental and physical functions disperse one by one, even a child would know how this movie ends. The film shackles us to the couple, forcing us to join them in the here and now—which is all we’ve got, anyway; and if the film has a moral, it’s this cold comfort of pop philosophy. Hitchcock often bristled at the constraints the title Master of Suspense imposed on him. Given time, I can see him making a thriller like this.

The claustrophobic single settings of Lifeboat, Rope, Dial M for Murder and the final act of The Birds suggest that the trappings of domesticity, not to mention wealth, are indeed a trap and that those who allow themselves to be thus caught can only escape by facing harsh judgment or death (or both). Haneke seems to have picked up on and continued that message. Like Dial M for Murder—another movie about domestic homicide—Amour takes place almost entirely inside the couple’s elegant apartment. Unlike her globetrotting, concert-performing students, Anne, a piano teacher to elite students, has evidently spent her lifetime ensconced in these rooms, watching and instructing, but never fully doing. If Schubert's piano works—i.e. chamber pieces—ever provided any comfort for their souls (a tenuous assumption, if Haneke's earlier The Piano Teacher has anything to say about it), they are now only a reminder of their ineluctability of their destiny. Just about every wall of their home is packed floor-to-ceiling with books and art and curios accumulated over the years. I found my eyes wandering to the bookcases to peruse their titles, only to discover that most of them had indecipherable, if not blank bindings, as if at this stage of the game, all of their literature and learning will be useless for dealing with such situations as when Anne wakes up to find herself soaked in her own urine. Even in their dreams, there's no escaping this place.

Haneke's earlier films also hint at what Norman Bates characterized as "private traps." For example, inside a posh lakeside mansion, the well-to-do family of Funny Games is tormented by a pair of demoniac teenagers who seem to have no more motive for killing than do Rope’s Brandon and Phillip—unless you consider complacency to be a punishable offense, a point on which both Hitch and Haneke would agree.

Haneke’s Hitchcockian credentials are further reinforced by his camera’s self-awareness as a stand-in for both the author and his audience. Following the opening scene, which is more of a prologue, Amour opens with a wide shot (reminiscent of the end of Hidden) of an audience waiting for a piano recital to begin. The anonymity of this crowd prefigures the blank spines visible in the couple’s library; at first, the eye doesn’t know where to land, as it searches the milling crowd for a familiar face. The camera has been placed on stage and the sensation it evokes is either the laid-bare feeling of having a mirror unexpectedly held up to us, or, conversely, that we are the performers in this drama looking out at our audience. Either discomforting interpretation is plausible. William Rothman wrote that one of Hitchcock’s “deepest insights is that no moment in any film can be fully comprehended without accounting for the camera. Another is that, in the camera’s tense and shifting relationships with its human subjects, the author’s and viewer’s roles are intimately revealed.” Haneke takes Hitchcock’s insights into new territory. Hitchcock saw voyeurism as a theme to be developed; for Haneke it’s an accepted fact of life. Haneke’s contribution is to ask, “What will you make of it?”

Behind the simplicity of Haneke's storylines and technique—excruciatingly long takes with a stationary, unblinking camera—lies a subtle mind that has thought through the meaning of his stories and the medium in which he tells them, clear to their difficult, often abhorrent, end. At one point, Georges slaps Anne in the face, and we are not spared the force of it through clever editing or stagecraft: we watch her face implode under the weight of his hand. He immediately realizes that he’s gone too far and, with a murmured apology, retreats from the room. The camera, too, cuts away, as if in shame, to rest on a series of paintings hanging on their bedroom wall. I’m reminded of the long take in Frenzy, which spares us the details of unspeakable violence happening in an upstairs flat as the camera backs discreetly away and out to the street.

Amour's incidental music (Schubert's Impromptus, mostly, along with an impromptu performance of one of Beethoven's Bagatelles: I'll leave the interpretation to you), all of which occurs diegetically, is constantly interrupted or shut off. (One rejected title of the film was The Music Stops.) Like Phillip’s unfinished stabs at Poulenc’s Perpetual Motion in Rope, these fragmentary performances are a reminder that all life, even that of these octogenarians’, is doomed to a premature end. I think that both Hitch and Haneke would embrace Joseph Campbell’s words: “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”

Hitch loved to tell reporters a story from his younger days about a boy and girl he espied while on a train to Paris. The boy was urinating against a red brick wall, “but the girl had a hold of his arm and she never let go. She'd look down at what he was doing, and then look around at the scenery, then back again at the boy. I felt this was true love at work.” That impression stayed with him and inspired such scenes as the “world’s longest kiss” in Notorious. As its title insists, Amour is also a story of “true love at work,” despite incontinence, immobilization and dementia. As her health deteriorates, Anne shifts from stoic acceptance to stubborn refusal to go any further. Things get ugly. It’s easy to say that, in her pain, she withdrew her affection from her husband. But I don’t see it that way. I think she saw her end coming and was preparing her husband to take on the most excruciating act of love he would ever render. As with the mother’s suicide in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “she was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.”

To love another is to forfeit all defenses against suffering—yours and theirs. Hitchcock offers little and Haneke offers even less in the way of comfort. Neither director was ever comfortable with the bland reassurances of the Hollywood ending. In place of mere optimism, they offer us wisdom. And with wisdom comes hope. If you're lucky, you'll share your last days with someone who will do for you what you can't do for yourself, even if it's the imparting of oblivion. That, too, is amore.

Congratulations to Michael Haneke for taking home a 2013 Oscar for Amour in the Best Foreign Film category.

My Hookup With Hitchcock: Part II

2013-02-01T12:46:00.001-08:00

By Elisabeth Karlin

When I set out to write my play Bodega Bay I was Hitchcockful of ideas. I knew I wanted to send my protagonist off on an adventurous cross-country journey that would actually be a trip to self-knowledge. I knew I wanted to touch on themes of appearance vs. reality, the fragility of our ordered world and how the dead affect the living. I knew I would use the sea as a place of emotional confrontation. I knew I would deal in images of birds, bathrooms and eyeglasses and that my script would be peppered with allusions and in-jokes for the Hitchophiles. And I knew that I wanted to do all this in the heightened style of German Expressionism that Hitchcock was so rooted in.

Like Hitchcock, I approach story-telling as a character-driven endeavor and in Louise Finch (kudos to those who know right off the bat where I got that name) I created a natural descendant of all the familiar folk in the Hitchcock oeuvre with lives in need of purpose and meaning. Yet even with character and story in place, I still didn't have much more than a cerebral exercise. Determined to avoid a spoofy send-up or a reverential homage, I hoped to create a play that would stand on its own for those oblivious to the the Hitchcock overlay. The best dramas are written from the gut and have to come from the inside out.

Oddly, I discovered the viscera of my Hitch-inspired project in the movie that Hitchcock never made. Mary Rose is a play by J. M. Barrie that Hitchcock saw and loved as a youth. He never let go of the desire to film this fey, romantic ghost story. He wanted to do it with Grace Kelly and then with Tippi Hedren and when that relationship soured he considered unknown Claire Griswold. Because of a clear lack of enthusiasm from MCA/Universal (Hitch joked that the studio would likely have backed any project of his as long as it wasn't Mary Rose) it never happened but he never lost hope.

Mary Rose, the play, is an antique and like most antiques, it is not to everyone's taste. When I read the screenplay that Marnie screenwriter Jay Presson Allen drafted for Hitch, on the Writing With Hitchcock website (thank-you Steven DeRosa!) I wondered how such a moist and misty artifact of fantasy about a girl who disappears on "the island that likes to be visited," comes back and disappears on it again to return once more as an aching ghost, could hold such an unrelenting fascination for the sophisticated Hitchcock.

And yet, something about the script's final scene spoke to me in a strange way. It made me delve further and I came across a review of a revival of the play by critic John Lahr in the New Yorker. About the background of J. M. Barrie and Mary Rose Lahr wrote:

"He [Barrie] knew from experience that a mother could be both alive and dead. In 1867, when he was six, his thirteen year old brother David was killed in a skating accident. Barrie's mother, Margaret, took to her bed and became a ghostly presence who was both there and not there for her little boy...In life, Barrie could not heal his haunted mother or reclaim her. In Mary Rose written when Barrie was almost sixty, he does both."

I typed this quote and put it over my desk. I taped it to the inside cover of my notebook. I looked at it every time I needed to remind myself why I was writing this play. And every time I looked at it, the words "could not heal his haunted mother" blazed back at me, evoking my own mother who in her life was always both there and not there, shielded from me and the world by her dark glasses and an opaque haze of cigarette smoke and depression. I rode those words all the way to the last draft of Bodega Bay.

His failure to film Mary Rose is considered to be the great creative disappointment of Hitchcock's life. He thought it might be his masterpiece. Meanwhile, his acknowledged masterpiece, Vertigo, waded into many of the same themes and moods--how the dead affect the living and how a ghostly figure of desire can be there and not there.

In his interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitch is characteristically flip about the whole Mary Rose thing. "You should make the picture," he told the French director. "You would do it better. It's not really Hitchcock material," he said as if covering his broken heart. For more than Grace Kelly, more than Tippi Hedren, it seems that it is the spectral Mary Rose who was really the girl that got away.

A young man saw a play that stayed with him the whole of his life. And in some slightly phantasmagorical Mary Rose way, I wrote my own play while basking in his presence on our shadowy astral plane of an island that likes to be visited. I came back with the liberating lesson that what is cinematic or theatrical need not be sensible and logical, only truthful. But it was not the great maestro of anxiety who I found on that island. It was not the majestically monumental Hitchcock. It was only the watchful and yearning Alfred--a boy who liked to go to the theatre.

Elisabeth Karlin's play BODEGA BAY plays at The Abingdon Theatre in New York City through February 17th. For information go to www.abingdontheatre.org.

My Hookup With Hitchcock: Part I

2013-01-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

By Elisabeth Karlin

The epithet "Master of Suspense" that clings to Alfred Hitchcock like moss on a rock has always rung feebly for me. "Master of Dark Psychological Undertones, Chaos in an Ordered Universe and Moral Ambiguities" is more like it. I admit that it's a bit too wordy. That's why I stick simply with "The Master." This is the account of our collaboration, even though we never met.

Hitchcock has been on my mind quite a lot these past couple of years. As adjutant to Joel Gunz on the Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook Page and contributor to this blog, I have a daily dedication to saying something about the man. When fellows respond to what I put out there with their own thoughts I think about him some more. And of course I read Hitchcock savants like Gunz, Stephen Rebello, Steven DeRosa and Dan Auiler, and soon I feel like the composer in Rear Window, with Hitch in my apartment, adjusting my clock. You see, the more you think about Hitchcock, the more intrusive he becomes in your life. The more you look deeply into his work, the more you see. And the more you see, the more you want to say about it.

There was no fighting it. With Hitchcock a fixture in my consciousness, I had to dream up my own drama dealing in his deepest and most compelling themes. For me, the lure of Hitchcock has never been the spilling and splattering of blood. Rather, it is the question of what runs in our blood that gets me going back to the films. It is the way Hitchcock has of guiding his audience to disturbing discoveries about what makes us who we are that I see as the crux of his craft.

The result of this divine hookup with Hitch is Bodega Bay, a play about Louise Finch, the mousy sister of a meth addict, who leaves Staten Island for a cross-country odyssey to find the mother who mysteriously walked away years ago. Now, meth addicts on Staten Island might not sound like standard Hitchcock fare while transcontinental journeys and missing mothers might, and in upcoming posts I will elucidate and elaborate on the particular points of this creative embrace between The Master and me.

Elisabeth Karlin's play BODEGA BAY opens at The Abingdon Theatre in New York City on January 25th. For information go to www.abingdontheatre.org.

Jules Dassin: Hitchcock's "Wrong Man?"

2013-01-07T23:58:00.000-08:00

It’s almost a cardinal rule for film school graduates to cite Alfred Hitchcock as an influence, but the fact is that smart filmmakers have always stolen his ideas. Hitch, for his part, might have been the greatest thief of all—though, in the general accounting, he gave back more than he took. One such exchange that hasn’t been much commented on is that between him and director Jules Dassin (Rififi, Topkapi, and much more).

Dassin served as an assistant to Hitch during the making of Mr. And Mrs. Smith (1941), and it seems he was all but Hitch’s disciple. He would hang out on the set and watch the elder director at work with such unflagging attention that Hitch, in jest, started checking with him to see if the take was okay. When he left RKO for MGM to direct short films, Hitch advised him: "Don't ever make a picture with children, animals or Charles Laughton." (He went on to break all three directives.)

His very first directorial effort was a 1941 short adaptation of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. And if that assignment wasn’t Hitchcockian enough, its multiple tracking shots and subjective POV editing spoke to his careful study of the Master. Dassin’s extreme close-ups on the main character’s ear as he hears those phantom heartbeats come right out of the Hitchcock playbook. In fact, the entire 20-minute piece feels like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Seven years later, Dassin directed the police caper The Naked City. From the first frames, I knew there was more than a passing relationship here. (Stream it on Netflix here.)

For instance, there’s the scene where the oh-so Irish Detective Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) rouses suspect Frank Niles (Howard Duff) from unconsciousness. It matches the framing, action, tone and comic relief of the scene in Hitch’s Spellbound (1945), where the oh-so Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Brulov corners his wrong man, J.B. (Gregory Peck), for a round of questioning.

The Naked City

Spellbound

The acrophobia-inducing climactic chase atop the Williamsburg Bridge in The Naked City so recalls the final chase on the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) that the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “a roaring 'Hitchcock' end.”

In The Naked City, the bad guy, Garzah (Ted de Corsia) plunges several stories in this vertiginous shot. Apparently a dummy was used for the scene.

In a process shot layered with a tiny dissolve over his face, Frye (Norman Llloyd) exits this world from atop the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur.

The Naked City starts out, Hitchcockianly enough, with a series of “God’s eye” shots of Manhattan, New York. Over the noise of the helicopter’s engines, the film’s producer says,

“Ladies and gentlemen, the picture you are about to see is called “The Naked City.” My name is Mark Hallinger. I was in charge of its production. I might as well tell you directly that it’s a bit different from anything you’ve ever seen. It was not photographed in a studio. Quite to the contrary, the… actors played out their roles on the streets, in the apartment houses, on the skyscrapers of New York itself.”

This prologue—and the film that follows—appears to have influenced Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, eight years later, in several key ways. Hitch delivers the prologue to that film, speaking across the empty expanse of a darkened soundstage:

“This is Alfred Hitchcock speaking. In the past, I have given you many kinds of suspense pictures. But this time, I would like you to see a different one. The difference lies in the fact that this is a true story, every word of it. And yet it contains elements that are stranger than all the fiction that has gone into many of the thrillers that I've made before.”

In both cases, director and producer:

Introduce himself by name and deliver a prologue.
Take the audience out of the cinematic experience by reminding it that it is watching a movie.
Draw attention to their movies’ realism.
Make claims that this movie is unlike any the audience has yet seen.

Both films also take place in a New York that is both foreground and background, itself a character; and both are filmed in a neo-realistic documentary style. Perhaps most importantly, while both follow a police procedural format, Hitch’s film deals exclusively with the point of view of the accused—and that difference gives us a clue to Hitch’s greater intentions.

If The Naked City did indeed exert some influence on The Wrong Man, the fate that befell its creator might well have also have been on Hitch’s mind at that time, too. Dassin’s career in Hollywood was cut short when, in 1951, he was accused of Communist activities and blacklisted by the House of Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Like everyone else in Hollywood, Hitch very likely concluded that such blacklisting could easily happen to him. (See Lifeboat, which flopped in 1944 because it portrayed Americans and Germans alike in an ambivalent light. If Hitch had made that film at the height of the red scare, he’d have been run out of town.) For that reason, I see a connection between The Wrong Man and The Naked City, as well as Dassin himself.

Film critic Colin Macarthur has called The Wrong Man “the film which perhaps best conveys the underlying unease of 50s America.” It was (sort of) Hitch's response to the Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible: anyone could be accused of Communist leanings, guilty until proven innocent. Jules Dassin was just another “wrong man.”

The Naked City has another scene that apparently clicked with Hitch. Detective Muldoon watches children skipping rope in the street below his window, chanting this rhyme:

"Mother, Mother, I am ill

Send for the doctor over the hill

Call for the doctor, call for the nurse

Call for the lady with the alligator purse."

Hitchcock used that same rhyme twice in Marnie. In this latter case, it works on several levels, carrying forward ideas related to childhood danger, predatory animals, illness that is “nothing” and purses. But the way the rhyme is presented in down-at-the-heels urban settings in both films also suggests that Hitch was again thinking of his former protogee’s film.

The Naked City

Marnie

The rhyme doesn’t appear in the source novel, Marnie, by Winston Graham; it was suggested by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, who, according to Tony Lee Moral in his book Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie, “thought it would be funny and amusing.” Hitch would surely have known about its earlier use and smiled. By the same token, when Marnie Edgar coolly, methodically, robs the Rutland safe, the suspense, attention to detail and silence of that scene resembles the famous heist scene in Rififi, directed by Dassin while in exile in France. Hitch’s direction almost begs for that comparison.

Of course, Hitch made his creative choices for a multiplicity of reasons. Yet, beyond such artistic considerations, why would he drop details into a film that would be just an in-joke between a half-dozen people at the max (plus an unspecified number of future film geeks)? Well, for starters, just about every film Hitch made contained a wink or two just like that. Also, consider this: Marnie came out in 1964, the same year that Dassin finally returned to Hollywood to make Topkapi. Maybe, on some level, it was Hitch’s way of saying, “Welcome back.”

That’s speculation, of course. Still, one thing seems fairly certain: these two first-rate directors had enough mutual respect that they could riff on each others’ work, while following their own artistic lights.

Anthony Hopkins' Hitchcock: I need you to be Alfred one more time.

2012-11-20T19:32:00.003-08:00

“Like all great artists, Alfred Hitchcock is impossible to live with, but well worth the effort.” So says one of the characters in the eagerly anticipated Hitchcock (Fox/Searchlight), which both sums up the main point of the film and explains why I recently found my bags packed and on the porch. Apparently, I’m not the artist I thought I was.

That was a maudlin thought. Then again, Hitchcock is rife with maudlin humor and asides--along with enough Easter egg-like in-jokes to keep Hitchcock fans and re-watching the film for years. For instance, in a line borrowed from one of the final scenes in Vertigo, Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) invites Alma to join him for “one of those big juicy steaks we love so much.”

The first-ever legitimate biopic (or is it docudrama?) about the director, Hitchcock prudently avoids a career-spanning flyover of his half century in movies and focuses instead on the obstacles he faced just to make one film: Psycho. But don’t let that limited scope fool you. Restricting the story to just a few months between 1959 and 1960 allowed director Sacha Gervasi and screenwriter John J. McLaughlin ample room to explore the complicated relationships that existed between Hitch and Alma and Hitch and his leading ladies, while also comparing the dark corners of his psyche with the entertainments he brought to generations of audiences. History was provided by Stephen Rebello's excellent and readable book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.

Gervasi pulls out a variety of tricks to get those ideas across without resorting to dry exposition. In a series of imaginary sequences, real-life serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) and inspiration behind novelist Robert Bloch’s Norman Bates, plays Hitch’s muse, confidant, psychotherapist and Jungian shadow. Such fantasy scenes (fantascenes?) were a bit fresher when Tony Soprano first engaged in them, but here they show us what we suspected all along--that Hitch, ever the good Catholic, loved his murderers as he did himself.

Hitchcock isn't a term paper, it's a movie. The creators don't shy away from creative license in order to get the all-too-true story across. For example, Hitchcock was always famously cool on the set, and for the filming of the shower scene in particular, Janet Leigh recalled, “it went very professionally and very quickly.” Suffice it to say that in this movie, Hitch steps in and proves to be a real cut-up. What we lose in historical accuracy, we gain in further insight into Hitch's creative rage.

In a later scene, at Psycho's premier, Hitch pretends to direct the audience as if it were an orchestra. Untethered from historical facts, the scene reveals what the real payoff was for Hitch, who spent 50 years hiding in the dark behind a camera. Moments like this were what Hitch lived for.

When you realize that Anthony Hopkins himself played Hannibal Lechter, the screen’s second-most beloved serial killer, it follows that he was an inspired choice to play Hitch. (Hell, Hopkins could have played Alma if he’d wanted to.) And he brought a sense of Hitch’s troubled nature to the role. But I do have a beef. Like Toby Jones’ portrayal of Hitch in The Girl, Hopkins’ Hitchcock is based on Hitchcock’s public persona, with all the black humor and droll imperiousness unwaveringly in place. (At least in HBO's bio-waste The Girl, we get to hear a few of Hitch's classic, filthy limericks. I took notes.) In this new film, Hopkins' Hitch is either the Buddha of Deadpan or he’s a ravenous, knife-wielding glutton.

In preparation for the role, Hopkins admitted the he “watched a lot of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" episodes. That was his first mistake. And that prosthetic fat-man makeup didn't make his job easier. But the real Alfred Hitchcock, the one I’d hoped to glimpse, at least in the scenes he shares in private with his closest confidants, was in fact a spirited raconteur, quick with a smile, whose eyes—as with those of his characters—revealed everything, as this interview shows.

For me, the show-stopper was Helen Mirren, who serves up an Alma Hitchcock who’s cunning, resolute and funny—and who knew the score all too well as the loyal wife who lived in the shadow of her famous husband’s fantasy mistresses, without losing herself along the way. If Hitchcock gets a Best Picture Oscar where the master’s films always came up short, in order to complete the symmetry, Mirren ought to receive a Best Supporting Role where Alma never did.

Alfred Hitchcock lived to make movies. The story of his films cannot be separated from his life—and the converse is true as well. For film lovers in general along with casual fans and hard core Hitchcock Geeks, Hitchcock has a little something for everyone.

The film also stars Scarlett Johansson, who plays herself dressed up to look like Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg as Hitch’s smooth-as-scotch yet ravenous-as-a-vampire superagent, Lew Wasserman. James D’Arcy reincarnates Anthony Perkins and Jessica Biel keeps her chin up as Hitch's spurned muse, Vera Miles. Opens Friday in select theaters.

Portland's Cinema 21 just launched it First Annual Hitchcock Fest

2012-11-03T12:11:00.001-07:00

I am thrilled to announce Cinema 21's "First Annual" (only an oxymoron to the most pessimistic) Hitchcock Film Festival, which started last night and runs through Wednesday. So you know where I'll be camping this week! And, just to show that fresh prints isn't just a rap star, that's how you'll be seeing these movies! Here are the deets:

DATES: Runs Friday November 2 thru Wednesday November 7
TICKETS: $6 each; $9 per DOUBLE FEATURE; $40 per Festival pass
ADDRESS: Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave
FORMAT: ALL IN GLORIOUS, FRESH 35MM!!

Showtimes follow this fascinating interview with festival creator and curator, Ian Berry:

Who are you and what's your association with cinema 21?
"I've been a projectionist at Cinema 21 for 5 years now -- a projectionist in general since 1998. But I was a weekly fixture at Cinema 21 long before I worked there. It's always been my favorite movie theater. It's more than my home away from home; it's my church.

Why you? Why a Hitchcock festival?
I've actually been bugging my boss, Tom, for a while to do a Hitchcock festival. I originally wanted to do it on Hitch's birthday in August two years ago. But sometimes these things roll very slowly. With the success of the noir series back in March (another thing I had to pester him into), I think Tom finally saw that we could do a tribute to Hitchcock and he wouldn't lose his shirt. Plus it just seemed like the timing couldn't be better. The Sight & Sound pronouncement, the new movies, Hitchcock is just in the air right now. For personal and sentimental reasons, though, one of the greatest film-going experiences I ever had was seeing Rear Window for the first time as a young adult at Cinema 21. I was so completely blown away I returned the very next night to watch it again, just to be sure it wasn't a one night stand, that the movie was actually THAT GOOD. So I wanted to bring that feeling back to the theater, if only for selfish reasons.

In an era in which projection is increasingly digital, What is involved in putting together a 35mm film festival?
It's fairly difficult. First of all, there's the availability and condition of the existing prints. Film is a delicate medium. Some films are just plain unavailable. (For instance, we couldn't program The Birds because it's currently making the rounds as part of Universal's 100th anniversary tour. I really wanted Lifeboat but we were told there wasn't a print in circulation right now.) Some prints are in poor condition. In fact, when we got our print of Vertigo, we looked at it and very quickly realized that the print had seen better days. We immediately asked Universal if there was a better print available and we dished out the extra money to get it here.

Which leads right into Part Two: it can be very expensive to do a festival of 35mm films. We actually sought out private sponsorship to make this festival possible, mostly for the shipping costs of these prints. But we felt like we had to show these films ON FILM, the way The Master intended.

When we did the noir series, Tom was on the fence about going film or going digital. (Let's make this clear: I was not on the fence. I wanted film very badly.) Tom has to watch the prices of everything, so I don't blame him for being tempted by the lower costs of digital versions, especially where older films are concerned because the shipping costs are drastically reduced. Additionally, he's so busy that he doesn't watch the films in the theater as often as he'd probably like to and therefore is a bit removed sometimes from the power of celluloid. So when we came up with a list of the films we wanted to program, we found prints where we could, but then we compromised on a few titles (the ones we couldn't get 35mm prints) by showing the blu-ray versions. The very first film of the series was The Killers, of which we managed to get a brand new 35mm print. Tom and I watched it and afterwards he turned to me and vowed, right then and there, that we would always get 35mm prints for these types of festivals in the future. He was no longer on the fence. The print looked THAT amazing. He was a believer again!

When judging these prints up against a digital copy (a comparison which I've done on the big screen), I think the difference is unmistakable. Film is most assuredly the superior format. It not only looks better, it actually FEELS better, too. It's a whole other experience. And by the way, for this festival we've managed to get stunning brand new prints of The Lady Vanishes, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Marnie.

If the restored Dial M for Murder makes a theatrical run, can we hope to see it at Cinema 21? Will it be digital or (I hope!) a restored film version?
We showed Dial M in 3D the summer before last on film. It was spectacular! Tom and I wanted to program it for this year's festival, but decided it was too soon. So I feel very confident we'll have it in next year's festival. However, I noticed that the Film Forum in New York played the new digital version in 3D over the summer and I wonder how it looked. If it's possible to make the 3D effect better digitally than in the celluloid version, I think we might give it a try. We have a new digital projector and when we showed Pina in 3D, it looked incredible. So... maybe? But, like you, I also hope for a restored film version.

Showtimes:

Friday November 2nd
4:30pm - Strangers on a Train
7pm - Vertigo
9:30pm - Rear Window

Saturday November 3rd
Noon - Notorious
2:10pm - Rebecca
4:45pm - The Lady Vanishes
7pm - North by Northwest
9:40pm - Psycho

Sunday November 4th
Noon - Marnie
2:30pm - The 39 Steps
4:30pm - Strangers on a Train
7pm - Notorious
9:10pm - Rebecca

Monday November 5th
4:30pm - Marnie
7pm - North by Northwest
9:40pm - Rear Window

Tuesday November 6th
4:30pm - Strangers on a Train
7pm - Rear Window
9:10pm - The 39 Steps

Wednesday November 7th
5pm - The Lady Vanishes
7pm - Vertigo
9:30pm - Psycho

Tippi Hedren, crazy cat lady extraordinaire

2012-10-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Tippi Hedren's autobiographical book The Cats of Shambala (1985) and, before I go on, I have to get this out of my system.

WOWIE!

First of all, Tippi (or, perhaps, co-author for hire and ghostwriter extraordinaire Theodore Taylor) knows how to tell a good story and keep those 288 pages flipping by. But the best part is that just about every fifth or sixth page contains a revelatory bonne bouche that upends everything we thought we knew about Hitchcock's last official blonde.

For instance, says page 31: "I was a good technician, I believed, but I had no pretensions about winning Oscars." BOOM! Really?! Interesting slant, considering that, out of the blue, Ms. Hedren has recently started buttonholing anyone with ears to drop pissy-vinegary sound bites about how the director quashed her chances for earning an Academy AwardTM.

Better late than never, right?

The Cats of Shambala focuses on a fascinating—and relatively unknown—period in Ms. Hedren's life: a decade in which she tried to make Roar!, a movie starring 132 lions, tigers, jaguars and other wild cats, herself, her husband and four teenage children, including her daughter, Melanie Griffith (yes, one and the same).

Before I go on, I should mention that I met Tippi a couple of years ago and found her to be a sharp, beautiful, charming and indefatigable woman who seems old only when you look at the calendar. (I mean this sincerely.)

And then there's her legendary courage.

During her Hitchcock years, she dodged live birds hurled at her and allegedly ducked sexual advances from the (she claims) possessive director himself. But none of that was anywhere near the bravery she would demonstrate—and come to expect from cast and crew—as producer and star of her own movie.

In 1969 or 1970, she and then-husband Noel Marshall began development of a movie that they would co-produce about the mayhem that ensues when humans try to live with lions and tigers. Taking note of the risks involved in such an undertaking, they made a series of extraordinary decisions.

Realizing that they could not hire professional actors who had no experience working with wild animals, and that movie stars were out of the question, they decided to learn how to handle wild cats themselves. So they cast themselves and their children in the film. And in order to bond appropriately with the animals, they brought some of the creatures to live in their own home.

Talk about crazy cat ladies.

Thus, on May 2, 1971, Neil, a nine-foot-long, 400-pound lion, took up residence with Hedren, Marshall, 13-year-old Melanie and Noel's three teenage sons, Jerry, John and Joel.

Recalls Hedren, Neil "found a favorite sleeping spot in Melanie's bed.... One night the second or third week I went down to find them both asleep, side by side, Neil's big mouth not two feet from her body.... It was a sight some mothers might not relish." (Page 40.)

Soon, a retinue of six big cats shared a roof with the family. These would spend time living among them until they were moved on to a larger compound, which also served as their movie studio. The cats would then be replaced by new "trainees." The book is unclear about who was assigned litterbox duty, but we do what became of the furniture:

"One afternoon I came back from the canyon to view the wreckage of a cat tornado.... I found the Texas trio [of wild cats] pulling our king-size mattress out of the sliding door to the patio. The cover had been ripped off and the foam mattress looked like Swiss cheese, holes in it as large as dinner plates. They had also had a tug of war with the bedroom drapes, which were ripped our of the traverse rods and were hanging at half mast."

Shooting was expected to last about six months. But floods, fires, budgetary crises, wild animal rampages and en masse resignation of production crews (for reasons that will soon become obvious) threw the schedule off and development actually stretched out to a full eleven years. Life-threatening animal-related injuries became routine. Read a few of Hedren's descriptions of these disasters—if you think your stomach can handle it.

During filming, while Hedren was lying across a log, Cherries, a 100-pound cat, started batting the actor's head with her paw:

"The next thing I knew, Cherries was running hard at me again, then she was on me, both paws on my shoulders, pinning me to the log. She took most of my head into her mouth, grasping the back of the skull. I could hear her teeth scraping bone and the sound was truly unforgettable. There was a resonance to it that I still find hard to describe. It was like being in an echo chamber as her teeth raked my skull.... The scalp bleeds profusely, I learned, and a gush of red spread over my face."

Cinematographer Jan de Bont (Die Hard, Basic Instinct) had his entire scalp removed in a cat attack. 120 stitches were required to replace it.

On another occasion, Noel nearly died when a severe cat bite became infected.

Yet another event:

"One afternoon [teenager] John [Marshall] was walking with Tongaru near the newly-completed African house, by the lake, when he tripped over a rock hidden in high grass and landed face down. Before he could even try to push up, Tongaru was on him, his big mouth closing over the back of John's head. The lion did not try to penetrate the skull; rather, he seemed content to just hold John's head in his mouth.... Though he'd been around lions and tigers for almost two years, John had never experienced being trapped under one. He was visibly shaken from his twenty-five-minute ordeal. He was treated for scalp wounds at the hospital in Saugus, but not much could be done for his mental state."

Jerry Marshall's leg was mangled by a lion that Hedren described chucklingly as having a "tennis shoe fetish."

Following an unexpected clash between two lions, Melanie Griffith quit production, saying, "Mother, I don't want to come out of this with half a face." She later reconsidered and joined the cast again—only to be clawed in the face.

Not only were the humans at risk, but so were the animals themselves. Violent territorial fights had to be broken up. The elephants fought.

Oh, did I mentioned that the menagerie included two elephants? In addition to the 132 lions, tigers, leopards, cougars and jaguars, there were three aoudad sheep, as well as ostriches, flamingoes, marabou storks, black swans and, of course, the elephants.

One of which broke Hedren's leg.

Which subsequently developed black gangrene.

Check out what happened to assistant director Doron Kaupler while on the set:

The lion Tongaru "sprang out, ramming him in the left side of the head, breaking three teeth. Doron went down with the cat on top of him, canines entering his throat less than an inch from his jugular vein. His left ear was almost severed as the teeth went down the side of his head and into his throat." (Page 233)

Their neighbors' safety was put at risk when the cats would periodically escape from their home and from the compound.

I'm just scratching the surface here. There were many more bumps, scrapes and near-death experiences. Hedren was once bitten on the breast by a needle-fanged lion cub while bottle-feeding it. She lost track of how many times Noel was bitten, having stopped counting after 11.

Toward the end of the ordeal, Hedren concluded that "we had gambled everything, risked our lives and those of loved ones as well as crew members, to make the picture." (Page 260.)

She also chalked up their determination to continue production as an "obsession." Finally, though, they were done. "Noel had had a vision and together we had accomplished it, no matter the cost, in both money and human terms."

Despite 11 years' grueling effort and cost overruns well into the millions, Roar! was a critical and financial flop. Summarizing the errors in judgment that led to its failure, Hedren admitted that "we could not see beyond our own hopes and egos." (Page 259.)

All right. Enough about Roar!. Let's return to Hedren's aforementioned recollections about shooting conditions for The Birds. By the end of that week shooting the attic scene with live birds hurled at her, Hedren was on the edge. As she told biographer Donald Spoto, "One bird that was tied to me jumped from my shoulder onto my face and landed near me eye, scratching my lower eyelid." She collapsed into hysterics. Later, physicians ordered a 10-day leave of absence to recuperate, but Hitchcock allegedly protested, saying, "We can't do without her! We need her on Monday for the last few shots. According to Hedren, the doctor said, "Are you crazy? Are you trying to kill her?"

Fans of Hitchcock are familiar with this story, and it is a central talking point in Hedren's narrative about how abusive she claims Hitchcock was.

Yet, her personal sacrifices for that film pale in comparison with the ordeal she inflicted on herself and others while making Roar!. And, though she suffered for Hitchcock's vision, she was immortalized by it as well. To this day, in tribute to her unforgettable role, she embellishes her autographs ($20 a pop, thank you very much) with little v-shaped birds.

So it seems rather disingenuous that Hedren would wrap her reputation around the trials Hitchcock put her through when, upon being granted similar power as a producer, she went on to put more people in danger, overseeing more trauma and injuries in the making of Roar! than Alfred Hitchcock did in his entire 50-year career.

Is Tippi Hedren so lacking in self-reflective capabilities the she has failed to recognize the hypocritical position her own words put her in?

According to her, Cary Grant dropped by the set at that time and said, "I think you're the bravest woman I've ever met."

Her commentary? "I don't know if that was the right adjective for it."

What adjective do we use to describe her choice to cohabit with wild animals, putting her life and that of her daughter, her stepchildren and dozens of other people in jeopardy—all for the sake of a movie? What additional adjectives come to mind about about a person who does all that and then vilifies Hitchcock, who did far less?

And what adjectives should we use in reference to Shambala, her wildlife preserve, whose website proclaims: "As a true sanctuary, we do not buy, breed, sell, trade, or subject our animals to commercial use." But that's exactly how it got its start: purchasing animals from other zoos and preserves and augmenting that population via on-site breeding, all for one commercial purpose: to make a movie.

(To be fair, some of the founding "members" of Shambala were indeed rescued from abusive situations—but many weren't, while others were bred by Hedren herself.)

How did that commercially-acquired menagerie morph into the 501(c)3 non-profit we now know?

By the time filming on Roar! was completed, Hedren and Marshall's marriage (along with their finances) was in tatters, and they sought a divorce. Unfortunately, they now owned well over 100 wild cats and after the commercial failure of Roar!, neither of the two owners had the resources to care for them properly. Hedren writes on page 267:

"Noel had previously volunteered to take care of [the cats], financially, as long as they lived. We had assembled them for a purpose, and though that purpose had been fulfilled we still had a responsibility for their lives. Noel loved them as much as I did, but committing himself to feed them and maintain Shambala was more than a decent thing to do. Among my plans was one to establish the Roar Foundation, a nonprofit organization to assist in the care of the animals and continue further in-depth study of the great cat in captivity."

Let's get this straight. Hedren and Marshall bought and bred a fuckton of wild animals so they could make a movie, which turned out to be an unmitigated personal and financial distaster. After the dust was settled, they realized they couldn't afford all these creatures, so Hedren devised a tax-sheltered business plan that allowed her to seek private donations to care for the mess she'd helped create.

Wowie.

The ironies abound. Alfred Hitchcock, the master of terror, was famous for maintaining an atmosphere of serene control on the set; his horror all appeared on the screen. Hedren, on the other hand, ran what might be the most terrorized set in Hollywood history in the making of a light comedy/adventure flick.

Yet, with a little script doctoring here and there, Tippi Hedren gets to be the hero of a story in which she originally played the fool. And that makes about as much sense as her assertion that she was a victim of Alfred Hitchcock's obsessiveness. On that note, drop by in a couple of days.

Tippi Hedren's big fat cat fetish

2012-10-06T16:42:00.002-07:00

Young Melanie Griffith (Tippi's daughter) enjoys a slumber party with Neil the Live-In Lion. Pillow fight!

I don't usually post pictures of cats on the Internet. However, I'm willing to make an exception for Hitchcock-Blonde-turned-Hitchcock-Hater Tippi Hedren, who runs a non-profit that provides sanctuary for lions and tigers. For over 40 years, she has lived among them, making her home right on the preserve. I think it's a good idea to post these pictures--and the story behind them. Why?

In a recent interview with Andrew Goldman in the New York Times, the topic turned to her intimate relationship with these carnivorous animals. Then things got a bit testy. To wit:

AG: There’s a photo of you and a teenage Melanie, whose head is six inches away from Neil, your first live-in lion.
TH: He was not a live-in lion. Sometimes I get so annoyed with you writers.
AG: The caption from your book reads, “Melanie and I with Neil, our first live-in lion.”
TH: O.K., I missed that one. O.K.

At 82, Hedren could be forgiven for forgetting. But this isn't merely a senior "Oopsie!" moment. Hedren tried to elide at least ten years of her life, about which she wrote an entire book.

The book Goldman is referring to, The Cats of Shambala, was written by Hedren herself, and proclaims on its dust jacket: "Over a hundred photos bring the big cats, and the humans who worked, lived, raised them from cubs and (sometimes) slept with them, vividly to life."

What's really going on here is self-serving revisionist history. I'll explain that in a moment, but first let's pause to enjoy the time she invited Life magazine photographers into her house to do a spread on their life with poor Neil, the Forgotten Live-In Lion:

The lions were first brought in to live in her home in 1971 as cubs, in preparation for Roar! a film that she co-produced with her then-husband Noel Marshall and in which both starred. Soon enough, however that number grew much higher. Inevitably, like Mrs. Bates, one of the big cats would go a little crazy sometimes. Hedren was attacked by a lioness who chewed off part of her scalp. Her stepson, John, was likewise scalped. Neil was mauled. Melanie was so badly scratched the wound required plastic surgery. The Hedren-Marshall clan became familiar with the local hospital staff the way other families get to know their local Baskin-Robbins. Luckily, no one was killed.

Since then, she has kept a more circumspect relationship with wild cats (ya think?), though from the book it is unclear whether or not she still allows them in the house. Still, she doesn't exactly dwell on that period in her life.

After all, it's hard to raise money for a non-profit when you're also known for making astoundingly irresponsible choices, like inviting lions into your kitchen to rummage around in the fridge or allowing them into your children's bedrooms to sleep with them.

For her relentless screeds against Alfred Hitchcock, some fans of the director have privately hinted that maybe she's going a little loopy in her old age. But the fact is, poor judgment reared its leonine head while she was in her prime, complicating the stories about her past that Tippi is fond of telling. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Elisabeth Karlin and Zak Zebrowski for bringing these pics to my attention.

The Art of Accusing Alfred Hitchcock

2012-09-28T11:50:00.002-07:00

By Elisabeth Karlin

Like the stabbing violins of Psycho, my inbox has been shrieking with Google Alerts regarding Alfred Hitchcock: "Evil!" "Deviant!" "He ruined my career!" "He was a horror!" I got used to these loaded charges from Hitchcock Blonde Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie) as her contribution to the PR campaign for the upcoming HBO biopic The Girl. Scheduled to premiere this October 20, this made-for-cable movie promises to dramatize the director's allegedly abusive behavior toward his leading lady--or, at least, Tippi's version of events. But then I came across the header that read, "News about the Hitchcock sexual harassment flick." I'm not sure why this comparatively low-key line annoyed me. Perhaps it was its one-sided matter-of-factness.

Accusations have become assumptions that now need to be addressed.

The Girl is based on Hedren's memories as they have been told to, or perhaps extracted by, author Donald Spoto, the creative consultant on the project. I cannot talk about the film itself until I see it later next month, but I can comment on the nature of its publicity, which I find disturbing. (To be clear, The Girl should not be confused with Hitchcock, the other biopic soon to come out with a higher wattage cast and more creditable source material, namely Stephen Rebello's very worthy book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.)

For the record, I am a woman. I know what it is like to be a frightened and defenseless female caught in the grip of a powerful man, because, for several years, I myself was in a violently abusive relationship. Once I got out of that situation, I volunteered as an emergency room advocate for domestic violence and rape victims. I have loads of fellow feeling for any woman who needs someone to hear her story.

I have heard Hedren's story and can imagine the anguish she might have felt. "[Hitchcock] was almost obsessed with me," she once claimed, "and it's very difficult to be the object of someone's obsession. I never talked about it for twenty years because I didn't want people to think about it in the wrong light. I felt such empathy for Hitch, to have such strong feelings and not have them returned is very difficult." How did this honest, reasonable and rather touching assessment of their troubled partnership mutate into her recent characterization of Hitchcock as "evil and deviant to the point of dangerous?"

Apparently, for the sake of publicity, she is ready to turn on that wrong light and journalists are basking in the glow. I've read, based on her interviews, how "everybody knows that Hitchcock was mentally abusive to those who refused his advances..." Huh? And now the rather gruesome trailer for the film is circulating, accompanied by copy calling Hitchcock "creepy and pervy." Of course, more charitable writers will allow that he was a "creepy and pervy genius."

Was Alfred Hitchcock a pervy creep? Lifelong friends like Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman and Teresa Wright might argue that point, but they're dead, along with most of Hitchcock's (predominantly female) friends and associates. In the 1970s there was a round table interview of Hitchcock leading ladies. It's a jolly gabfest with Suzanne Pleshette, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint, Karen Black and yes, Tippi too. And while Hedren does come off as the least bubbly and most self-conscious of the bunch, she says nothing to indicate that she doesn't share in the group's affection for Hitch. Interestingly, asked by the moderator about having called Hitchcock "fat" to his face, Hedren responds: "I may have done that. I don't remember. That could have happened. I honestly don't remember that."

Well, it did happen. There was a set full of witnesses on the day when Hitchcock refused to interrupt the filming of Marnie so that Hedren could go to New York and pick up Photoplay's "Star of Tomorrow" award. She in fact called him a "fat pig" and that showdown resulted in their official falling-out.

The Hitchcock-Hedren drama began in 1961 when plans to make Marnie as a returning vehicle for Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco, fell victim to the complexities of diplomatic relations and the financial entanglements of Monaco. Hitchcock had to face the hard fact that Grace Kelly was gone for good and he shelved the project.

It was then that his gaze fell upon a blonde model in a television commercial. He liked her lady-like style and the way she tossed her head. He signed her to a seven year contract before they even met. He cast her as the lead in The Birds and just as Scottie Ferguson strove to turn Judy Barton into Madeleine Elster, Hitch was set on making Tippi Hedren into Grace Kelly. And as if to prove it could be done, he cast her as Marnie. That much we know.

Now to digress for a moment. When I was a kid my father launched a one-man publishing company that nevertheless had two names: Hopkinson and Blake. (It was named after the Brooklyn street corner where he hawked newspapers as a lad.) It occupied a small and unprofitable niche, publishing scholarly books about film. One evening he tossed a rejected manuscript on Hitchcock my way. Knowing my interest in the subject, he thought I might like to read it. And oh boy, did I read it. My mother, noting my intent rapture, picked up the chapters as I finished them and the two of us were up all night babbling about birds and bathrooms and eyeglasses and teacups and the way they linked every film. We considered the influence of Dostoevsky and Henry James on the director and how movies that we had looked upon as light thrillers were actually dark and complex meditations on a chaotic universe. It was the best time I ever had with my mother.

And that is how Donald Spoto's first book, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, got published. I'm sure my mother's opinion carried more weight than my own but my father liked people to believe that it was published with the imprimatur of his teenage daughter. I remember so well the making of the book: examining mock-ups of the cover, watching my dad edit drafts and how he rewrote Princess Grace's preface to make it readable. I was put to work as a proofreader and once the book was out, you could read my indignant rebuttals to any criticism of it in the Letters sections of Film Comment, American Film and other magazines. It didn't make much money ("Don't worry, I don't blame you," my father told me) and he was forced to sell the rights to Doubleday.

Although Spoto's high regard for Hedren is evident in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, it was in his following unauthorized biography, The Dark Side of Genius (Spoto had moved on to the statelier publishing house of Little, Brown), where his obsession with her really took hold. Written after Hitchcock's death, Dark Side disturbed many as a seamy and speculative intrusion into the director's personal life and private thoughts. It was certainly jarring to me that the man who wrote what many of us considered the definitive and seminal analysis of the Hitchcock oeuvre would be so hell-bent on depicting the great artist as a pathological misogynist. It left me severely disillusioned--not with Hitchcock, but with Spoto.

The book on the life of Hitchcock made Spoto famous in a way that his book on the art of Hitchcock could not, and he went on to serve as one of the publishing industry's go-to writers of celebrity biographies. In 2008, he returned to Hitchcock for the third time with Spellbound by Beauty, spilling more wild suggestions about the director's impulses toward his leading ladies, especially Hedren. In The Dark Side of Genius, he had written somewhat sympathetically (albeit with mysterious access to the inner workings of Hitchcock's mind and heart): "Had he actually touched the closest incarnation of his dream, the moment of physical contact might have been intolerable for him." In Spellbound by Beauty, Hitchcock's infatuaton is treated with less romantic gauze. Either way, how far Hitchcock actually went in his pursuit remains hazy. But now with The Girl, the Spoto-Hedren confederacy makes one last march to demolish the Hitchcock legacy for good.

"He ruined my career but he didn't ruin my life," has been a refrain wafting through Tippi Hedren's publicity soundbites (and to her credit, she has impressively put her life to good use with her Shambala Preserve for Big Cats.) (Full disclosure: Spoto serves on the Shambala Preserve's Board of Advisors.) To that, Hitch defenders have retorted, "Ruined her career? He gave her a career." But it is true that after their estrangement he kept her locked in her contract, drawing a salary but unable to work for those years. Still, I don't think other directors ever shared Hitchcock's entrancement. She insists that Francois Truffaut wanted her. If he did, my guess is that it was in homage to Hitch. And with Jeanne Moreau on hand and Julie Christie and Catherine Deneuve waiting in the wings, I doubt the French director was much vexed by her unavailability.

Hedren has claimed that Hitchcock blocked her Oscar nomination for Marnie. This is doubtful. for one thing, Hitchcock had no power over the Oscar nominating process where actors nominate actors. Unless he went knocking on the doors of Beverly Hills threatening to bust kneecaps at votes for Tippi, I can't imagine what kind of influence he could have wielded there. The nominations for Best Actress in 1964 were Julie Andrews (at the height of her popularity), Anne Bancroft (one of the most respected actresses in town), Sophia Loren (a legend), Debbie Reynolds (a triple-threat talent), and Kim Stanley (considered the best American actress, ever.) I'm curious as to which of these nominees took Tippi's spot.

We all hold our own opinions of Tippi Hedren as an actress--and they tend to vary widely. But as for Hitchcock ruining her career, I will concede that he obstructed it for a time, but as anyone who has seen Hedren in Charlie Chaplin's The Countess from Hong Kong can attest, she is blaming the death of her acting career on the wrong genius.

None of us knows exactly what transpired between the director and his protégée. In this sad story of an impossible meeting between love object and love subject, I can buy that Hitchcock probably behaved badly and yet I still question why Donald Spoto, the man who ignited my passion for Hitchcock, has been so determined to build some cautionary narrative out of the imperfect and inexplicable strands of human nature. He should know better.

As for the "Alfred Hitchcock sexual harassment flick," well, I have an innate suspicion of any "docudrama" told from the perspective of one of its subjects. Memory shifts with time and almost always in the most self-serving way. Autobiography is the least trustworthy of genres.

From the look of it, it appears that what might have been a story of depth and complexity has been reduced to a crude Victorian melodrama of an oily villain and a guileless damsel in distress--and this sullies and diminishes the very art of storytelling. We do not live in a world of victims and villains. Hitchcock knew that we are made of much more fascinating stuff. He showed us that in every regular Guy there lurks a disturbed Bruno. In every warped Uncle Charlie there is at least a vestige of a wholesome young Charlie.

And so, the man who was afraid of the police has been accused of terrible crimes against women and there is no way he can defend himself from the charges. I do not believe that Alfred Hitchcock was a woman-hater. His truth is in his work. That's all we can know and that's all we have a right to judge him on.

Elisabeth Karlin is a playwright living in New York City. Her award winning, Hitchcock-inspired play, BODEGA BAY, will have its world premiere at the Abingdon Theatre in New York, opening January 25, 2013.

To Catch a Quiche

2012-08-07T22:41:00.001-07:00

Yep, here's the recipe for one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite dishes, featured in To Catch a Thief (1955).

Which all goes to clarify: contrary to certain myths, Hitchcock loved eggs, with the exception of those that have been fried, coddled, boiled, poached or left raw.

Hitchcock's Vertigo takes top spot in Sight and Sound list

2012-08-02T19:17:00.004-07:00

As you might have heard by now, a tectonic shift has occurred within the hallowed halls of the venerable film magazine Sight & Sound. Vertigo has replaced Orson Welles’ cinematic PhD dissertation, Citizen Kane, for the Number One slot on the monthly’s list of 50 Greatest Films of All Time.

Finally, they’re seeing things my way.

And for the last day or two the Internet has erupted with either rejoicing or indignation—depending on your loyalties to either Hitchcock or Welles. “Greatest 50” lists of any kind are more arbitrary and capricious than a Philistine god. In fact, the very notion that works of art can be herded into a police line-up and organized from greatest on down is not supported by any aesthetic or critical theory that I know of outside Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Art is art and it simply defies competitive ranking. But you already knew that, so let’s get on with why I think this is important—especially for Hitchcock fans.

When Vertigo was released in 1958, press and public alike didn’t know what to make of it and their ho hum response hurt Hitch personally. Ultimately, it may have contributed to his inability to gather support for another pet project that touched on the supernatural: Mary Rose. He knew he had a major work of art on his hands, but timing—and mishandling on the marketing distribution end—worked against him. A couple of years after Vertigo’s ill-fated run, Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano confessed to the director that the film was, in his opinion, Hitch’s greatest film. As recounted in Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Stefano’s praise actually brought the director “to near-tears.” Still, by 1962, Hitch was so shaken up by this film in which he had invested enormous artistic juice that he could hardly bring himself to talk about it in his interviews with Francois Truffaut. In 1973, he pulled the film from circulation altogether.

Meanwhile, old prints and bootleg copies circulated among film students among whom it became a cult favorite. The tide began to turn. And in 1983, the film was re-released to a new generation, who saw it for the masterpiece it was. (That single occasion transformed me into a full-on Hitchcock Geek.)

As the years passed, critical reception improved. You can literally chart Vertigo’s ascension to critical esteem by looking at its rise in ranking on various lists, such as the Sight & Sound list above. It first appeared on the list in 1982, on the number seven spot. It moved up to fourth place in 1992, second place in 2002 and finally took first Place in 2012. A similar trajectory can be observed in the American Film Institute’s 100 Years… 100 Movies list and various others.

But the Sight & Sound list, which compiles the votes of over 800 critics, is by far the most respected. And so, when Citizen Kane, which held the top spot since 1962, was moved down a notch, well, you can see why some people think it's kind of a big deal.

For the last few years, Vertigo and Citizen Kane have jostled for First Place on a variety of lists. And for good reason. Both films are deeply personal works by two genius directors working at the top of their game. And both feature main characters who, caught up in their obsessions, behave badly. Charles Foster Kane is played by Orson Welles, while Scottie Fergusen (James Stewart) is a clear stand-in for the obsessive Hitchcock.

While both films are masterpieces, I have to say that Vertigo has an edge over Welles’ film.

Kane’s pre-eminence is due in no small part to Gregg Toland’s expressionistic cinematography, supported by Bernard Herrmann’s score—along with a cast of first-rate actors. Still, the story itself adds little to the body of filmic literature. (In fact, the story is told mostly through the eyes of a newspaper reporter.) For me, once I figured out the game that Welles was up to, I found that there’s not much more that it has to say.

Welles’ background was in live theater and radio. He only brought a handful of film projects to completion, and while each one is brilliant and amazing, but I always got the feeling that he was throwing the kitchen sink at his audience in terms of production and technique crazy creative ideas. What you see with Welles is all he ever had to offer.

Hitchcock was different. With a background exclusively in film, his Vertigo is the summation of several decades’ deep experience and meditation on film. The result is a project that is profoundly sublime and complex. I get the feeling that Hitch had much more to say, but that he had the restraint to leave it for another time, another movie.

I've always experienced Citizen Kane as a prime example of classic Hollywood. Its achingly poignant story of a man whose egomaniacal obsession with grand achievements leads to his downfall anticipated Welles' own decline. But that's about as far as the story goes, while Vertigo digs much deeper. While Vertigo also echoes Hitch's own obsessions as a director, it is also metaphor for the Hollywood studio system and it even can be read as a philosophical treatise on the meaning of film itself. As such, Vertigo is universal in scope, while Citizen Kane remains a brilliant, extremely influential artifact rooted in the classic movie era of the 20th century. For that reason, I believe that while both films will be not be forgotten for a long, long time, Vertigo will continue to draw audiences, while Citizen Kane will eventually be preferred by primarily a relatively small but passionate group of academics. Thus:

Vertigo : Citizen Kane :: Macbeth : The Jew of Malta

Plus, while Citizen Kane is all shadows and corners and angles, with an ugly man at its center, Vertigo is flat-out more beautiful, a Technicolor portrait of one of America’s great cities, with the exquisitely beautiful Kim Novak dangled before our eyes. I mean, seriously, what you rather spend an evening hanging out with: Madeleine’s mesmerizing legs or Charles Kane’s preposterous jowls?

With all the bluster of its eponymous gubernatorial candidate, Citizen Kane proclaims itself to be a Great Work of Hollywood Art from its first frames. Vertigo, on the other hand, simply spins a good, albeit twisted, yarn. Along the way, Hitchcock made history, using filmcraft at its best to tell that story and draw the audience in. And that helps explain its rise in stature.

As Sight & Sound's editor, Nick James said in a CNN interview, among critics there has been a trend away from "films that strive to be great art, such as Citizen Kane, and that use cinema's entire arsenal of effects to make a grand statement" toward those with "personal meaning to the critic" as in Vertigo.

Reflecting on his unique set of first-world problems, Hitch was fond of complaining, "My movies go from failures to masterpieces without ever being successes," and, "Even my failures make money and become classics a year after I make them." The same could be said of his entire body of work. In Hitch's day, his films were generally regarded as mere thriller entertainment (French critics aside). Since then, his oeuvre has been assessed and reassessed by new generations of audiences--and each time his stature rises. Vertigo's recent placement at the top of the Sight & Sound list is the latest affirmation that Alfred Hitchcock is indeed the Shakespeare of the 20th century.

But maybe you feel differently. Drop me a line in the comments section and tell me what you think. Which of the two movies do you think ought to occupy first place?

Wait Until Dark: Audrey Hepburn's Non-Hitchcock Hitchcock Film

2012-07-19T01:55:00.000-07:00

Even the film's ad campaign tried to recreate Hitchcock's
famous campaign from Psycho. Click to enlarge—if you dare.

Wait Until Dark (1967) is the best Hitchcock movie that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t direct. With a cast led by a cool brunette—Suzy Hendrix, played by Audrey Hepburn, who’d been tapped by Hitch to play just that type eight years earlier for his ill-fated No Bail for the Judge—the film is often mistakenly attributed to Hitch. Projecting his own pompousness on the director, critic Rex Reed huffed and puffed that “If Hitchcock could only laugh at himself, this is the movie he’d make.” It’s easy to see why.

Opening on an extreme close-up of a china doll’s silk jacket, slit open and stuffed with heroin (and possibly other, more dangerous contraband), the film leads with a distinctly North by Northwest-like MacGuffin. The toy also invokes the doll-like heroine of the film (was that a deliberate pun by the writers?), its black, blank eyes the perfect corollary to Suzy’s sightlessness and its stuffed innards neatly paralleling her unwitting role as the eventual possessor of this hot item.

Freudians, start your engines.

Immersing herself in the role, Audrey Hepburn attended the Lighthouse School for the Blind and even learned to read Braille. But it was the director who insisted that she conceal her famous brown peepers behind impassive grey contact lenses.

The plot is simple: Suzy, recently blinded in a car accident, is left home alone while her husband, Sam (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) is lured away by a hoax perpetrated by a thug who's traced the contraband-laden doll to their apartment. The bad guys then take turns playing head games with her to induce her to find the doll and give it to them.

As was Hitch’s approach at times, most of the action takes place on a single set—in this case, a Greenwich Village apartment, just down the street from Brandon and Phillip’s penthouse in Rope and L. B. Jefferies’ bachelor pad in Rear Window, the latter of which shares a passing resemblance to the interior in this film.

There’s the nearly wordless five-minute expository sequence at the beginning of the film that sets the plot in motion—a technique that reaches as far back as Hitch’s silent films The Lodger and Blackmail, but which, for my money, anticipates the opening sequence of his final film, Family Plot.

Hitch hardly invented the film staple of the beautiful woman in danger. But it’s safe to say that he explored its psychological possibilities more deeply than anyone. In Wait Until Dark, Suzy, learning to adjust to her disability, becomes increasingly isolated as danger closes in on her. Her blindness is a metaphor for seeing, in all its shades of meaning, that Hitch himself explored in such films as Young and Innocent, Psycho and The Birds.

Mr. Roat's cadaverous posture and cavernous spectacles remind me of Dan Fawcett's final disposition in The Birds.

Even the stylized, expressionistic lighting reminds me of Hitchcock—or at least the Germans’ influence on his work; at one point the apartment seems to be lit by a single refrigerator bulb, to chilling effect. (Rim shot!) As such, it's an interesting counterpoint to the Wendices’ apartment in Dial M for Murder, which at times is lit only by the dying embers in the fireplace.

Hitchcockian? Indubitably. On the other hand, almost everything I’ve described up to this point can also be attributed to Frederick Knott, who wrote both the play upon which this film was based and Dial M for Murder (the original Broadway play and Hitch’s 1954 screen adaptation). As such, Wait Until Dark makes for an interesting study on the recently contested topic of Hitch’s authorship. To a degree, this movie feels like a Hitchcock film. And though there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that there were overt attempts to imitate him, Knott’s attachment to the project gives us insight into what sorts of organic contributions he made as well. The way I see it, Knott, along with director Terence Young (Dr. No and also check out what I have to say about his other Bond film, From Russia with Love) learned a lot from Hitch, and were quite happy to borrow some of his techniques—to Hitch’s occasional consternation. Hitch, on the other hand, had good taste in writers and was equally happy to exploit their talents and, at times, perhaps take credit for them.

Many of the elements that we love about Dial M surface in this film. Take, for example, the villain Mr. Roat’s brilliance and attention to detail. Like the earlier film’s Tony Wendice, Roat (Alan Arkin) thinks everything through, obsessively wiping his fingerprints from the apartment and making sure to ash his cigarettes in a jar that he carries with him. Supremely in charge and self-possessed, he knew his co-conspirators would try to kill him, even before they knew. Like Wendice, Roat uses both the carrot of cash incentives and the stick of blackmail to compel the two con artists, “Sgt.” Carlino and Mike Tallman (Jack Weston and Richard Crenna), to work for him.

As mentioned, the theme of blindness—literal and metaphoric—is explored here as in Hitch’s films. Declares Suzy, “I’m going to be the world’s champion blind person.” That statement presages, perhaps even invites, in a sense, a series of harrowing events from which she does indeed emerge victorious. Ironically, Suzy is married to an L. B. Jefferies-like photographer with a military background; in this case, he’s a Korean War vet. Though sighted, he fails to see the danger she’s in until it’s almost too late. Meanwhile, the sociopathic killer, Roat, hides behind thick, black blind-man’s spectacles through which he sees all too much. The symbolism is there, though not explored as fully, nor with as much subtlety, as Hitch would have demonstrated, and this is where the imitators show their hands. In copying the Master’s painterly style, theirs is a bit too paint-by-numbers.

Hitch’s sets have a numinous quality, in which ordinary objects acquire unusually great significance. On a Hitchcock set, each framing and re-framing takes on added dimension as the background illuminates or counterposes the action and dialogue in the foreground. A close examination of his single-set films shows that he divided these confined spaces into specific architectural regions. For instance, in Dial M, the living room is a homey place, where very human interactions take place, while the study, with its heavy curtains, is consistently played for theatricality: this is where the Lesgate’s murder occurs. But in Wait Until Dark, those sorts of opportunities are generally missed.

Likewise, the plot is full of implausibles that even Hitch would have found too glaring. (Why does Suzy leave one of the lights on in her apartment? Why doesn't she send Gloria to get the police?) And the basic Gaslight-esque premise is too fantastic to be taken seriously. You have to suspend your disbelief and accept the movie on its own terms, as a good yarn.

That’s not to dismiss the film. I think it’s wonderful. You’d be hard pressed to find a better—and more terrifying—climax in a movie outside of Hitchcock’s films. (See a charming stop-action recreation of the scene here.) Contrary to Roger Ebert’s dismissal of Alan Arkin’s Roak as “not particularly convincing in an exaggerated performance,” I love this bad guy. Roat heebs me out more than almost any other screen villain I can think of. He is driven by forces we are not allowed to fully wrap our hands around. Part of the reason I think the doll contains more than mere illicit drugs is Suzy’s observation, “It’s different about Mr. Roat, isn’t it? It’s that he wants to do evil things.” Later, as Roat disembowels the doll, he tosses the heroin packets aside and stashes some of its other contents in his pocket. What are they? Diamonds? Anthrax? Roofies? Reportedly, George C. Scott and Rod Steiger both turned the role down because the character was too despicable for their taste. Apparently, the idea of terrorizing Audrey Hepburn was too much—though she herself welcomed the challenge. Their loss. Our gain.

In a tip of the hat to feminist film critics, Wait Until Dark corrects what some may see as a flaw in Dial M for Murder. In the earlier film, although Margot (Grace Kelly) stands up to her attacker and kills him with a pair of scissors, she is afterward powerless as murder accusations begin flying her way. She is completely at the mercy of her adversaries and owing only to the inspector’s persistence is she rescued from the gallows. Suzy, on the other hand, marshals her meager resources to boldly and cunningly defeat her attacker. In his book Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals, John Lyden sees both films as "an expression of 'female rage' against male aggression, as the woman refuses to be made a victim and is able to fight back effectively in the end."

Maybe that’s why, years earlier, brunette Givenchy model Audrey Hepburn had wanted to make a movie with Hitchcock. For his part, by that time, Hitchcock’s palette extended far beyond the cool blondes his Hollywood myth suggests. Thus, in 1959, Hitch developed a detailed treatment of Henry Cecil’s No Bail for the Judge and offered the lead role to Hepburn, who read it and eagerly accepted. Publicly, Hitch kept his cards closer to his chest, while still revealing where his intentions lay. Regarding the film and, obliquely, Hepburn, he said, “I’m quite prepared to try a cool brunette if I ever come across one.”

The 1959 movie was not to be. According to Diana Maychick’s Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait, the very day after she requested contracts to formally sign on to the project, Hepburn, who had been in the third trimester of her pregnancy, miscarried her baby. This devastating loss plunged her into a depression and she backed out of the arrangements, consigning the film to the What Could Have Been category of the actor’s, the director’s and their fans’ lives.

Though Hitch never forgave her, it seems that Hepburn, who constantly sought to move beyond the confectionary roles of her youth, tried for the rest of her career to take on the heft of a Hitchcock movie—even if it didn’t involve Hitch himself. In 1963, she made Charade with Cary Grant—another Hitchcock movie not directed by Hitchcock—and in 1967 she threw herself into the role of Suzy Hendrix, in a final attempt to star in a Hitchcock picture. But not quite.

Worldwide Web Premier: Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s The Ring Live this Friday

2012-07-10T23:55:00.001-07:00

This is not a production still. It's an actual frame from the movie. Yeah, the quality is that sharp.

Read on and keep this hashtag in mind: #thering

This, my friends, is what the Web, at its best, is all about. The world premier of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 masterpiece, The Ring, will take place, not just in a single theater inaccessible to 90% of the world’s Hitchcock fans, but online, available to the world. Here are the details:

Date: Friday, July 13th
Time: 20:00 GMT (12:00 Noon, US/Pacific)*
Where: http://thespace.org/items/e0000ecg
Cost: FREE
Twitter Hashtag: #thering

*Find out what time it starts in your time zone by doing the math here.

The premier follows the BFI National Archive’s meticulous frame-by-frame restoration of the film, with a newly-minted soundtrack composed and performed by award-winning jazz musician Soweto Kinch. So forget those cruddy old soundtrack loops you’ve gotten used to with silent films. Kinch’s music alone will be almost worth the price of admission.

But even more importantly, I watched a preview of the film and visuals are truly stunning. You'll think the film had been shot last week. The quality's that good. Watching the restored The Ring is the closest you'll ever get to seeing what Hitchcock himself saw at the premier.

The Ring will be shown simultaneously at London’s Hackney Empire, so it’ll be almost like joining a live theater audience, but with one major improvement: unlike the theater-goers, you can follow along in a worldwide Twitter feed—just use the hashtag #thering. I’ll be there and I hope you can join us! To get prepped for the film, take a look at this brief-but-informative documentary about Hitch, London and the British film industry of the 1920s.

As was the case throughout his career, in this early production, Hitch assembled a repertory cast that he would use off and on in multiple films. The movie's story itself goes a little something like this: The Ring is a story of the love-triangle between boxer Bob Corby (played by Ian Hunter, who also starred in Easy Virtue the following year), his sparring partner Jack Sander (Carl Brisson, featured the following year in The Manxman) and Jack’s beautiful wife Mabel (aka the housekeeper 1928's The Farmer's Wife). Even the setting was to become an early Hitchcock standby, with the climactic championship fight set in Albert Hall, a locale he would return to in both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

See you there!

Up in Alfred Hitchcock's Tree of Life

2012-03-20T22:03:00.002-07:00

By Elisabeth Karlin

"Somewhere in here I was born...and here I died. It was only a moment for you...you took no notice."

Belying the words of Vertigo's Madeleine Elster, this past year we did take notice. During that time, we on the Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook Fan Page acknowledged the birthday of just about every actor, designer, writer, cinematographer and more, who made a contribution to The Master's movies.

On the surface, the year of birthdays proved to be something of a popularity contest. Those redoubtable behind the screen contributors like Bernard Herrmann, Edith Head and John Michael Hayes certainly received loving appreciation from the fans but if we are to gauge idolatry by the Facebook comments and approving thumbs, it's the movie stars who rule. And sitting supremely and unassailably on the loftiest perch, are the Fab Four: Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman.

Comfortably resting on branches beneath that mighty quartet are scads of other beloved screen stars. Kim Novak, Doris Day, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh, Thelma Ritter, Claude Rains, Teresa Wright, Suzanne Pleshette, Alastair Sim, Barbara Bel Geddes and Miss Torso herself, Georgine Darcy, all garnered over one hundred "Likes" each. Included in that bunch is Eva Marie Saint whose daughter's friend let us know that Ms. Saint was absolutely tickled when shown our birthday post tribute and comments. Oh, and on August 13th the man himself amassed seven hundred and three thumbs, making Alfred Hitchcock, appropriately, the most popular figure on The Alfred Hitchcock Geek Fan Page.

There is a lot to be learned about Hitchcock when we stop to look at the people who worked with him. We know that he surrounded himself with immense talent. And his great love for the theatre is evident in how he employed the majestic figures he had seen on the London and New York stages, such as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Gladys Cooper, Judith Anderson, Cedric Hardwicke, Tallulah Bankhead and Canada Lee.

At the other end of the spectrum, were "those guys," the familiar faces who had names like Malcolm Atterbury (the man who notices the crop duster dusting where there are no crops in North by Northwest) and Minerva Urecal (the telegraph operator in Shadow of a Doubt.) We even paid tribute to Bess Flowers, the queen of the Hollywood extras, who technically appeared in more Hitchcock films than anyone, even if you never noticed her. Look sharp and you can catch her in Rear Window as the composer's party guest with the poodle.

We know that when Hitchcock cottoned to a colleague he held fast to him. Cinematographer Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini and set designer Robert Boyle are just some of the names that show up repeatedly in the Hitch oeuvre. But it wasn't until we took our daily birthday stock of all the players that we saw returns we weren't even aware of, such as Leonard Carey who played balmy Ben in Rebecca and who cleaned up nicely as proper butlers in Suspicion and Strangers on a Train. Or Mort Mills, the unsettling highway cop in Psycho who was far less menacing as a farmer on a tractor in Torn Curtain.

Someone is born and a story begins. And when we investigated a little deeper into the lives of those who worked with Hitchcock, we found the stories could be surprising. After all, if there is one thing we know from Hitchcock it's that people are not always what they seem to be.

Cheerful Robert Young (Robert Marvin in Secret Agent) suffered from alcoholism and depression. 1960's pretty boy Jeremy Slate (a blink and you miss him Grand Central Station cop in North by Northwest who also appeared in four Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV) distinguished himself in a wild variety of accomplishments from the shores of Normandy to the football field to the business world to winning a Peruvian Tony Award, all before arriving in Hollywood. John Loder (Ted, the secret agent and green grocer in Sabotage) was taken prisoner in WWII and upon release chose to stay in Germany and run a pickle factory. Prim Laraine Day (Carol Fisher in Foreign Correspondent) a devout Mormon who never swore or drank, was married to Leo "the lip" Durocher, the brashest manager in baseball. Reginald Denny (loyal Frank Crawley in Rebecca) made good on his passion for aviation as a pioneer in drone technology. Wallace Ford (Fred Saunders in Shadow of a Doubt and the hotel lobby masher in Spellbound) survived a hardscrabble youth that would have shocked Dickens. Laura Elliot (Miriam in Strangers on a Train) blazed trails when, as Kasey Rogers, she created the Women's Pro-Class Division in motorcycle racing.

And then there was Clarence Muse. Perhaps you recall him as the helpful Pullman porter who tended to Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. Muse appeared in more films than any other African-American in history. But that's hardly the most notable aspect of his career. While he was playing porters and chauffeurs and waiters, he was also turning in startling performances of full-bodied characters in films created for black audiences. Many of these films he wrote himself. He was the first African-American to star in a Hollywood film and the first to receive a screenwriting credit. As a writer, he collaborated with Langston Hughes. As a producer, he founded the formidable Lafayette Players in Harlem. He held a law degree from Dickinson College and he composed the Louis Armstrong hit "Sleepy Time Down South." Clarence Muse is probably the apotheosis of what can be discovered when we look past what we first see. And if we have learned anything from Hitchcock, isn't it that?

A day of birth begins a story but as we who are stuck on movies know, every story has an end. And in Hitchcockland it is the finale of life that holds us in thrall. Many of the lives we celebrated ended prematurely and some rather gruesomely. Per-Axel Arosenius (Boris Kusenov in Topaz) set himself on fire in protest of Swedish tax laws. Lillian Hall-Davies, the leading lady of The Ring and The Farmer's Wife, locked herself in her kitchen, turned on the gas, stuck her head in the oven and leaving nothing to chance, cut her own throat.

But the most macabre date in Hitchcockiana falls on September 12. It was on that date in 1992 that Anthony Perkins died. On that date in 1993, Raymond Burr died. On that date in 1995, Tom Helmore died. So, on the same date in almost consecutive years, Norman Bates, Lars Thorwald and Gavin Elster, three of the most memorable of Hitchcock's murderers, left this world.
Somewhere in this tree they were born...and there they died. And we took notice.

Hitchcock in Outer Space

2012-02-02T14:59:00.000-08:00

He may not have won an Oscar for any of his 53 films, but we always knew Alfred Hitchcock was more than a star. Finally, thanks to some intrepid sky-gazing from the astronomers at Chile's La Silla observatory, Hitch's famous profile can clearly be seen in the star-forming region NGC 3324. The portrait above is actually the work of several young stars whose radiation has carved out an enormous cavity in the surrounding gases.

Well, that settles that. If you're wondering where the Master of Suspense went after he died, we now know.

Thanks to Twitter friend Onur Orhon (@onurorhon) for spotting the Universe Today article for us!

Why Alfred Hitchcock Turned Down a British Honor in 1962

2012-01-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

Hitch waits for some love from the palace.

When Alfred Hitchcock was designated a Knight of the British Realm toward the end of 1979, henceforth his formal title was Sir Alfred Hitchcock, KBE. His life was quickly winding down, but between bouts of depression and heavy drinking, the old jokester flashed forth. Parlaying the honor into a brief PR stunt for his never-to-be-completed film The Short Night, he rechristened himself The Short Knight. His longtime friend, Universal Studios heavy Lew Wasserman, quickly threw together a celebratory luncheon attended by old friends Cary Grant, Janet Leigh and others. British consul general Thomas W. Aston bestowed the medal.

When a reporter asked him why it had taken the queen so long to bestow the honor, Hitchcock dryly replied, "I guess she forgot." Sadly, he was to enjoy the title for only another four months, whereupon he passed away.

That may be the end of the story. But it isn't the beginning.

As reported in the London Daily Mail today, the Queen first awarded Hitchcock in 1962, but he turned the honor down. As disclosed in a recent release of information from the royal archives, the director declined "because, in his view, it did not do justice to his contribution to British culture."

Wow. That's ballsy. If I were to be invited into the Order of the British realm, I'd accept the offer without a second thought. Turns out, hundreds of artists, scientists and others have snubbed the queen -- usually for political reasons, or out of protest. But Hitch was different. In effect, he said, "Your highness, is this it?" That got me thinking. And Googling. Turns out that in 1962, Queen Elizabeth II offered Hitch the title "Commander of the British Empire." That title, while impressive, is of a lower rank than KBE. Most importantly, perhaps, it doesn't come with the honorific prefix "Sir."

Thus, after fronting 48 movies and a hit TV show that rank among Great Britain's most important cultural exports, Hitch was still to be addressed as "Mister." That didn't sit too well with him. So he declined. I might not have been able to do what he did. But I can understand why the man who never won an Academy Award and who thus accepted the Irving Thalberg Lifetime Achievement Oscar with a two-word acceptance speech ("Thank you") marked his CBE medal "return to sender." He was holding out for something better.

Too bad there isn't a British rank titled "Maestro."

2012 Shaping up to be Major Year for Hitchcock Fans

2012-01-20T10:48:00.000-08:00

Over the next year or so, there will be so many Alfred Hitchcock-related events, it will be hard even for die-hard fans to keep up.

For starters, researchers and scientists at the British Film Institute are working feverishly to restore Hitch's nine surviving silent films, including The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Lodger (1926), The Ring (1927), Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmers Wife (1927), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929) and Blackmail (1929). These frame-by-frame restorations will be released with brand new, custom-made musical scores. (If you're a fan of silent movies, you know how annoying those "canned" musical scores can be.) The release will timed to coincide with the 2012 Olympics in London.

Also, after several years of languishing in development, it looks as if Steven Rebello's fantastic book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho has finally been green-lighted for a trip to the big screen. Anthony Hopkins has been signed to play Hitch, while Helen Mirren will play his wife, Alma. The biopic will cover the travails (and there were many) Hitch endured to bring one of cinema's most outstanding -- and profitable -- films to life.

Several Hitchcock films are also slated to be brought to Blu-Ray in 2012, most notably Dial M for Murder (1954) in 3-D! If you have a Blu-ray player and a newer TV that can handle 3-D, you'll finally be able to see this amazing film the way Hitch originally intended.

Another biopic about Hitch, called The Girl, is in production. This BBC production will star Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren and Toby Jones as the director. With story consulting from Ms. Hedren and Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, the film promises to be the Hedren-authorized chronicle of this difficult chapter in her life.

I've got a book ready for press as well. Titled Notes from an Alfred Hitchcock Geek, it culls some of the best posts from this blog and adds in totally new content to demonstrate once and for all that Alfred Hitchcock is indeed the Shakespeare of the 20th century. I'm looking for a publisher and 2012 would be the perfect year to bring this fascinating study of Hitch's films to the public! If you can help, or of you'd like to review my proposal, please contact me at joel.gunz (at) gmail.com.

Dial M for Murder coming to Blu-Ray in 3D in 2012!

2011-11-20T20:24:00.001-08:00

Watch these clips in 3D. You can even choose the format you want (red/blue glasses, "cross-eyed" etc.) by clicking the 3D icon at the bottom of the frame.

As my friends know (because I have a way of worming it into, like, every third conversation), I believe Dial M for Murder (1954) to be one of Alfred Hitchcock's underrated masterpieces. How did it come to be overlooked? I think many people take their cue from Hitch himself, who described it as a light, hastily produced film whose performance he'd "phoned in." Methinks he doeth protest too much. (Plus, he couldn't resist a bad pun.)

The bigger problem is that very few people have had the opportunity to see the movie in its original format--3D--which makes about as much sense as watching North by Northwest in black and white. You're literally missing an entire dimension. Village Voice movie critic Andrew Sarris agrees. Upon seeing Dial M in 3D for the first time in the 60s, he exclaimed, "In 2D, Dial M is minor Hitchcock; in 3D, it is major Hitchcock."

And so, on my Hitchcock Geek Facebook page, I put out a call to my fellow geeks to campaign Time/Warner, which owns the film, to restore it for a Blu-Ray 3D release. Within hours, Alert Reader Charlie Fulton pointed out that "it's already happening" and drew my attention to a podcast featuring an interview with Warner Home Video Senior Vice President George Feltenstein, who announced the upcoming release of two 3D films, House of Wax (1953) and Dial M. He says:

"It looks really, really good that they're going to [be released] sometime in 2012.... Probably the end of 2012. We're working on them now. Those 3D experiences are going to be crisp and clean and sharp and vital and realistic." (Catch the entire interview with WMPG radio's Dick Dinman under the title "Inside the Walls of the Warner Archive.")

Thanks to quantum-leap improvements in 3D imaging in recent years, I think it's safe to say that, with this reissue, the Dial M in 3D experience is going to be an improvement over what audiences got in 1954. And with a Blu-Ray reissue, you'll get to see it whenever you want!

TAKE ACTION!

Want to nudge Feltenstein to speedily (and skillfully) complete the project? Drop by Warner's Classics Facebook page and tell them how eager you are to see Dial M in 3D on Blu-Ray.

Rear Window and the Case of the Swirling Snifters

2011-11-15T21:56:00.001-08:00

“One of part of [Rear Window] that always makes me giggle is when Jeff, Lisa and Doyle are all hanging around and warming their brandy throughout the entire scene. It cracks me up every time. The visual of the three of them swirling and swirling and swirling for some reason just strikes me as funny. Am I the only one who thinks this or have I watched this film one too many times?” -- Prairiegirl

Alfred Hitchcock was not one to leave a good entendre undoubled. From Rope’s campy gay undertones to Mrs. Danvers’ not-so-subtle lesbian love for Rebecca DeWinter, his movies are literally (and metaphorically!) stuffed with sexy kinks and high jinx. For instance, in this scene from Easy Virtue (1928), over-eager suitor John Whittaker (Robin Irvine) works a martini shaker a tad too vigorously, in a motion that unmistakably parodies masturbation as he watches Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) pose for her make-up artist.

This was just a warm-up for later, when he, er, pops the question.

And so, in Rear Window,when Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) steps out of L. B. Jefferies’ kitchen nursing (heh heh heh) pair of brandy of brandy snifters, detective Lieutenant Doyle (Wendell Corey) can be forgiven for sniffing out (hehehe) double trouble (snerk!).

Think such theorizing is merely a product of the Hitchcock Geek's dirty mind? Well! I'll have you know that I know better people than you in Pittsboig! Matter of fact, Hitch himself envisioned the scene as an elaborate sex joke. In this interview transcript that he graciously shared with me, Hitchcock author Steven DeRosa (Writing with Hitchcock) asks Rear Window screenwriter John Michael Hayes about the loopy humor in this scene and I suspect that even Steven was surprised by the answer he got:

SLD: In that scene with Jeff, Lisa and Doyle, when they're swirling the brandy snifters. I was wondering where that came from.

JMH: That was a Hitchcock suggestion. It was to emphasize her breasts.

SLD: It's just so funny.

JMH: And it was sort of, you know, to make fun of her chest as she swirled these things around. That was, I wasn't really too taken with it at first, because I thought it was a little, what do you say? Not cheap, but a little raw, a little gross for a sophisticated woman to be suggestive like this. But that was Hitch's thing. And that's the kind of humor he had.

SLD: Yeah, I remember that shot now when she's walking out, out of the kitchen. But then throughout the rest of the whole scene, as the three of them are talking, you just have these three snifters swirling in the air.

JMH: Yeah. All swirling in that air. I don't know. That was Hitch's directorial touch. And I'm not running away from it, but that was his idea, and I'll tell you that. Because I never thought of it, as a suggestive gesture. I still don't think it does much for Grace Kelly's character. But it was amusing and it was something, and it made the scene more interesting than just, you know, just walking out and handing somebody some brandy, and they were all sort of nervous and tense and they were swirling the brandy around.

Nervous? Tense? Of course! If you ask me, there was even more to the tension than just Grace Kelly’s ta-tas (not that that wasn’t excuse enough). Those warming brandy snifters added heat to a scene already steamy enough to fog up L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies' (James Stewart’s) studio window. Lisa Fremont (Kelly) had just arrived at his apartment and announced that she would be staying overnight. While Jeff’s landlord might not have cared, censors in 1954—the same censors who insisted that married couples sleep in separate beds—would have nixed the sexual implications that would logically follow. (That's why his plaster cast reached up to his belly button, satisfying the board that all skin below his waist was derma non grata.) What followed in the dialogue amounts to a careful tango between the Hollywood code and the obvious outcome of a night with Grace Kelly.

But to fully appreciate the fun Hitch had with the brandy snifters, we need to back up a bit. Though voyeurism and murder are the overt story elements in the film, Rear Window is really the story of two people who just can't seem to get their lives in sync in the love department. Lisa’s first two piping-hot entrances into Jeff’s apartment speak volumes for their difficulties. First, there is her ravishing initial entrance, where she arrives shrouded in darkness, like an apparition or a midsummer night's dream fever, to awaken sleeping Jeff with a kiss. (See also: “Sleeping Beauty.” In fact, Rear Window is an inversion of the fairy tale, with the Princess risking life and limb to claim her knight.)

But after this hot and heavy screen moment, Jeff and Lisa get down to the real business of their relationship: arguing about his failure to commit.
In their next scene together, Lisa wears a sultry, jet black dress. Again, though she throws herself at Jeff, he barely acknowledges her as he mulls over the question of “why a man would leave his apartment three times in the middle of the night.”

Her sex appeal can’t compete with his interest in solving the mystery on the other side of the courtyard.

Still, it’s during this scene that Lisa is finally convinced that Jeff’s suspicions are founded in truth. Logically, then, in their next scene together—and though the shooting script called for “another extravagantly beautiful dress”—Lisa shows up at his home dressed in a no-nonsense green suit and with her hair tucked primly under a pill box cap. The only indulgence in her attire this time is a gaudy pearl bracelet rattling around on her forearm, a reminder of her expert taste in jewelry—a bit of knowledge on which her credibility hangs in this scene.

Without even a hello kiss and ready to prove she can live out of a suitcase just as well as Jeff can, Lisa's poised to catch a thief, er, murderer.

For the first time in the movie, they are in harmony, which at the moment involves 50 percent amateur sleuthing and 50 percent foreplay as Jeff invites her into his lap to neck a little—and discuss the case. In return, she offers to trade, not sex, but her feminine intuition, for a bed for the night.

When Lisa announces that she’s going to “slip into something comfortable,” she takes off her jacket to reveal a sleeveless, backless top that’s all business in the front and a party in the back, setting the mood for the sexual innuendo to follow. The moment is a perfectly-planned exhibit of Hitch's description of Kelly as a “snow-covered volcano.” However, the scene that made it to the final cut departs significantly from the shooting script. Here’s how the script goes:

                       JEFF
           You mean -- like [slip into] the kitchen? And
           make us some coffee?

                       LISA
           Exactly what I had in mind -- along
           with some brandy.

In the film, however, the lines are swapped. Lisa says what Jeff was supposed to say and vice versa:

                        LISA
            Why don’t I slip slip into something
            more comfortable?

                        JEFF
            By all means.

                        LISA
           I mean the kitchen to make us
           some coffee.

                        JEFF
            With some brandy too, huh?

Thus, it’s Lisa’s idea to prepare for a sober night of detective work by brewing a pot of coffee, while Jeff, feeling amorous, asks for a dollop of brandy. By changing those line readings on the set, Hitch (or, perhaps, Hayes) brought their maturing relationship into deeper relief. Their roles are now effectively reversed (Jeff even briefly waffles about whether or not Thorwald is guilty) and that situation will sharpen when Lisa puts her life on the line.

The voyeur becomes the voyee.
“What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” So says the insurance company nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), earlier in the film. That outside look into Jeff’s home is provided by Doyle, who now lets himself in. Though the movie takes place primarily from Jeff's perspective, for the moment we are brought inside Doyle’s head. Through the use of subjective action/reaction shots framed from his perspective, we join him in his voyeuristic inspection of Jeff’s apartment.

Introducing the scene, Doyle enters the apartment, only to stop short when he hears Lisa, who, almost as if prompted by him, begins humming the tune being composed across the way. Her haunting, theremin-like vocalese wafting in from the kitchen aurally parallels the sight of her ghostly shadow winding about on the ceiling. (See also: the dreamlike scenes of the flitting Merry Widow Waltzers in Shadow of a Doubt.) It echoes our first shadowy encounter with her.

Doyle's first sighting of Lisa is not with the woman herself, but, rather, with her feminine mystique.

Doyle then looks down to see her Mark Cross overnight bag lying open on the table, an explosion of pink femininity in Jeff’s platonic man-cave. A stonefaced detective lifted straight from the pages of Dashiell Hammett (except for the fact that he has settled down to what I guess to be a lackluster marriage), we're left to rely entirely on the Kuleshovian editing to tell us that he is doing the math in head.

When he lights his cigarette, it seems to cue the neighboring composer to strike up a boogie-woogie on the piano. The sound distracts him from his first train of thought, and it has the same effect on him that it does on Lisa, drawing him toward the window to find the source of the music. In Rear Window, music exerts an almost metaphysical power; even the world-weary police dick can't resist its tug.

We see (from Doyle's perspective) a raucous party at the composer’s apartment and, next, the Thorwalds’ apartment, plunged into darkness. This pair of shots works on at least three levels.

First, it shows us that he has identified where the music is coming from. Secondly, it is a reminder that the swinging, cocktail-soaked world of single life is not something that Doyle (and Jeff) can be a part of if they want to be married; the best they can do is stand outside and look in. Finally, its chaotic camaraderie serves as a neat counterpoint to the Thorwald home's morgue-like interior.

(Also, look closely at the party and you'll see one of the female partygoers snaking her way through the crowd with a pair of whiskey cocktails hoisted aloft to hand to one of the guests, a pre-echo of Lisa's brandy service. You'll also see an elderly woman nearly passed out drunk on her feet, dressed in a white suit and a lavender scarf—Hitchcockian colors of death (see, for example, the funeral wreath in Topaz) and, perhaps, a nod to dead Mrs. Thorwald.)

The camera pulls back and down, giving us a powerful low-angle view of Doyle, from Jeff’s viewpoint—that is, we watch Jeff watching Doyle. All eyes are on the Lieutenant Detective and the news he is about to share. His mysterious silence and the grave look on his face indicate that he has something portentous to reveal. Grandstanding, he relishes his moment of power by withholding his Big News.

                                   DOYLE
                      What else have you got on this guy
                      Thorwald?


                                   JEFF
                      Enough to scare me that you wouldn't
                      get here in time, and we'd lose him.

                                  DOYLE
                           (Soberly)
                      You think he's getting out of here?

                                  JEFF
                      Everything he owns is laid out on
                      the bedroom, waiting to be packed.

As we shall soon see, Doyle's conspiratorial tone is just a case of Hitchcock leading us up the garden path. First, though, Lisa emerges from the kitchen, cupping in her hands those two mammarian snifters, a hint that Jeff himself has some bedroom business of his own “waiting to be packed.” Winking double entendres like that permeate this scene, in which the dialogue counterpoints the visuals.

From here out, the scene actually has two story lines: (1) Jeff and Lisa's argument with Doyle regarding whether or not Lars Thorwald is guilty of murder and (2) Doyle’s mostly unspoken interest in Jeff and Lisa’s appearance of sexual impropriety (along with Doyle’s quite obvious excitement at seeing Lisa). The snifters tie the scene together as a visual analog to the dramatic tension while also reinforcing the impression that illicit sex is afoot. Specifically, there’s a hint of masturbation—particularly on the part of Doyle, who clearly gets off (cough cough) on the opportunity to make his old war buddy, Jeff, “look foolish.”

Those twirling cocktails thus play a role comparable to that of the ticking clockwork of the metronome in Rope that Rupert Cadell (James Stewart, six years earlier) uses to ratchet up Phillip's (Farley Granger's) anxiety during the interrogation sequence. Their circular pattern echoes Lisa's twisting shadow on the ceiling seconds earlier. It riffs on Hitch's earlier cameo, where he is glimpsed winding up the spring steel belly of the clock on the composer's mantle, an analogue to his role as this film's ringmaster of dramatic tension. It may even reference the spiral unspooling of the film itself as it relinquishes its story, one shuttering click at a time. Think I'm overdoing the associations? Go rent Hitch's silent masterpiece The Ring (1927) and make up your own mind.

The brandy is also a sexual innuendo, a libation whirling hypnotically as a prelude to sex: Doyle feels an erotic tug in Lisa’s direction, while she and Jeff, in their opposition to Doyle’s indifference, come together (relationally, that is!), their palms and fingers warming more than their brandy. It’s a masturbatory ménage à trois.

It's also a celebration. Following Lisa’s insistence that no woman would leave for a trip without taking her jewelry with her, Jeff and Lisa believe that they’ve got conclusive evidence of a murder and they toast their cleverness with Doyle, who, noncommittal, lets them talk.

Finally, in Hitchcock's world, brandy is often a symbol of sophistication (see Tony Wendice's special occasion drink in Dial M for Murder). Here, it exposes the class distinction between Doyle and Jeff and Lisa. While the latter two capably partake of their drinks and Jeff especially appears to enjoy mulling his around in the glass, Doyle drinks his straight down and shows that he can't handle his liquor as well as the other two can. This is important, as it reveals that Jeff's tastes have evolved in the years since he and Doyle served together in the war, leaving Doyle behind in that area. Their handling of the brandy is an apt metaphor for the contrast between Jeff's attunement to the subtleties of his neighbors' behavior and Doyle's social myopia.

But getting back to Lisa's hubba-hubba entrance with those two brandies! This is Doyle’s first look at Jeff’s girlfriend and, unable to take his eyes off her, his lust at first sight stops just short of a wolf-whistle. Meanwhile, Jeff stares intently at Doyle. As the script directs, “he seems to be trying to penetrate Doyle's mind.” The almost telepathic focus ostensibly has to do with the Thorwald case, but it also leads Jeff to pick up on Doyle’s worldly-wise judgment of Lisa’s sleepover. Thus, in response to Lisa's assertion, Doyle looks down at Lisa’s overnight bag billowing over with her sleepover goodies—a perfect counterpoint to Thorwald’s sinister suitcase. Though his face remains fixed, the editing tells us what he’s thinking: “Thorwald’s not the only guilty person around here.” But before he can get a word out, Jeff cuts him off with a pointed “Careful, Tom.”

We (and Jeff) have been waiting anxiously to hear about what his sleuthing has dug up on the disappearance of Mrs. Thorwald and the camera moves back, as if to courteously give him space.

After taking a phone call that further delays his Big Reveal, the next shot is a fairly long take. Clocking in at one minute and six seconds, it may not match the eight-minute marathons in Rope and Under Capricorn, but it's still a gem of stage blocking and camera work. As Doyle hangs up the phone, Lisa steps into the room, placing Doyle between her and Jeff. Doyle listens impassively, whipping his head back and forth between the two as they regale him with the details of Jeff's “research” and Lisa's intuition, those orbs of brandy going non-stop.

In one long take, with sex in the air, the three stand in almost claustrophobic proximity, swirling their brandy about in those balloonish snifters, in rhythm to the boogie-woogie drifting in from outside. Jeff and Lisa are aroused by their cleverness and sexual attraction, while Doyle is aroused because he thinks he can trump their circumstantial evidence—and, of course, he's turned on by Lisa. The three couldn't be more full of themselves and though the scene is quite masturbatory, most viewers won't allow themselves to “go there.” Unable to put their finger on it, as it were, they can't help but giggle. Here's how the long take goes, which closely followed the shooting script:

LISA
Jeff, aren't you going to tell him
about the jewelry?

Doyle looks suddenly interested. He asks tersely:

DOYLE
Jewelry?

JEFF
He has his wife's jewelry hidden in
among his clothes over there.

DOYLE
You sure it belongs to his wife?

He turns his head to Lisa, who answers.

LISA
It was in her favorite handbag --
And, Mr. Doyle, that can lead to
only one conclusion.

DOYLE
Namely?

His head snaps back to Jeff, who answers:

JEFF
That wasn't Mrs. Thorwald who left
with him yesterday morning?

DOYLE
You figured that out, huh?

His head moves back to Lisa as she answers with a touch of
pride in her voice.

LISA
It's just that women don't leave
jewelry behind when they go on a
trip.

Before Doyle can comment, Jeff asks impatiently:

JEFF
Come on, Tom -- you don't really
need any of this information, do
you?

Bringing their cozy little three-way to an abrupt halt, Doyle steps out of the circle, walks over to the desk and puts his glass down and says, “As a matter of fact, I don't.”

Again, as if perfectly timed, the boogie-woogie comes to a halt, ending the celebratory mood and creating an air of suspenseful expectation. Doyle walks into the deep foreground, his sweaty face filling the frame (just as Detective Arbogast's does when he walks into the Loomis Hardware store in Psycho) and drops his bomb. He speaks to the now-auspiciously quiet window and declares flatly:

“Lars Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am.”

As are all such lines in a Hitchcock film, Doyle's pronouncement is a huge red flag that the Director was up to some deeper tricks. Just as their suitcases suggest a "secret sharer" relationship between the Thorwalds and the Lisa and Jeff, Doyle now implicates himself in their vortex of shared guilt by equating Thorwald's innocence of the charge of murder with his own. Here's why. As a World War II air force reconnaissance pilot, he was in fact guilty—if only communally, by virtue of his uniform—of murder. Thus, the inverse of his statement will prove to be true: Thorwald is at least as much a murderer as he is! (See also: Rupert's guilt and shame in Rope.)

Using little more than their understanding of human nature, Jeff and Lisa surmised correctly that something fishy was going on in the Thorwald home, while Doyle's professional, logical methods caused him to walk right by the evidence without noticing. This, too is a recurring theme in Hitchcock. Think of Spellbound: and Constance Peterson's feminine intuition-based conviction that J.B. was innocent, while her brainiac mentor, Dr. Brulov, was no more equipped to see the truth of the situation than Doyle. The lesson Hitchcock seems to be pointing out is that logic—the supposed apex of human evolution—has its limits because our humanity resides, not in the head, but in the heart. It is with our hearts that we will solve the problem of good and evil.

Following Doyle's pronouncement, Lisa stops swirling her brandy, its cessation of movement matching the drop in her countenance. Next:

JEFF
You mean you can explain everything
that went on over there -- and is
still going on?

DOYLE
No! And neither can you.
That's a secret and private world
you're looking into out there. People
do a lot of things in private that
they couldn't explain in public.

(Italics added. Again with the masturbation innuendo!) Resentful of Doyle's condescending attitude, Jeff loses his temper and wheels himself over to Doyle. The three share the frame once again, Doyle loving every moment of his victory. The actors are blocked so that Doyle stands tall over Lisa and Jeff. For a visual philip that adds a suggestion of menace to the outburst of hostility, you can see a devil's mask in the background, along with one of Jeff's wartime photos, a picture of the explosion from an artillery shell in Korea. Lisa's glass remains mostly still, while Doyle's continue to rotate—the respective glasses continuing to express their owners’ interior mood.

Doyle moves away from them to take a seat and Jeff wheels in, still angry, cross-examining him. The camera repositions and in keeping with the explosiveness of their emotions, Jeff's photo of an atomic mushroom cloud sits in the background:

DOYLE
I found the trunk -- a half hour
after I left here.

LISA
Of course, it's normal for a man to
tie his trunk up with a heavy rope.

DOYLE
When the lock is broken -- yes.

JEFF
What was in the trunk? A surly note
to me?

DOYLE
Mrs. -- Thorwald's -- clothes. --
Clean -- carefully packed -- not too
stylish -- but presentable.

Doyle begins walking over to the chair.

LISA
Didn't you take it to the crime lab?

DOYLE
I sent it on its merry and legal
way.

Doyle sits down in the deep foreground, stretching back in Jeff's armchair, coolly swirling his drink.

JEFF
Why -- when a woman only goes on a
simple trip, does she take everything
she owns?...
If his wife wasn't coming back --
why didn't he tell his landlord? --
I'll answer it for you -- because he
had something to hide.

(Italics added.) Doyle hesitates a moment and lets his eyes wander and we see a cut-in closeup of the

overnight case with Lisa's lingerie.

DOYLE
Do -- uh -- you tell your landlord
everything?

Doyle's crack further links Jeff with Lars Thorwald and Lisa with Mrs. Thorwald, by means of the secrets they keep, their respective clothes and suitcases, and the appearance of guilt. For the moment, Doyle has vindicated Thorwald and all but accused Jeff and Lisa of a (debatable) violation of 50's-era morality. The irony is that he's wrong on both counts, and his intellectual hubris will nearly cost Jeff his life. After failing to change the subject, he stands and tries to finish off his drink as if it were a straight shot of whiskey. It shoots out of the glass, spurting onto his jacket. In other words, Doyle clumsily shoots his load.

Hitchcock Gets His Hands on Blackmail

2011-11-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

“Self-plagiarism is style.”--Alfred Hitchcock

For a full-length series of posts about Dial M for Murder, check out my mondo analysis!

One of my favorite shots in all of Hitchcock's movies appears in his 3D chamber piece Dial M for Murder (1954). Here's the setup: though Margot Wendice (Grace Kelly) killed Anthony Lesgate (Anthony Dawson) in self defense, suspicion has been aroused that she actually murdered him in cold blood. In this shot taken from her point of view, she makes a desperate plea for her innocence, holding out a key to her questioners that should exonerate her, but which, pathetically, does the opposite.

In 3D, her arm appears to float in front of the theater's front row, as if severed from her body. For my money, there are are few other moments in cinema history that telegraph such pitiful hopelessness, winning the audience's sympathy—and its dread for her future.

This shot also riffs on the film’s earlier murder where, in the 3D experience, Margot "reaches into the audience,” as if imploring it for help as she gropes for the scissors with which to defend herself:

These two shots are among many in Dial M demonstrating that Hitchcock’s innovative and expressive use of 3D effects is unmatched. Which raises an interesting question: working with a new medium, and with no other filmmaker exploring 3D’s potential with his level of sophistication, where did Hitchcock get his ideas? From himself.

As it happens, versions of those two shots appear in his final silent—and first sound—film (he made two versions), Blackmail (1929). Like Dial M, that movie also explores the guilt of a woman who has killed her attacker in self defense. Take a look at its murder scene:

With the action hidden behind a curtain, we are left to imagine Crewe’s (Cyril Richard's) sexual assault on Alice White (Anny Ondra). (The situation itself augurs Lesgate’s rape-like attack of Margot on the writing desk.) In her desperation, Alice's hand fumbles about, eventually to grasp a bread knife. After her weapon finds its target, Crewe's dead hand then flops out from behind the curtain, completing this stanza of violence, which is mercifully hidden from us. The entire scene is expressed by the movement of hands and and is no less terrifying in its refusal to show us the details of the assault and of Crewe's subsequent death.

Later in the film, in a scene that anticipates Dial M, Tracy (Donald Calthrop), the film’s would-be blackmailer, comes to see that not only will his plot fail, but that he is going to be framed for Crewe’s death. Pleading for his life, he hands the blackmail note to Detective Frank Webber (John Longden), hoping—in vain—for mercy. Note how his hand protrudes in from the side of the frame:

On a formal level, these repetitions add resonance to an otherwise tawdry story. As Sidney Gottlieb noted in his article “Hitchcock’s Silent Cinema,” which appeared in A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, such shots in Blackmail "establish rhythmic and structural patterns by carefully placed repetitions that create constant echoing effects."

As with Margot, the framing here reinforces what the story is already bracing to tell us: Tracy hasn't got the chance of a sno-cone in a pizza oven. But there is more to this than mere technical film grammar. Gottlieb adds: "Hitchcock's cinematic ingenuity is no mere formalist exercise but a means to strengthen Blackmail as a provocative critique of the forces of order and authority in society, a disapproving dramatization of how men silence women and attempt to shape them to suit their interests, and a case study in guilt."

Much the same could be said for Dial M. For instance, in the shot of Margot's hand above, the sense is reinforced that her beauty and wealth are no match for the male-dominated world that now casts a hostile eye on her—though in the final verdict, its law enforcement sector, at least, is more benign and prone to justice than that presented in the earlier film, even if its Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) had to go rogue and commit "highly irregular" acts in the service of justice.*

Blackmail was Hitch's farewell to silent movies, and in later interviews, in describing the end of that era, he singled out this shot, whose shadows paint a silent villain's mustache on Crewe's face:

This effect casts a glooming spell on what has up til then been a light mood, wiping the smile off our face with one last joke. While I don't think Hitch did quite the same thing in Dial M, the plot follows a similar arc: for the first part of the film, Wendice's upper crust humor carries the show, rendering his murder plot an intellectual exercise. And then, similar to the shift in mood in Blackmail, the following brief (silent era) chiaroscuro scene abruptly changes everything, as Lesgate emerges from the shadows to carry out his diabolical orders:

There is, however, at least one difference between the two films that I should mention. In Blackmail, these hands extend in from the side of the frame. Not so in Dial M. In that project, Hitch exploited the depth dimension to achieve similar emotional effects, giving those scenes an added subjective boost by placing his action toward the bottom of the frame, where the 3D imagery appeared to mingle with the front rows of he audience, as in this celebrated shot:

In another shot that echoes both the murder scene and Margot's plea for mercy, Inspector Hubbard presents the key that exonerates Margot and convicts the real villain, Wendice.

In order to make Dial M for Murder, Hitchcock rummaged around in a bag of tricks devised a quarter century earlier and adapted them to a new format. Along the way, he added a phrase or two to the language of 3D film and made an enduring favorite in the Hitchcock catalog. People may not be able to explain why a movie like this gets under their skin. All they know is they can't take their eyes off of it.
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*Ever notice that Margot is the only female character to appear in Dial M? Only two other women are mentioned in passing: "poor Miss Wallace," the victim of Lesgate's murderous greed and Maureen, who's "such a filthy cook." By contrast, there are the men of Dial M, whose college breeding and club membership guarantee special privileges. Even sleazy Lesgate and daft Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings) are members of this fraternity of men. It's in this world that Margot must defend her life and honor. In the final reckoning, it takes a near-miracle to save her when Inspector Hubbard rises above class and the rules of the game to make sure justice is served.
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Haven't had enough of Dial M for Murder? Go here.

Michele Bachmann Provokes Spit-Take from the Alfred Hitchcock Geek

2011-10-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Update: I just realized that this whole thing is a satirical joke. (Thanks to "Crispy" below for enlightening me.) Bachmann never actually said any of this. But I'm leaving the post up because I'm not sure which is funnier: Craig's faux interview, or the fact that I fell for it.

"My hero!" -- Michele Bachmann.

Not to politicize this blog or nuthin', but I had to pass this nugget on from the November, 2011 issue of Vanity Fair: In an interview with Craig Brown, Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann listed her top eight heroes. In addition to the usual suspects on such a list (Jesus Christ, Gandhi, MLK), she added our favorite mama's boy:

“#7: NORMAN BATES

Here is a salt-of-the-earth guy who tends to his mom as well as single-handedly running a small family business. A proven thief books into his motel, so he humanely executes her. The guy's a hero. And what do the liberal elite call him? 'Psycho'! can you believe it?”

Make of her selection what you will. I'm sure she's just kidding around. This is, after all, the snooty-snarky Vanity Fair. (Disclosure: I vote democrat.) (Since I'm a Vanity Fair reader, you probably already knew that.) (Just don't hate me for being simultaneously smart and vapid. It's harder to pull off than it looks.) Nevertheless, if she gets elected, just to be on the safe side, we should probably keep all sharp objects out of the Oval Office!

The Re-Premier of Hitchcock's "Lost" Film The White Shadow: A Special Report

2011-10-03T20:23:00.000-07:00

Program from the re-premier of The White Shadow. Click twice on this and all subsequent images and make them instantly bigger!

By guest blogger Pat McFadden.

On Thursday, September 22, the recently discovered reels from The White Shadow (1924), a film from Alfred Hitchcock’s days as Assistant Director for Graham Cutts, were re-premiered at the Motion Picture Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills. I was fortunate enough to acquire tickets for myself and a few friends, and had the further fortune of sitting in the front row. (This was somewhat due to necessity, as the entire middle section of the theatre was reserved for VIPs with the exception of the very first row.) Front row at this particular theatre is usually too close – but for this night, with two musicians and a panel of six, I simply could not have had a better position as a non-VIP. I had full view of the stage and could turn around for perfect view of any notable who’d been asked to stand in the audience.

As usual, an extravagant and beautiful program had been printed for the evening, with a paper insert of notes on Hitchcock’s role(s) on the film, and its place in, and effect on, his career, well written by Hitchcock Author David Sterritt.

Randy Haberkamp, the Academy’s Director of Educational Programs, and always an entertaining, witty and knowledgeable Master of Ceremonies at Academy screenings, began the evening asking for a show of hands from those who identified themselves as “optimists.” He went on to correlate this to the fact that they were about to show us only the first half of a feature, and urged us optimists to look at the experience as “half full” and not “half empty.” He then asked some people in the audience to stand so we could gaze at them and applaud, among them were Norman Lloyd and Eva Marie Saint (both of whom would be on the panel later), Ed Lauter (Maloney in Family Plot), Diane Baker (Lil Mainwaring in Marnie), and Veronica Cartwright, with her hair pulled back in a pony tail, just like her younger self as Cathy Brenner in The Birds.

The screening got underway, starting off with two shorts which had also been discovered and rescued, one with Mabel Normand from 1914, the other with Monty Banks from 1923, and then the existing first half of The White Shadow. The amazing Michael D. Mortilla accompanied the entire evening on piano, with an original score that is simply magnificent. Joining him for the feature only was the excellent and lovely Nicole Garcia on violin.

The Film

The original opening credits did not survive (as we were to learn from the discussion later, the first few feet of any reel of nitrate are usually the first to decompose). Therefore the film began with a still shot of one rescued but damaged frame of the opening inter-title – this can be seen on the program cover – followed by a simple list of credits. More may be missing from the opening but it didn’t seem like it could be much, as the story seemed to be in place: Nancy Brent (Betty Compson) meets Robin Field (Clive Brook) on deck of the ship that they are both taking back to London. They get along and plan to meet after they’ve settled back at home. Nancy is welcomed home by her family: alcoholic father, doting mother, and identical twin sister Georgina, also played by Compson. A double was used for some shots, but the many scenes which utilized the splitscreen effect were quite seamless and accomplished for the period. Compson was excellent in both roles, and stunningly beautiful (she would work for Director Hitchcock some18 years later in Mr. And Mrs. Smith, as Robert Montgomery’s bombastic blind date Gertie, the smart-mouthed blonde with the sure cure for nosebleeds).

But we now learn that these identical twins are not at all identical in character, and Nancy is as selfish and wanton as a female character was allowed to be in 1924. She quickly sends her unsuspecting sister to the pre-appointed place that she herself had agreed to meet Robin, for the sole purpose of his being baffled at not being recognized by the girl he thinks is Nancy. Several more episodes at the family’s country manor prove that despite the pleading and placating of her sister and parents, Nancy is rotten to the core. Unsatisfied with her boring life at home, Nancy leaves a short note for her sister and steals away without a trace. Blaming himself, her father, already unstable from too much drink, goes out in search of her; neither are found. After her mother dies of a broken heart, Georgina is now left alone. Reluctantly abandoning the search for her sister and father, Georgina continues to see – and falls in love with - Robin, still letting him believe that she is Nancy.

Nancy, it is now revealed, has become a card playing, smart dressing drinker in Paris, spending her time winning things from men (all implications) in a place of ill-repute called the Café of the Laughing Cat (see picture on page 2 of program – this beautiful set, centered by a man-sized cat statue that brings “The Ten Commandments” to mind, could well have been the young art director’s proudest creation for this project.) In the first of several contrived coincidences, Mr. Brent, the twins’ father, is seen at the same club – now unrecognizable as a wandering tramp who has lost his mind from drink and desperation.

This scene is the most lighthearted so far. A lengthy inter-title card explains the rules of the Laughing Cat Café: As each new person enters, the wild patrons shout "GET OUT!" The persons who don’t run screaming are considered worthy to stay. This was charming British humor in an otherwise serious and engaging melodrama, and suspiciously Hitchcockian.

Back in London, Robin and “Nancy” are engaged to be married – but Robin’s good friend Louis Chadwick (Henry Victor) will soon (coincidentally!) visit the Café in Paris and see the real Nancy holding court. Henry visits Robin, tells him what he has witnessed, and that it would be a disgrace to marry this woman. Unwilling to believe it, Robin dares Henry to take him to Paris and prove it to him. Georgina, overhearing all this, realizes that Henry has unknowingly located her long-lost twin, and she rushes to France as well, hoping to find her there.

We return to the Laughing Cat Café, where all of our major characters are now gathering, and just as good-twin Georgina enters (meaning that Nancy, Robin, and Louis are about to be shocked out of their minds to see her there) -- the reel ended and the curtain closed. There was a huge collective groan from the audience. Chalk another one up for the Master of Suspense, but in a way he never intended.

Eva Marie Saint rushed to the podium on the stage, where, after cheerily muttering “Well, I don’t understand it, but I still don’t understand North By Northwest,” she read to us a synopsis of the conclusion of the drama (from the film’s U.S. Copyright Registration), humorously accompanied by more melodramatic piano and violin.

“After seeing Nancy enter the bohemian nightclub, Robin bitterly denounces her. In the chaos of the fight, she slips away, followed by Georgina. Georgina tells Nancy of the disappearance of their father and the death of their mother. Nancy weeps but refuses to return home. Her health broken by worry, Georgina goes to Switzerland to recuperate. Robin meets her, and still assuming that she is Nancy, begs forgiveness. Georgina knows that she hasn’t long to live, and she sends for her sister. She persuades Nancy to take her place in the sanatorium and marry Robin. Georgina leaves for Paris, to await the end. After returning to England with Robin, Nancy is summoned to her dying sister in Paris. She arrives just in time to say goodbye. When Georgina dies, her “white shadow” passes to Nancy, who at last has a soul. Mr. Brent resurfaces and finds his way to England, and while walking down a London street, he is hit by a car carrying his surviving daughter. [‘I didn’t write this!’ Saint interjected at this point, stoking the laughter already emanating from the audience.] Nancy rushes him to the hospital. Mr. Brent regains his sanity and returns with Nancy to their country estate. Robin asks Nancy to marry him. Much as she yearns to accept, the white shadow of her sister’s sanity holds her back. When Robin learns the truth regarding the two sisters, Nancy begs his forgiveness. In response, he takes her in his arms. ‘Since you have been brave enough to tell me, I will be brave enough to forget it.’”

Click to enlarge fellow Hitchcock geek David Sterritt's program notes.

The Panel

The Panel (left to right): Randy Haberkamp, actress Eva Marie Saint, actor Norman Lloyd, Leslie Anne Lewis, NFPF Nitrate Consultant for New Zealand Project, Frank Stark, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Film Archive, Annette Melville, Director of the National Film Preservation Foundation, and Michael Pogorzelski, Director of the Academy Film Archive. (Photo credit: Todd Wawrychuk / ©A.M.P.A.S.)

Now the panel gathered onstage to great applause, moderated by Academy Director of Special Projects Randy Haberkamp.

Asked of Frank Stark: "Why does it happen to be New Zealand that so many of these films are being found?"

“The real question is why did they disappear everywhere else?” Frank quipped, and then explained that New Zealand was the end of one of the distribution shipping chains, and after exhibition, rather than shipping the prints back, which was costly, distributors were asked to destroy them. Many of these workers, including some projectionists, secretly stole away with prints, unable to bear with the thought of destroying them, and Frank fancies that many were enjoyed at private collector parties. Thus, a great deal of film has been re-collected over the years.

Annette Melville explained the role of the NFPF as sort of a “match-maker” – they don’t hold films, but they work on behalf of the American archival community to locate and preserve endangered works. The Mellon Foundation gave them a grant enabling them send a two-person team to New Zealand, which has succeeded in identifying over 165 titles, going through 225,000 feet of nitrate film, and that’s just the silent material.

Annette handed the mike over to Leslie Anne Lewis, who held us captive with her fascinating “detective story:” The film was in a couple of reels labeled “Twin Sisters,” but the original credits were gone, and it had been placed in the American section due to the fact that the Selznick logo was on it (every inter-title had “Selznick” at the bottom, as seen in the frame blow-up on the program.) Intrigued by the beautiful images, she concentrated her research one evening on identifying this film. Cross-checking the identified cast members with other clues, she eventually narrowed it down to two possibilities, and since one of them had the Hitchcock name attached to it, began researching what he had been doing at the time. As there is no shortage of Hitchcock-related study on the internet, this led to the happy confirmation of what had been found.

Saving questions for Saint and Lloyd for last, the evening ended with fond reminiscences from both, of working - and eating – with Hitch and Alma. Most of Lloyd’s stories are already known to Hitchcock devotees, but hearing and watching him relate them was worth separate admission: Alma catching Janet Leigh’s subtle swallow in time to cut it before shipping “Psycho;” Ben Hecht viewing the finale of “Saboteur” and telling Hitch “He should have had a better tailor.”

Eva Marie told of something that happened during the shooting of the auction scene in “North By Northwest.” Between shots she was drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup. Hitch saw this and took it away from her, replacing it with a china cup and saucer. It just wouldn’t do, he said, for the extras and crew to see this lady in such a beautiful dress drinking from a Styrofoam cup. She loved it – it helped her to stay in character. She also loved that Hitch had his bacon flown in from Denmark, and Dover Sole from England. “I liked all that,” she said. “I was from Albany.”

During this story, when she was about to quote Hitchcock, Saint stopped and asked Lloyd if he would imitate him. “You’re an actor, and you’re a guy,” she said. Lloyd at first waved the microphone away, then suddenly puckered up his mouth, changed his expression and sitting posture, and in pure Hitchcock dialect, slowly warbled “I’m not large enough.” This drew a great laugh, but Eva Marie topped it when she later said “I love my husband, but I have the hots for Norman!”

No questions were culled from the audience, but nobody seemed to mind, and as we filed out, one aisle was clogged by the amazing cluster of Saint, Lloyd, and Baker all chatting together. My hand instinctively reached into my pocket to take a picture, but they just don’t let you do that at the Academy. There are now, however, some pictures available for viewing on their web site: http://photos.presslist.oscars.org/listanevent.php?events=1629&pg=1

My personal assessment of the evening? Perfect. Of the film? Most people seemed to agree with me that what we saw was a first-rate production of a rather silly story. If this first half had been summarized for me, sight unseen, I doubt that I’d have anticipated being as engaged, entertained, and yes, even emotionally involved. It’s impossible to know, but not at all difficult to guess, how much of that was due to accomplished director Cutts, and how much to the hard work of a young and eager assistant director, editor, co-writer, art director, and title designer. So, despite how convoluted the second half sounds, I assume it maintained its dignity, and hope that it might be found in another mislabeled canister somewhere, someday.

Remembering Alma Reville, Born August 14, 1899

2011-08-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

Hitch and Alma's wedding day, December 2, 1926

Hardly a day goes by that I don't think about Alfred Hitchcock. I dream of meeting him, but I fear that if that were to happen in an alternate universe (or heaven, I suppose), it might be a rather awkward encounter. I might even feel a bit intimidated. And so, in my dream, I meet someone else first: Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville. If she liked you, Alma could be relied upon to grease the wheels of friendship between her guest and the great director. Plus, I hear that she made a mean Beef Beaujolais, so if the meeting was a flop I imagine I'd still have had a wonderful dinner.

Alma's profound, yet generally unsung, contribution to Hitch's films has only recently begun to be acknowledged. As film historian Charles Champlin once wrote, “The Hitchcock touch had four hands and two of them were Alma's.”

According to IMDb.com, she is credited with writing contributions to 29 films for Hitch and other directors. She also served in a variety of other capacities, including editor and assistant director. Like her husband, she understood filmmaking from the ground up. Thanks to her first-rate intellect, coupled with fierce determination, she was a film pioneer in an era when film—not to mention women in the workplace in general—was yet silent. As screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train) says, “Alma was truly a filmmaker. I can sincerely say from personal experience that I don't think Hitch's films would have been as good without Alma.”

Handling continuity for The Mountain Eagle (1927), 5' 0" Alma ascends a stepladder to adjust Bernard Goetzke's hair.

To those who knew her, however, she was content to be Alma, a gracious host and a thoughtful friend. She was a superb cook whose souffles were like her friendship itself: they never failed and always rose to the occasion. If her hand in the Hitchcock touch has been overlooked, it's mainly due to her modesty, which seems to have sprung from deep place of ego-security. She simply had no need for that kind of attention.

By contrast, Hitch seems to have harbored a great deal of insecurity and fear. Yet, his public never really knew about that. For that we can also thank Alma, who was his staunchest defender and supporter and the only person to whom he revealed his vulnerable side. Because his films deal with the dark matter that resides in human nature, critics and fans alike have long assumed that Hitch himself was a bit “mogo on the gogo”—an armchair diagnosis that shows up Spellbound (1945). If you want an idea of what Alma's view of him might have been like, pop in a DVD of that movie. Gregory Peck plays “J.B.,” a man stripped of his identity and accused of being a homicidal maniac. As her name aptly implies, Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) refuses to succumb to such thinking, even when the learned Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekov) pooh-poohs her defense of him, saying, “We are speaking of a schizophrenic, not a valentine.” She replies, “We are speaking of a man.” With those six words, she gathers up her interlocutor's collection of Freud's writing and hurls it back at him. I see that as Alma's rejoinder to hamfisted biographers who would conjure up demons in Hitch's psyche where there are none.

Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, wrote a memoir about her mother, called Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man. When you finish this post, do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy. It remains as good a view of this extraordinary woman we will likely ever get. Here are a few excerpts:

Whitfield Cook:

“I remember meeting Pat, Hitch and Alma for the first time at the exact same time. I went to [their] house and the first thing I realized was that they were all real people—no Hollywood stuff, very real and very, very nice.... I was quite crazy about Alma because she was so gentle and yet so strong. I don't think she cared that people thought she was working in the shadow of Hitch. She adored Hitch and she loved working with him.... Alma was very short but extremely attractive, and part of that attraction came through her intelligence and warmth.... One thing I did notice about her was that she never talked about herself and she never talked about the past. She had been a pioneer in the silent era, but she never made a point of mentioning it.”

Connie Erickson (wife of favored Hitchcock Production Designer) on meeting the Hitchcocks for the first time, at what the Hitchcocks referred to as “The Ranch” in Santa Cruz:

“[There were] colorful hanging baskets of begonias everywhere. Only the English can do so well with their gardens and flowers—a built-in talent. Being so young at the time, I was a bit nervous, but once we got to the Hitchcock home, I felt at ease and we spent a couple of delightful days, eating (Alma cooked the meals and Hitch chose the appropriate wine) and relaxing. Alma was the perfect hostess because she was so simple and understated.

“Years later, I flew to London with Pat for the Hitchcock hundredth birthday celebration. We took the train to Nottingham where Alma was born.... For some strange reason, Nottingham seemed familiar to me. It was then that I realized that Alma had recreated the beautiful feeling of the city where she grew up in the house in Santa Cruz. Nottingham, I found out, is known as the flower city of England. Like in the Santa Cruz home, there were flowers everywhere. And no doubt, Alma was one of them.”

Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (Marnie):

Although she was opinionated and contributed a great deal to any conversation, Alma never talked about the past. And she never pushed herself forward. The only ego she displayed was in her presence—she was really there, she did not disappear.

Nurse Betty Losher, who cared for Hitch in his final days:

“The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. H was a respectful, collaborative, loving and protective one. For instance, after one of the drafts of The Short Night [(Hitch's final screenplay, never filmed)] was completed, Mr. H brought a bound copy to his wife. He asked if she would read it the next day and she said she would. I remember the next morning, while Mr. H was at the 'stuuuudio,' she read the entire script, stopping only for lunch. She finished it after tea and waited for him. I was with her in the main room when he came home. He walked straight through the foyer to see his wife. 'Well, what do you think?' In her soft voice but loud enough for him to hear her, she replied, 'Quite good. Quite good.' To my surprise, he completely fell apart and wept.... The next morning, I overheard Mrs. H ask, 'Whom do you see as the detective?' He immediately replied: 'Peter Lorre,' followed by, 'But we don't have him anymore.'”

Alfred Hitchcock cut a large figure in more ways than one. Yet, Alma lived in no one's shadow. She was and always will be Alma Reville. With begonias and Champagne, Happy Birthday, Alma.

A Perfect Treatment -- Excerpt from "Writing with Hitchcock"

2011-07-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

Some of Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved films were made in the 1950s, and four of them (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much) were written by one man: John Michael Hayes. Though he'd earned a sterling reputation in radio, when he first met with Hitch, his screenwriting resume was rather thin. Nevertheless, the director took a gamble and contracted him to work on Rear Window. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of his career.

My friend Steven DeRosa has written a fascinating book about their extraordinarily fruitful collaboration and its sad, perhaps inevitable, demise. Called Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, it's a must-have for anyone who loves good movies. You can find purchasing details -- including how to get an autographed copy for yourself -- at the end of this post. In the meantime, enjoy this fly-on-wall look at their very first meeting, excerpted from Chapter One:

A Perfect Treatment

Excerpted from Writing with Hitchcock by Steven DeRosa

On the morning of September 9, 1965, Alfred Hitchcock sat in his office at Universal Studios confounded that after a detailed treatment, three complete drafts, and one set of revisions, the screenplay he had been preparing for Torn Curtain was not up to par. Hitchcock had spent four months working on the scenario with the novelist Brian Moore, and then engaged the screenwriting team of Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall to do a hasty rewrite, but still found the script lacking. Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock’s personal assistant, knew her employer was in trouble, especially after Marnie had flopped a year earlier. Robertson was Hitchcock’s most valued associate during his tenure at Universal and had remained part of the director’s entourage since serving as script supervisor on Vertigo during happier times at Paramount. At Hitchcock’s request, Robertson prepared a short list of writers she thought were skilled enough to retool the second-rate script. Hitchcock surely trusted Robertson’s judgment, but was adamantly opposed to calling one of the writers she had put on her list, even though a little more than a decade earlier the writer had been responsible for the scripts of some of Hitchcock’s major successes. For some reason—pride, anger, principle—Hitchcock refused to call John Michael Hayes. Hitchcock felt he became the Master of Suspense on his own and did not require assistance from someone whom he had made a star.

In the spring of 1953 Hitchcock had faced a similar career crisis. His independent production company, Transatlantic Pictures, had failed, and his years at Warner Bros. were a mixed bag of mostly box-office failures. With its track record on the stage in London and on Broadway, Hitchcock hoped that a film of Frederick Knott’s Dial M for Murder would bring the change of luck he desperately needed. Warner Bros. purchased the rights for Hitchcock, but the studio was in financial trouble. In March the studio halted production on all new projects for ninety days, and the following month they asked their executives to take a salary cut of up to 50 percent.

In a business where you’re only as good as your last film, Hitchcock could not afford to let his career come to a standstill. He instructed his agents at MCA Artists to shop around for another studio contract. In his business dealings, Hitchcock was handled personally by the agency’s president, Lew Wasserman, in addition to Arthur Park and, later, Herman Citron. In spite of the fact that Hitchcock’s performance as his own producer in Hollywood had not yet lived up to his reputation, Wasserman and company shrewdly arranged what became over the next few years a lucrative multipicture contract with the Paramount Pictures Corporation.

Eager to obtain Hitchcock’s services, Paramount offered to make a deal if he would develop a script out of a story from a collection called After Dinner Story by mystery writer Cornell Woolrich (who wrote under the pseudonym William Irish). Taking Wasserman’s advice, Hitchcock chose “Rear Window.” Eager to find the perfect writer to dramatize Woolrich’s short story, Hitchcock recalled a name he heard often on the radio in connection with comedy, suspense, and detective shows. “Do you know John Michael Hayes?” he asked his agents. The response was that they certainly did—Hayes was also an MCA client.

The Meeting

Through much of his first decade or so in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock worked with a number of distinguished writers, including Robert Sherwood, Thornton Wilder, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, and Raymond Chandler. Impressive as this list of collaborators may be, Hitchcock still found himself in the late 1940s and early 1950s with a string of commercial failures. Hitchcock’s agents were therefore perplexed by their client’s request that they arrange a meeting with John Michael Hayes. By the spring of 1953, the thirty-three-year-old Hayes had been a popular and prolific writer of radio dramas, and although his potential as a screenwriter had been recognized, there was little evidence in his first film credits to indicate he had much to offer Hitchcock. Nevertheless, there was something about Hayes’s style that Hitchcock responded to and felt he needed.

Hayes recalled, “Hitchcock had his agents and my agent get together for lunch and they handed me this book which had the short story in it called ‘Rear Window.’ They told me, ‘You’re to meet Mr. Hitchcock on Friday night at the Beverly Hills Hotel for dinner. Read the story and be prepared to discuss it with him.’” Hayes virtually memorized the story in order to anticipate what Hitchcock would ask. What color were the eyes of the hero? How many steps up to his door? How many windows across the way? Hayes prepared for a thorough examination.

The dinner was scheduled for seven-thirty in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Hayes dressed as well as he could, memorized his notes and ideas, and drove from the San Fernando Valley, over the Santa Monica Mountains, to Beverly Hills, arriving a few minutes early. By seven-thirty, Hitchcock hadn’t arrived. At quarter of eight, he still wasn’t there. And by eight o’clock, there was no sign of Hitchcock. The young writer thought he might have gotten the night or, worse, the hotel wrong, which only added to his feelings of anxiety about meeting the famous director. In need of something to calm his nerves, Hayes went into the hotel bar and explained his predicament to the bartender.

Unlike many of his contemporaries in Hollywood, Hayes was a neophyte when it came to liquor and wisely set his limit at two drinks. Unaware of the potency of martinis, which the bartender prescribed as a good drink to calm one’s nerves, Hayes knocked back his drink and returned to the lobby as quickly as he could, not wanting to miss Hitchcock. Having skipped lunch that day in anticipation of a big dinner, Hayes quickly felt a warm glow from the liquor as he continued to wait. By eight-thirty, Hitchcock still hadn’t arrived, prompting the writer to retreat to the bar for one more drink before returning home.

Having consumed his second martini—his limit—Hayes walked out of the hotel and down the path toward his car, when suddenly a taxi pulled up and out came Alfred Hitchcock, who started up the walk hurriedly. Hayes tried to interrupt him. “Mr. Hitchcock?”

“No. Sorry. No autographs. I have a very important meeting.”

“You have it with John Michael Hayes.”

Hitchcock stopped and said, “Are you John Hayes?”

“Yes,” the writer replied.

“Well, come on. Let’s get going,” commanded Hitchcock, who never apologized for being late. The two proceeded to the dining room, with the head waiter fussing over Hitchcock, whose reputation as a big spender and gourmand had been well established even before he arrived in America. As they sat at the booth reserved for the star moviemaker, Hayes must have been impressed, if not intimidated, by the attention he commanded, which made it all the more surprising when the first words out of Hitchcock were “Do you drink?”

Taken aback, Hayes replied, “Well, I’ve been known on occasion to take a drink.”

“Well, what do you drink?”

“I think the last drink I had was a martini.”

“Oh, wonderful, my favorite drink,” said Hitchcock, adding mischievously, “I like a man who drinks.” Hitchcock called the waiter to the table and ordered two double martinis. When the drinks arrived, the two men tipped glasses, and Hayes sipped as cautiously as he could.

Soon after, Hitchcock called for hors d’oeuvres and another double martini for each of them. Hayes had finally got the first cocktail down, and by now was bleary-eyed, praying he would not get sick. “Mr. Hitchcock, I don’t—I think one—,” protested Hayes.

“Oh, come on,” Hitchcock encouraged, “we’ve got to relax and get to know each other. As I told you, I like a man who drinks.” Along came the second round of double martinis. Hayes kept imagining he was going to get sick and that Alfred Hitchcock would never speak to him again. And to this point, the director hadn’t mentioned Rear Window at all. Pouring sweat, trying to keep sober and sound intelligent, Hayes recalled the director asking, “Have you seen any of my movies?”

“Yes, I have, Mr. Hitchcock.”

By now they’d finished the hors d’oeuvres and had started a second course of Dover sole with a rare white wine. Hitchcock extolled the virtues of the wine as he poured a big glass for the writer, who tried to sip it politely and act as if he truly appreciated it. Returning to the subject of his pictures, Hitchcock said, “For example?”

Recalling his experience as an Army theater projectionist, Hayes replied, “Well, for example, oh, Shadow of a Doubt.”

“What did you think of it?” asked Hitchcock.

Hayes began to give an analysis of Shadow of a Doubt from frame one to the end of the picture, telling Hitchcock what he thought he had done right, and what he thought he had done wrong, where it was strong, where it was weak, and that he didn’t particularly like the casting. The young writer continued his assessment of Shadow of a Doubt straight through the next course of steak with red wine. Blurred by the combination of martinis and fine wines, Hayes started going through Hitchcock’s movies, one by one, indicating some things that he could have done better in Notorious and telling the director that he thought the bullet stopped by the Bible in the hero’s pocket in The 39 Steps was kind of corny. While Hayes talked, Hitchcock said nothing, and just continued eating and drinking and munching and crunching and slurping.

At the conclusion of the meal, Hitchcock ordered dessert to be brought with a concoction of brandy and Drambuie. Amazingly, Hayes hadn’t gotten sick, but Hitchcock still had said nothing about Rear Window—not a single word. Finally, with the dinner finished, Hitchcock said, “Well, I’ve got to go home.” Hayes offered to drive him, but shrewdly Hitchcock decided to take a taxi. After a considerable amount of coffee, Hayes got into his car, put the top down, and drove slowly over the Santa Monica mountains back home. Upon his arrival, Hayes’s wife, Mel, asked, “How did it go?”

“Well, we had one of the great feasts of all time. But I am through, not only with Alfred Hitchcock, but maybe forever in this town. I’d better start thinking of a new profession. Because,” Hayes said, “I analyzed his pictures, and I analyzed them like a reviewer, critically.” Hayes spent the rest of the weekend waiting to hear how miserably it went. On Monday morning Arthur Park telephoned him and said, “You’re in. Hitchcock loved you. You start work tomorrow. Report to Warner Bros., where he’s preparing Dial M for Murder.”

In disbelief Hayes responded, “Are you sure you have the right John Michael Hayes?”

“Why?”

“We never talked about Rear Window, or anything.”

“You’re fine.”

The next day Hayes arrived at Warners, and he and Hitchcock discussed Rear Window for the first time. Baffled by the experience, Hayes needed a year before he had the temerity to ask Hitchcock about that night. “Well, let me tell you what happened,” Hitch-cock said. “I went to a cocktail party at Jules Stein’s house. That’s why I was late. You know, I was dieting and I had several drinks. I remember meeting you and going in to eat, but I don’t remember anything after that. But you talked a lot, and on the assumption that a man who talks a lot has something to say, I hired you.” Not one to leave an associate completely at ease, Hitchcock added, “But don’t forget, if I didn’t like you, two weeks later I could have let you go.”

Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes by Steven DeRosa is available in a new, expanded edition in print and e-book formats at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Apple iBookstore, and Lulu.com. Signed copies are also available at WritingwithHitchcock.com You can follow updates from the author on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.