Hitchcock Style

by Gregory Avery

After studying at Brigham Young University, Mr. Avery completed his college degree at S.O.S.C., after which he worked in the fields of film, television, and journalism. He has previously written about film for an Ashland, Oregon publication, from 1989 - 91. He now writes for Nitrate Online.

No further proof is needed as to how iconic the figure of Alfred Hitchcock has become than to point to the appearance of Terry Johnson's play "Hitchcock Blonde", which premiered on the London stage in 2003. Now, along with all the popular and critical acclaim, the awards (none of them Oscars---Hitchcock received an Irving Thalberg Award in 1967, but didn't seem too happy about it), his presence in the mediums of television and publishing, and the belated knighthood in early 1980 (the delay having probably more to do with the fact that the director had long since taken out U.S. citizenship), Hitchcock can now claim the singular honor of having become an adjective. Only Walt Disney, with the term "Disneyesque", can be said to have come close to anything comparable.

And, along with the countless other books already penned about Hitchcock, the new book "Hitchcock Style" attempts to provide us with a gracious lexicon of what makes the director a stylist and an artist (although I doubt anyone, now, would disagree on either score). On facing pages, Man Ray's "Vénus restaurée", with its smooth white female torso bound with cord, is laid beside Ingrid Bergman, a Galatea wearing a collar held in place by the point of a silver arrow, in the Salvador Dalí dream sequence for "Spellbound" (or, rather, the one part of the dream sequence that ended up being cut from the film).

Most fascinating are the photos taken of an exhibition, "Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences", which was shown in Montreal and at Paris' ultra-modern Centre Georges Pompidou in 2001. Here, the fatal glass of milk in "Suspicion" is displayed, on a silver salver, as if it were a part of a communion service. The toy doll in "Stage Fright", with its splash of blood, is set before an arrangement of mirrors which reflect and re-reflect it into infinity. Cabin 1 of the Bates Motel is replicated, with one wall taken out so that we can see from the bed straight into the bathroom opposite, all of it roped-off like one of the rooms at Mt. Vernon, George and Martha Washington's home, in Virginia.

Also to be found are test photos of Tippi Hedren, made during pre-production for "Marnie", possibly to determine which disguises Hedren's character would appear in during the film (the hash marks, plainly made on each of the photos, are left unexplained); and, most surprising and delightful, a fashion still showing Hitchcock menacing a model while the Bates residence looms in the background.

We know already that Hitchcock was very particular about the type of people he worked with---not just actors but technicians, designers, composers. He was well-versed in art (Hitchcock first worked in the film business as a designer) and in literature (collaborators would include Thornton Wilder, Maxwell Anderson, and novelist Czenzi Ormonde, who was brought in to help shape-up "Strangers on a Train" after a truculent Raymond Chandler left the project).

What does this particular book hope to tell us about Hitchcock? Once one moves beyond the visuals, so to speak, the text---which was written by Jean-Pierre Dufreigne, a novelist and cultural editor for the magazine "L'Express"---increasingly reveals itself to be a complete and utter hash. For starters, it was originally written in French, then translated into English, so that any quotes used in the book that were made by Hitchcock, who was often very particular about what he said and how he said it, have been translated from English to French and then back into English. Thus Hitchcock's comment, made during the filming of "Dial M for Murder", on how capturing the "gleam" on a pair of scissors was as important as hollandaise sauce on asparagus, has been turned into obtaining the "dazzle" on a pair of scissors. (Not, I'm afraid, the same thing.) Ditto with regards to a remark made to François Truffaut, " An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into cab with you and, to your surprise, she'll probably pull a man's pants open." ; this transmogrifies into, "An English girl is quite capable of getting into a taxi with you and, much to your surprise, ripping over your fly." (Doesn't quite sound like Hitchcock.)

Some of the text itself seems poorly translated---a section on "special effects" turns out to be about clothing accessories, with no apparent irony intended, and the word "hero" is used where the term "protagonist" would be more exact in meaning. Some of the author's own statements, though, might have been dizzying even in the original French. "Pretty women are married to unattractive nincompoops as punishment for preciousness in Hitchcock's moral universe." "Hitchcock's bad guys are more than bastards: they invariably have a sentimental flaw, unless they are henchmen." On "Vertigo", the director "never gave any directions to Kim Novak. That led to the even stronger power of the enigmatic aspect of this blonde with two faces." On filming women, "The nape of the neck was the only piece of skin lined by the kind of hairiness that it was permissible to show. Hitchcock had to do without everything else, but he wasn't going to do without this." (And if you think that's wild, wait until you get to the annotated filmography at the end of the book.)

There are also blunders galore. The account of the 1979 Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony and dinner held by the American Film Institute is but one example. Princess Grace---a.k.a. Grace Kelly, star of "Dial M...", "Rear Window", "To Catch a Thief", and, almost, "Marnie"---was not "already" dead in 1979 (would've made it difficult for her to pay those regular visits she had been making to the Hitchcocks), and Tippi Hedren had not necessarily "fled film in disgust" (she had left, but in order to start the Shambala wildlife preserve and foundation, and later to advocate on behalf of the international treaty banning whaling); she was also in attendance at the 1979 ceremony. Hitchcock's wife, Alma, was receiving medical attention after having suffered a serious stroke eight years earlier, but she, too, was at the ceremony---not stranded "in hospital", as Dufreigne claims---and Hitchcock paid special tribute to her at the conclusion of the evening during his award acceptance speech (which the book also gets wrong).

As for the films, Dufreigne keeps circling around to the same ones for the same examples over and over---the more well-known titles from the 1950s and 60s, with only a couple from the 40s and 30s; none of the silents, save for a brief reference to "The Lodger"; and the design work that Hitchcock did prior to making his directoral debut with "The Pleasure Garden", released in 1925, and which encompasses some 16 films, is completely unnoted. Dufreigne categorizes Hitchcock as a "Catholic" director, but doesn't say anything about "I Confess", whose main character was a Catholic priest.

More distressing is when Dufreigne distorts the facts for his own purposes. The notorious (and unverified) "sexual proposition" Hitchcock is alleged to have made to Tippi Hedren is located during the making of "The Birds", not "Marnie", so as to explain how live birds were thrown at Hedren during the filming of the attic scene as "revenge" for Hitchcock's being turned-down. Live birds were used in the scene as a last resort, but the idea that the director would deliberately risk disfiguring---or worse---the star of his latest, costly, and as-yet-unfinished film is too dopey for words. (For one thing, the completion bond people would've thrown a fit.)

Comments about Hitchcock's personal side in the book tend to be general, sweeping, somewhat predictable---that his shyness tended to make him film his actresses with their backs to the camera (well, some of the time...), that he was emotionally aloof, neurotic (show me an artist who ISN'T neurotic---"The reason we see things differently is because we're artists," one friend told me). Hitchcock did sometimes enjoy telling risque or bawdy stories on the set, and he could sometimes be withering or cold towards performers who were disappointing to him, but he also prided himself on being an overall professional, on being punctual, polite, and he appreciated performers who showed up on time and ready to work. Dufreigne's repeated assertions that Hitchcock preferred blonde actresses makes the appearance of the brunettes Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Anna Massey in "Frenzy" seem pretty inexplicable. Likewise the observation that Hitchcock often set key scenes in kitchens and dining rooms, but never bedrooms (read: sexual neurosis): Cary Grant rescues Ingrid Bergman from a bedroom in "Notorious", Joan Fontaine is served a glass of milk in "Suspicion" while in bed, Jon Finch takes a tire iron to someone who's in bed in "Frenzy".... I could go on. (Disparaging, and unwarranted, remarks are also made towards some of the people Hitchcock worked with, but there are some particularly crappy comments made about Anthony Perkins, whom Dufreigne dismisses as "a product through-and-through of New York---intellectual, snobbish, and arrogant", his acting "seeming uncontrolled", and at one point likened to a "retarded adolescent". Perkins started rehearsals for the lead in the new Frank Loesser musical "Greenwillow" right after finishing work on "Psycho", and, along with co-writing the screenplay for "The Last of Sheila" with Stephen Sondheim, would later give varied and exemplary performances in "Goodbye Again", "Pretty Poison", "Winter Kills", and, especially, Alan Rudolph's "Remember My Name".)

"Hitchcock Style" appears in the U.S. six months after the publication of Patrick McGilligan's "Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light", and while Dufreigne would not have had ready access to McGilligan's manuscript, his book suffers as a result of it anyway. McGilligan makes a strong case for Hitchcock's family life---both when he was growing up, and the later one he had with Alma and daughter Pat---as being more warm and supportive than had been previously surmised. Hitchcock's contractual arrangements during the Fifties and Sixties vastly affected what films he made during those periods, and while the deal Hitchcock made with M.C.A., beginning in the early 1960s, ensured that he and Alma would be able to live comfortably for the rest of their lives (though it also gave M.C.A. the last word on which Hitchcock films would be "green-lighted" for production), the couple used their assets to help friends and to perform many acts of unpublicized charity.

As for the "Tippi" episode---Donald Spoto first reported it in his 1983 biography "The Dark Side of Genius", while McGilligan takes a more guarded approach, pointing out that Hitchcock made no secret about the fact that he had been sexually impotent for many years. Spoto's tone is different from the one he had used in his earlier "The Art of Alfred Hitchcock" (1978), as if he became increasingly disenchanted with his subject while in the process of writing more extensively about him. This is not the case with McGilligan's biography (or with the revised edition François Truffaut brought out of his book of interviews with the director), while David Freeman's "The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock" (1984) is unsparing but sympathetic---Freeman wrote, and completed, the screenplay for what would have been Hitchcock's next film after "Family Plot", an espionage and escape thriller entitled "The Short Night".

In "Hitchcock Style", once notices early on a recurring refrain, repeated, at regular intervals and with the same notes, throughout the rest of the book: Hitchcock is described as "short", "ugly", "grouchy", "grumpy", and "lily-livered", a "plump little man who did not like himself very much", and a "pudgy midget". Ashamed of his Cockney origins, he---in comparison with Erich von Stroheim, who reinvented himself by inserting the "von" into his name after he arrived in Hollywood---got rid of his accent and had people call him, not "Fred" or "Cockie", but "Hitch". He had a "penny-pinching stinginess", amassed millions even before he crossed from London to the U.S., and had wife Alma Reville's name included in the credits of all his films, either as screenwriter (Hitchcock, Dufreigne says, never wrote a word, and disdained dialogue), "advisor", or both, a double-billing that was "a neat way for doubling the family's wages". (Dufreigne even suggests that Alma may have chosen, or procured, so to speak, the famous "icy blondes"---the "Hitchcockette", the "Hitchcoquette", the "Hitchcockatrice", as the author calls them--- who appeared in her husband's films.)

Having been "born" with fear---his arrival, Dufreigne says, on August 13, 1899, caused his family to miss attending Mass services at their local Catholic church, "a major omission"---Hitchcock made it the centerpiece of his films; being "ugly, fat, and bald", he punished the beautiful women in his films who would not normally yield to him in real life. Hitchcock was not "the master of suspense" either, but "the master of elegance"---Dufreigne argues that you can get the same type of "frisson" either way---and that his modus operandi was not suspense, but "desire", although shortly thereafter Dufreigne says that Hitchcock "repressed" desire, as well. (Well, it's got to be either one or the other, dear, not both, the reader responds.)

Hitchcock's craft was actually "arrogance", his style simply the result of the fact that "he did not want to film like other people"; the striving for "perfection" also made him "pitiless", and, worse, a "misogynist". Turning his back on "all means of sentimentality", he sought "pure sensation", the "absurd masochistic joy of suspense". Despite being "somewhat unsightly" and having a "portly paunch", his "full-length portrait" went up outside theaters that were showing his films to attract long lines of moviegoers, and thus was also a way to "thumb [his] nose" at the "sublime stars" he worked with. "Compared to Hitch, Orson Welles and even Erich (von) Stroheim" [sic] "had all the modesty of extras...," writes Dufreigne. "The little 'Cock' turned into one great big megalomaniac!"

And, as the finishing touch, Dufreigne adds, "Hitchcock's oeuvre lends itself to wild simplification." No, it doesn't. Otherwise, we would not still be interested in the films or drawn to them if they did not continue to offer ways and means of generating fascination and interest. Hitchcock may have indeed been a frightened man in real life, but there were other reasons why he was drawn to making suspense films: because they were exciting and interesting to watch. Rather than become rigid and "pitiless" in an unchanging style, Hitchcock tried all sorts of technical and narrative innovations---in what would have been his 1980 film, "The Short Night", he would have challenged audiences even further, presenting them with a protagonist who deliberately murders an innocent woman halfway through the story. (Dufreigne dismisses this project---which Hitchcock devoted the last four years of his life to---in one sentence, and doesn't elaborate.)

As for the charge of misogyny.... The opening scene of Terry Johnson's "Hitchcock Blonde" has a young female student asserting that the reason "Psycho"---or, more specifically, the shower scene in "Psycho"---has fascinated so many people is because it is essentially misogynistic ("An expression of misogyny so extreme, yet so precise...," the student says in the play). I wondered: what is it really about that scene that has interested so many people for years? Aside from the technical aspects and the surprise factor, is it really because on some level we enjoy seeing Janet Leigh's Marion Crane being murdered? But then I thought: no. The reason the scene continues to have power is because, in one way or another, we have come to identify, in some respect, with Marion. No matter how many times we see the film. Even the way the scene itself is filmed---we feel that it is us, in the shower, fending off the knife of Mrs. Bates, and yet to no avail. We have come to sympathize with Marion, and everything leading up to then is made to enable us to do so, not to turn her into an object for mere bloodletting. And for a misogynistic director, Hitchcock has certainly gotten some very good work from a number of actresses: along with Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren, an off-hand accounting includes Madeleine Carroll, Edna Best, Nova Pilbeam, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson, Teresa Wright, Ingrid Bergman, Tallulah Bankhead, Grace Kelly, Mildred Natwick, Thelma Ritter, Constance Collier, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Eva Marie Saint, Suzanne Pleshette, Jessica Tandy, Ethel Griffies, Diane Baker, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Billie Whitelaw, and Barbara Harris, who was able to sell us that final plot twist at the very end of "Family Plot". (And, if "The Short Night" had gone into production, Hitchcock's first choice to play the female lead in that film would have been Liv Ullmann.) This definitely stacks up well against the work of other directors, past and present, whom I can say are definitely misogynists (but leave us move on).

The book might have done better if it had just focused on the films themselves, but it's difficult to think of Hitchcock's films without thinking of the animating presence behind them. But the attempt to reduce Hitchcock to nothing more than a compendium of clichés and petty vices makes for no Hitchcock at all, which means that the only thing missing from "Hitchcock Style" is Hitchcock himself.