Hitchcock
I’ve always wanted to carry that joke a little further. I’d like to hire a woman of that type for a dinner and introduce her to the guests as an elderly aunt of mine. The so-called aunt would say, “Can I have a drink?” And in front of everyone, I would say, “Absolutely not. You know how you are when you drink. No drinks for you.” So the old lady would wander off into a corner, looking very pathetic. All the guests would be quite uncomfortable. Later on Auntie would come over again, with soulful eyes, and I would say very sharply, “It’s no good looking at me like that. Besides, you’re embarrassing everybody.” And the old lady would simply whimper and then begin to cry softly, while the guests wouldn’t know where to look and really would feel they were in the way. Then I’d say, “Look here, you’re ruining our whole party. That’s enough. You’d better go back to your room.”
The only reason I never pulled that joke is that I’m afraid someone might hit me.
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I. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a wealthy, snobbish playgirl, meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), a young lawyer, in a San Francisco bird shop. Despite his sarcastic attitude, she is attracted to him and travels to Bodega Bay to take two small lovebirds as a birthday present to his little sister, Cathy.
As she nears the duck in a rented motorboat, a sea gull swoops down at her, gashing her forehead. Melanie decides to stay, spending the night with Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), the local schoolteacher. Annie warns Melanie that Mitch’s mother, Mrs. Breuner, is jealous and possessive with her son.
The next day, at Cathy’s outdoor birthday party, the gulls swoop down on the picnicking children and that evening hundreds of sparrows come swooping down the chimney, flying all around the house and causing considerable damage. The following morning Mrs. Brenner goes to visit a farmer nearby and finds him dead, with his eyes gouged out. That afternoon, when Melanie discovers an Harming assembly of crows gathering outside the schoolhouse, she and Annie organize the children’s escape. As Melanie escorts them down the road. Annie is trapped behind and sacrifices her life in order to save Cathy. Meanwhile, Melanie and the children take refuge in a restaurant as the birds attack the town’s business section, causing a fire in the gasoline station.
Melanie’s courage during these trials inspires Mitch’s love and his mother’s approval of their romance.
That evening Melanie and the Brenners board up the windows of their home just in time to protect themselves from the enraged birds which dive suicidally against the house, tear at the shingles and gnaw at the doors to get at the people inside. After peace returns. Melanie, hearing a sound upstairs, goes up to the attie to investigate. There she finds herself in a room full of birds which attack her savagely. Finally rescued by Mitch, the girl is in a state of shock. Taking advantage of a momentary lull, Mitch decides to flee. Between the house and the garage and as far as the eye can see, thousands of birds wait in ominous array as the little group emerges from the battered house and moves slowly toward the car.
II. Bernard Hermann created and directed the musical score for all the Hitchcock pictures since The Trouble with Harry in 1955. Prior to that he created the score for Orson Welles’s first two films. Citizen Kane in 1940 and The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942.
Hitchcock demonstrates how Tippi Hedren should faint when she makes a red ink spot on her blouse.
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“MARNIE” ■ A FETISHIST LOVE ■ THE THREE HOSTAGES,” “MARY ROSE,” AND “R.R.R.R.” ■ “TORN CURTAIN” ■ THE BUS IS THE VILLAIN ■ THE SCENE IN THE FACTORY ■ EVERY FILM IS A BRAND-NEW EXPERIENCE ■ THE RISING CURVE ■ THE SITUATION FILM VERSUS THE CHARACTER FILM ■ “I ONLY READ THE LONDON ‘TIMES’ ” ■ A STRICTLY VISUAL MIND ■ HITCHCOCK A CATHOLIC FILM-MAKER? ■ A DREAM FOR THE FUTURE: A FILM SHOWING TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A CITY
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15
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. Now, we come to Marnie. Long before it was actually made, there was some talk that it might mark Grace Kelly’s comeback to the screen. It’s taken from a Winston Graham novel, and I’d like to know which aspect of the book made you decide to do the film.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. The fetish idea. A man wants to go to bed with a thief because she is a thief, just like other men have a yen for a Chinese or a colored woman. Unfortunately, this concept doesn’t come across on the screen. It’s not as effective as Vertigo, where Jimmy Stewart’s feeling for Kim Novak was clearly a fetishist love. To put it bluntly, we’d have had to have Sean Connery catching the girl robbing the safe and show that he felt like jumping at her and raping her on the spot.
F.T. Why is Mamie’s hero so attracted to the girl? Is it that she depends on him because he knows her secret and can turn her over to the police, or is it simply that he finds it exciting to go to bed with a thief?
A.H. It’s both of those things. Absolutely.
F.T. I notice one contradiction within the film: Sean Connery is very good and he has a sort of animal-like quality that fits in perfectly with the sex angle of the story. Yet neither the script nor the dialogue ever really touches on this angle, and Mark Rutland is presented to the viewer simply as a protective character. Only by watching his face very closely can one sense your intention to lead the script into a less conventional direction.I
A.H. That’s true, but remember that I established at the outset that Mark had spotted Marnie. When he learns that she’s robbed the safe, he says, “Oh yes, the girl with the pretty legs . . .” In one of my early British pictures, Murder, I used the stream-of-consciousness technique. If I’d used that technique, we might have heard Sean Connery saying to himself, “I hope she hurries up and does the robbery so that I can catch her at it and possess her!” In this way we would have had a double suspense. We still would have played Marnie from Mark’s point of view, and we’d have shown his satisfaction as he watches the girl, in the act of stealing. I actually thought of constructing the story in that way. I would have shown the man looking at—in fact, secretly watching—a real robbery. Then, he would have followed the thief, would have grabbed Marnie and made out he had just happened on her. He would have taken her by force, while pretending to be outraged. But you can’t really put these things on the screen. The public would reject them. They would say, “Oh no, that’s not right. I don’t believe it!”
F.T. It’s a pity, because that story would have been fascinating. I like Marnie very much as it is, but I feel that it’s difficult for the public, because of the atmosphere, which is stifling, a little like a nightmare.
A.H. In America they’ve re-released it as a double feature with The Birds. It’s doing very well at the box office.
F.T. For all the pieces to fit, it seems to me, the picture would have had to run for three hours. As it is, there is nothing redundant in the story; in fact, on many points, one would like to know more.
A.H. That’s true. I was forced to simplify the whole psychoanalysis aspect of it. In the novel, you know, Marnie agrees to see the psychiatrist every week, as a concession to her husband. In the book her attempts to conceal her past and her real life added up to some very good passages—both funny and tragic. But in the picture we had to telescope all of that into a single scene, with the husband doing the analysis himself.
F.T. Yes, right after one of her nightmares. That was one of the highlights of the film.
A.H. What really bothered me about Marnie were all the secondary characters. I had the feeling that I didn’t know these people, the family in the background. Mark’s father, for instance. And I wasn’t convinced that Sean Connery was a Philadelphia gentleman. You know, if you want to reduce Marnie to its lowest common denominator, it is the story of the prince and the beggar girl. In a story of this kind you need a real gentleman, a more elegant man than what we had.
Hitchcock directs a scene with Scan Connery.
F.T. Someone like Laurence Olivier in Rebecca?
A.H. Exactly. That’s the way you heighten the
fetishist concept. I ran into the same trouble on The Paradine Case.
F.T. Claude Chabrol refers to it as the “temptation of self-destruction,” and you describe it as “degradation for love.” Apparently it’s a dramatic motif that appeals to you very strongly, and I hope that someday you can work it out to your satisfaction.
A.H. I doubt it, because it’s the kind of story that is linked to the class consciousness that prevailed thirty years back. After all, today a princess can marry a photographer and no one lifts an eyebrow.
F.T. In your original treatment there was a wonderful idea, but you dropped it. You wanted to have a love scene that would mark Mamie’s release from her sexual inhibitions, a scene that would take place in the presence of other people.
A.H. Yes, I remember that. In that treatment she went to see her mother and found the house full of neighbors: her mother had just died. That’s where the big love scene would have taken place, to be interrupted by the arrival of the police who came to arrest Marnie. I dropped the whole thing because we ran into the inevitable cliché, with the man saying to the woman who’s being taken away to prison, “I’ll be waiting for you when you come out.”
F.T. So you decided to eliminate the police, and we infer that Marnie is not being harassed because Mark has reimbursed her various victims for their losses. As a matter of fact, it’s my impression that the public never has the feeling that Mamie’s in danger of being arrested. At no time does one get the feeling that she is a hunted woman or in any real danger. There was a similar phenomenon in Spellbound. Two mysteries of essentially different nature are blended together: a moral-psychological problem: What has this character, Gregory Peck or Tippi Hedren, done in his or her childhood? and a material problem: Will the police catch up with the character or not?
Storyboard for the opening scene of Mamie
A.H. I’m sorry, but it seems to me that the threat of a jail sentence is also a moral motive.
F.T. No doubt, but I still feel that a police inquiry and a psychological investigation don’t add up to a clear picture. The viewer isn’t sure whether he’s rooting for the character to discover the key to his neurosis or for him to get away from the police. Aside from that, the trouble with handling both these actions simultaneously is that the police hunt must move quickly, whereas the psychological investigation requires time to be properly developed.
A.H. That’s true. In the construction of Marnie I was bothered by the long period between the time she got her job at Rutland’s and the time she committed the robbery. Between the two, all we had was Mark on the make for the girl. That just wasn’t enough. We often run into the problem of the logic of time. You feel you must show a certain amount of preparation; yet that preparation can become dull. We’re so anxious not to drag it out that we can’t fill it with entertaining details that would make it more interesting.
There was a similar problem in Rear Window, you know, where a long time went by before James Stewart began to look suspiciously at the man across the courtyard.
F.T. Yes. You used the first day for the exposition of the story. But I found that very interesting.
A.H. Well, that’s because Grace Kelly was so nice to look at and the dialogue was pretty good.
F.T. After Marnie there were reports of three film projects that have apparently been delayed or dropped. The press mentic The Three Hostages, from the John Buchan novel; Mary Rose, based on the play by Sir James Barrie; and an original screenplay entitled R.R.R.R.
A.H. That’s right. I worked on those three projects. Let’s begin with The Three Hostages. The novel is full of typical Buchan situations and very close to another book of his, The Thirty-nine Steps. The central figure is the same character, Richard Hannay. The Three Hostages was published in 1924. It tells how the government is about to round up a gang of secret enemies of the British Empire, who Buchan implies are Bolsheviks. These secret enemies, knowing that they are to be arrested at a specific date, kidnap three children whose parents are among the important people in the country. Richard Hannay’s job is to find out where the three hostages are hidden and to get them back.
He gets his first clue before leaving London when he meets Medina, a most elegant gentleman, with a touch of the Oriental about him, a connoisseur of wines, a confidant of prime ministers. Medina invites Hannay to his house and offers to help him. Gradually Hannay realizes that while his host is talking, he is actually trying to hypnotize him, and he allows him to believe the hypnosis has taken effect. A few days later he goes back to see Medina. Someone else is present, and to show the accomplice that he has Hannay in his power, Medina says, “Hannay, go on your hands and knees like a dog. Now go over to that small table and bring back that paper knife between your teeth.” Of course, it was a very suspenseful and amusing scene, since Hannay actually has all his wits about him.
Nevertheless, through this, Hannay is able to pick up the clues that will lead him to the first hostage, a nineteen-year-old young man interned on an island in Norway; then, to the second, a girl he locates in a low dive in London. I forget where he found the third one, but the point is that each of them had been kidnaped by hypnotism.
Now, the reason I dropped the project is that I feel you cannot put hypnotism on the screen and expect it to hold water. It is a condition too remote from the audience’s own experiences. In the same way, it’s impossible on put an illusionist on the screen, because the public knows instinctively, through the tricks they have seen in films, how the director went about it. They will say, “Oh well, he stopped the reel and then took her out of the box!” It’s the same thing for hypnotism. And visually speaking, there would be no difference between someone who is really hypnotized and someone who’s pretending.
F.T. I believe you had already dropped the concept of a kidnaping through hypnotism in the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
A.H. That’s right, I did. In fact, though the first screenplay of The Man Who Knew Too Much was taken from a Bulldog Drummond story, it was influenced by my reading of Buchan. Now, Mary Rose, the second project, is a little like a science-fiction story. I still haven’t definitely dropped the idea of making it. A few years back it might have seemed that the story would be too irrational for the public. But since then the public’s been exposed to these twilight-zone stories, especially on television.
The play starts out with a young soldier coming into an empty house where he and the housekeeper talk about the past. He tells her he was a member of the family that lived there. And here we have a flashback that takes us back thirty years. We see a family in an everyday atmosphere, and a young Navy lieutenant who is there to ask Mary Rose’s parents for her hand in marriage.
The mother and father look at each other in a strange way, and when Mary Rose is out of the room, they say to the young man, “When she was eleven years of age, we went for a holiday to an island in northern Scotland. There, she disappeared for four days. When she came back, she had no awareness of the passage of time and no knowledge of her disappearance.” The parents add: “We have never told her about this, and you may marry her, but do not mention it to her.”
Now there is a lapse of several years, and Mary Rose, who has a two-and-a-half-year-old child, says to her husband; “I want to go on a delayed honeymoon. I’d like to go back to the island where I went as a little girl.” The husband is upset, naturally, but he agrees.
The second act of the play takes place on the island. A young boatman who is studying for the ministry at Aberdeen University is piloting them on a boat and telling them about the local folklore. He mentions that on the island a little boy was once spirited away and a little girl was missing for four days.
They go fishing and the boatman shows the husband how to catch the trout and cook them on the hot stones. Meanwhile, Mary Rose suddenly hears celestial voices, like Debussy’s Sirènes, you know. She starts to move toward them, the wind rises, and presently she is gone
. There is a silence, the wind stops, and the husband starts searching for Mary Rose. He is frantic; he calls out, but she has disappeared. And that’s the end of the second act.
The final act takes us back to the same family twenty-five years later. Mary Rose has been forgotten; the parents are quite old and the husband is now a middle-aged, paunchy man. The phone rings. It’s the boatman, now a minister, who has just found Mary Rose on the island, unchanged. She returns to her family and is bewildered at being confronted with these old people. When she asks to see her little son, they tell her he ran away to sea when he was sixteen. The shock of the whole thing kills her—a heart attack.
Now, we go back to the soldier in the empty house—at the beginning of the story. Mary Rose appears through the door, like a ghost. They have a very natural conversation, and the scene becomes quite pathetic when she tells him that she is waiting and has been waiting for a long time. He asks, “What are you waiting for?” and she says, “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten.” She talks rather like a child. Then, suddenly, you hear the voices through the windows and a big, powerful light. Mary Rose gets up and walks toward the light, vanishing out of sight, and that’s the end of the play.
F.T. It’s quite interesting.
A.H. You should make the picture. You would do it better. It’s not really Hitchcock material. What bothers me is the ghost. If I were to make the film, I would put the girl in a dark-gray dress and I would put a neon tube of light inside, around the bottom of the dress, so that the light would only hit the heroine. Whenever she moved, there would be no shadow on the wall, only a blue light. You’d have to create the impression of photographing a presence rather than a body. At times she would appear very small in the image, at times very big. She wouldn’t be a solid lump, you see, but rather like a sensation. In this way you lose the feeling of real space and time. You should be feeling that you are in the presence of an ephemeral thing, you see.