Hitchcock
F.T. I have no preconceived notions on this and I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems unlikely to me that anyone but a Catholic would have handled Henry Fonda’s prayer scene as you did in The Wrong Man.
A.H. That may be, but on the other hand, you should bear in mind that this was an Italian family. You remember, in Switzerland they have milk chocolate and lakes; in Italy . . .
F.T. In Italy they have the Pope! I forgot that Henry Fonda was portraying an Italian in the picture. But even so, most of your work is strongly permeated by the concept of the original sin, and of man’s guilt.
A.H. How can you say a thing like that when in fact we always have the theme of the innocent man who is constantly in danger, although he isn’t guilty?
F.T. While your hero is generally innocent of the crime for which he’s under suspicion, he is generally guilty of intentions before the fact. For instance, let us take the character of James Stewart in Rear Window. Curiosity isn’t merely a nasty personality trait; in the eyes of the Church it’s actually a sin.
A.H. That’s true, and I agree with you. You remember that a reviewer said it was a horrible film because of the Peeping Tom character. Now, if anyone had mentioned that to me before I embarked on that picture, it certainly wouldn’t have kept me from going ahead with it, because my love of film is far more important to me than any considerations of morality.
F.T. Well, in my opinion, that reviewer is wrong, because Rear Window is anything but an indulgent film. The morality in this picture is simply its lucidity. We’ve already mentioned that scene in which the killer comes up to James Stewart to ask him. “What do you want of me?” In nine out of ten films you’ve made—in forty-five of your fifty pictures—you’ve had tandem confrontations of good and evil characters. The mood grows increasingly oppressive, until someone finally decides to talk up, to turn himself in, or to confess. This is the composite portrait, or the mechanism, that runs through all of your works. Whether by means of a crime plot or not is beside the point; the fact is that for the past forty years you’ve consistently filmed moral dilemmas.
A.H. That’s quite true, and I’ve often wondered why I’ve never been interested in pure stories of everyday conflict. I think it may be because, pictorially speaking, they’re dull.
F.T. Exactly. It might be said that the texture of your films is made up of three elements: fear, sex, and death. These are not daytime preoccupations, like in films that deal with unemployment, racism, poverty, or in the many pictures on everyday love conflicts between men and women. They are nighttime anxieties, therefore, metaphysical anxieties.
A.H. Well, isn’t the main thing that they be connected with life? There might be another reason, and that is that I’m not a writer. I could do a whole script by myself, but I’m too lazy to do that, or too preoccupied in other directions. That’s why I bring other writers in. But I suppose that the films with suspense and atmosphere are, to some degree, my creations as a writer. I don’t think I’m really any good at stories that are completely written by someone else. I think I told you how I suffered with Juno and the Paycock, how helpless I felt at not being able to do something to Sean O’Casey’s story. I kept looking at it and studying it. It was an entity of its own, written by Sean O’Casey, and all I could do about it was to cast it and direct the players.
For me to take someone else’s script and merely photograph it in my own way simply isn’t enough. For better or for worse, I must do the whole thing myself. And yet, in a way, one has to be terribly careful that one doesn’t run out of story ideas. Like any artist who paints or writes, I suppose I’m limited to a certain field. Not that I’m comparing myself to him, but old Rouault was content with judges, clowns, a few women, and Christ on the Cross. That constituted his life’s work. Cézanne was content with a few still lifes and a few scenes in the forest. But how long can a film-maker go on painting the same picture?
Yet I feel there’s still a lot to be done. The phase I’m going through at this time is to try to correct a major weakness in my work in respect to the thin characterizations within the suspense stories. It’s not so simple, because when you work with strong characters, they seem to take you where they want to go. I’m like the old lady with the Boy Scouts who’re trying to help her across the street: “But that’s not where I want to go!” This has always been a conflict with me because I require certain effects. I’m drawn by the wish to put intriguing settings in my pictures, like the motorcar on the Ford assembly line. You might call it a bastard form of writing, an inverted way of arriving at one’s goal. Let’s take North by Northwest, which isn’t based on a novel. When I start on the idea of a film like that, I see the whole film, not merely a particular place or scene, but its direction from beginning to end. Aside from that, I may not have the vaguest idea of what the picture will be about.
F.T. As I see it, Mr. Hitchcock, your approach is anti-literary and purely cinematic. Emptiness has a magnetic appeal for you; you see it as a challenge. The movie house is empty; you must fill it. The screen is empty, and you are impelled to fill it. Your point of departure is not the content but the container. You see the film as a receptacle to be filled to the brim with cinematic ideas or, in your own terms, to be “charged with emotion.”
A.H. That’s about the size of it. Sometimes a film project starts with a very vague idea. One idea, for instance, is that I’d like to do twenty-four hours in the life of a city, and I can see the whole picture from beginning to end. It’s full of incidents, full of backgrounds, a complete cyclic movement. It starts out at five a.m., at daybreak, with a fly crawling on the nose of a tramp lying in a doorway. Then, the early stirrings of life in the city. I’d like to try to do an anthology on food, showing its arrival in the city, its distribution, the selling, buying by people, the cooking, the various ways in which it’s consumed. What happens to it in various hotels; how it’s fixed up and absorbed. And, gradually, the end of the film would show the sewers, and the garbage being dumped out into the ocean. So there’s a cycle, beginning with the gleaming fresh vegetables and ending with the mess that’s poured into the sewers. Thematically, the cycle would show what people do to good things. Your theme might almost be the rottenness of humanity. You could take it through the whole city, look at everything, film everything, and show all of that.
F.T. That story is a perfect illustration of your approach to a film. You start by spelling out all the imagery and the eventual sensations; from there on, the over-all theme will emerge by itself. It could be a fascinating picture.
A.H. There are lots of ways in which to do that film, but who’s going to write it? It would have to be funny, and it would also require a romantic element. You might get ten films in one. I tried it several years ago and asked a writer to do something with the idea, but it didn’t work out.
F.T. I suppose the whole picture would follow the one character as he goes from one end of the city to the other.
A.H. That is the problem. What can we hang the theme on? Of course, there are several possibilities: the man on the run, the newspaper reporter, or a young couple from the country discovering the city for the first time. But these are all too trite. It’s an enormous task, yet I feel the need to do this picture. Strangely enough, when you do a big, modern story, the public doesn’t appreciate its size. But if you should take that same story in the Roman period, it is acknowledged as an enormously important picture. The tragedy is that the public accepts modernity without being awed by it. And yet they’re impressed by the Roman temples because they know they had to be built on the sets. What is Cleopatra, after all, but a little story like Roman Holiday which is about a modern princess in everyday clothes.
Of course, one doesn’t make a picture like this merely for the first row in the balcony or for a few seats on the aisle. It would have to be geared toward two thousand seats in the theater. Because cinema is the greatest known mass medium there is in the world and t
he most powerful. If you’ve designed a picture correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience. To a film-maker, this is always the challenge.
A novel may lose a lot of its interest in the translated version, and a play that’s beautifully acted out on opening night may become shapeless during the rest of the run, but a film travels all over the world. Assuming that it loses fifteen per cent of its impact when it’s subtitled and ten per cent when it’s well dubbed, the image remains intact, even when the projection is faulty. It’s your work that’s being shown—nothing can alter that—and you’re expressing yourself in the same terms everywhere.
Hitchcock was not allergic to publicity. Here, he poses disguised as a woman for a major American magazine. Photograph by Maxwell Coplan.
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I. Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a thief. Her modus operandi is to change her identity as soon as she has committed a successful robbery and then move on to another job. Though Mark Rutland (Scan Country), the head of an important firm, recognizes her from a previous encounter, he says nothing and hires her as a secretary-bookkeeper. He is clearly attracted to the girl, but she ignores his attentions and soon disappears with the contents of the company safe.
Mark discovers the theft, replaces the stolen money and manages to track Mamie down. Instead of turning her over to the police, he takes her back to Philadelphia and marries her. The girl has no choice but to accept him, but the shipboard honeymoon turns out to be a disaster as Mark learns that his bride is frigid. When he takes her by force, she attempts to commit suicide.
Subject to terrifying nightmares, Marnie is a profoundly neurotic girl, and her kleptomania is obviously a form of compensation for her frigidity. When Mark learns that she has lied in claiming to be an orphan, he hires a detective who locates the girl’s mother in Baltimore.
Meanwhile, Marnie makes another attempt to rob the Rutland safe. Mark catches her in the act. Determined to discover the key to her deep-rooted neurosis, he forces his wife to accompany him to Baltimore, where he will try to pry from her mother the secret of her childhood.
Eventually, the puritanical mother breaks down and confesses that she had been a prostitute. When Marnie was a five-year-old child, she killed a sailor with a poker to protect her mother from his molestation. Marnie has, until this day, no memory of the tragedy.
Now that the truth is out in the open, it is clear that Marnie, with the help of her understanding husband, will eventually recover from the secret guilt feelings that have tormented her for years.
II. An American atomic scientist (Paul Newman) pretends to be a defector so as to get a secret scientific formula from Professor Lindt in Leipzig. A first setback occurs when his fiancée (Julie Andrews) decides to follow him to East Germany; the second is when he is forced to take part in the killing of a bodyguard who has discovered his secret mission. Following an exciting series of adventures while he is on the run, he will eventually manage to secure the secret formula and to leave East Germany with his fiancée.
III. This scene takes place, following Gromek’s killing at the farmhouse, in a factory that marks a stopover on the trip between East Berlin and Leipzig. In the canteen Professor Armstrong (Paul Newman) is startled to meet a foreman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gromek. The man is Gromek’s brother. After introducing himself as such to the American visitor, Gromek Two takes hold of a kitchen knife that looks just like the one his brother’s been killed with in the previous episode and begins to slice a sausage. Armstrong is understandably very upset when the man says to him. “My brother loves this kind of sausage. Would you be kind enough to give it to him in Leipzig?”
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HITCHCOCKS FINAL YEARS ■ GRACE KELLY ABANDONS THE CINEMA ■ MORE ON “THE BIRDS,” “MARNIE,” AND “TORN CURTAIN” ■ HITCH MISSES THE STARS ■ THE “GREAT FLAWED FILMS” ■ A PROJECT THAT WAS DROPPED ■ “TOPAZ” MADE TO ORDER FOR THE FRONT OFFICE ■ RETURN TO LONDON WITH “FRENZY” ■ THE PACEMAKER AND “FAMILY PLOT” ■ HITCHCOCK LADEN DOWN WITH TRIBUTES AND HONORS ■ LOVE AND ESPIONAGE ■ “THE SHORT NIGHT” ■ HITCHCOCK IS ILL, SIR ALFRED IS DEAD ■ THE END
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16
At the time we recorded these talks with him, Hitchcock was at the peak of his creative powers. During the previous ten years, he had made eleven movies, among them Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho.
Following the termination of his contract with David O. Selznick, he became his own producer, and even acquired the rights to several of his negatives, which is rare in Hollywood.
Starting with The Birds, all of his subsequent films were made under the auspices of Universal, the company of Lew Wasserman, his former MCA agent and closest friend. He also became one of the five major stockholders of that company. In exchange for a large number of stocks, he gave Universal-MCA the rights to some two hundred hours of television programs he had produced and supervised over a period of ten years.
In 1962, the major problem for Alfred Hitchcock was the disappearance of his star performers, fames Stewart was too old to play the lead in one of his pictures; in private, Hitchcock attributed the commercial failure of Vertigo to Stewart’s aging appearance. At the same time, despite the success of North by Northwest, Cary Grant had voluntarily abandoned his film career in order to leave his fans with a seductive image of his screen personality. In fact, he turned down the male lead in The Birds, and Rod Taylor, an actor who was competent but who lacked charisma, was finally cast in the role.
The problem with actresses was even more serious, for the motto “cherchez la femme” was a strain running throughout Hitchcock’s work.
Though he never forgave Ingrid Bergman for having left him for Rossellini, Hitchcock harbored no resentment toward Grace Kelly. One reason was that Prince Rainier was not a film director; another was that the former cockney lad was rather awed by the title of Princess the beautiful Philadelphia society girl acquired when she left Hollywood for the cliffs of Monaco.
But while he bore no grudge against Grace Kelly, he undoubtedly had regrets, and hoped to retrieve her for Marnie, a film based on a novel by Winston Graham to which he had acquired the rights especially for Grace Kelly. The deal was almost set: Grace Kelly was genuinely tempted, and Prince Rainier, who was very fond of Hitchcock, seemed to favor the project. However, General de Gaulle, irritated by the fiscal advantages that the Principality granted to French businessmen, launched an attack threatening Monaco’s privileged status. In order to maintain his links with France, the Prince was forced to compromise and to make concessions that would alter the frivolous image of his Principality. In the process, Grace Kelly had no choice but to definitively abandon the cinema.
A film lovingly conceived for one actress, and finally enacted by another—the history of cinema is full of these painful disappointments and betrayals. Renoir wanted Catherine Hessling for the title role of La Chienne, but it was Janie Marèze who starred in the film. It was Miriam Hopkins, and not Claudette Colbert, who was slated to star in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Stromboli was originally written for Anna Magnani, but the starring role went to Ingrid Bergman. The title role of The Barefoot Contessa was inspired by Linda Darnell, but was eventually played by Ava Gardner. In her biography, Doris Day recalls that she was distressed by Hitchcock’s taciturnity during the shooting of The Man Who Knew Too Much. She was convinced that she had been cast merely because she was a singer, and that Hitchcock would have preferred Grace Kelly in the part. In this she was perhaps mistaken, for at the end of the shooting, Hitchcock told her, “I said nothing because you gave a good performance. If it had been otherwise, I would most certainly have said something.”
On the other hand, Vertigo was undoubtedly a film in which the leading lady was cast as a substitute for the one Hitchcock had in mind initially. The actress we see on the screen is a substitute, and the change enhances the appeal of the movie, since
this substitution is the main theme of the picture: A man who is still in love with a woman he believes to be dead attempts to re-create the image of the dead woman when he meets up with a girl who is her look-alike.
The irony of the situation was pointed up during a tribute to Hitchcock I attended in New York in 1974. Seated next to Grace Kelly, and viewing the scene in which James Stewart urges Kim Novak to put her hair up in a bun, I realized that Vertigo was even more intriguing in light of the fact that the director had compelled a substitute to imitate the actress he had initially chosen for the role.
Thus, in the early sixties, Hitchcock missed the stars. Hitchcock needed them more than other directors because his cinema was based not on characters but on situations. He hated useless scenes, the kind that can easily be dropped during the editing because they do not serve to move the action forward. He was not a man for digressions, or for those petty details that “ring true.” In his films, one never sees an actor attempt a superfluous gesture, like smoothing down his hair or sneezing. If the actor is framed in a full shot, his silhouette must be impeccable; if he is filmed from the waist up, his hands will not appear at the bottom of the frame. Because of this, the lifelike impact of a Hitchcock movie is based on a personality previously acquired by the actor in films by other directors. James Stewart brought the warmth of John Ford to Hitchcock films, and Cary Grant brings to them the charm he displays in his comedies on marital infidelity.
Yet the immense success of Psycho—which was listed in second place at the box office for 1960, just behind Ben Hur—reassured Hitchcock on his ability to captivate a mass audience with a small film. He was, therefore, confident when he undertook the shooting of The Birds in 1962.