Hitchcock: Man and Myth

Alfred Hitchcock is hardly filmdom’s forgotten man. Although Hitchcock passed from the scene in 1980, every year seems to bring forth another few books about his films and his life. One of the latest, from University Press of Kentucky, is A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, The Myths, The Legacy by British filmmaker Tony Lee Moral. Moral, who poses in his book jacket author-photo with a vicious-looking crow on his arm, has previously published studies of both Hitchcock’s Marnie and The Birds. This new Moral work goes back to the beginning, showing Hitchcock developing his filmmaking talents among the German Expressionist. Still, Moral spends the bulk of his time on the late Hollywood Hitchcock, especially on his fraught relationship with anointed star-in-the-making Tippi Hedren.

 The interaction between Hitchcock and Hedren was clearly complex. Once the exquisite Grace Kelly had departed for Monaco, there to take the throne as Princess Grace, Hitchcock was casting around for a new leading lady. There’s not much discussion of why such later Hitchcock blondes as Doris Day (The Man Who Knew Too Much), Kim Novak (Vertigo), and Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest) didn’t entirely fill the bill. But Hickock was apparently after a Hollywood newcomer whom he could mold to his own aesthetic specifications. He found Hedren, a successful New York cover-girl model, while watching a TV commercial for a diet drink. Their first project together, The Birds (1963), proved to be a physical and emotional challenge for the newcomer. But the film’s massive box-office success led to Hedren being given another opportunity, this time for the title role in Hitchcock’s Marnie. This 1964 film, with its lurid sexual subtext, earned mixed reviews and box-office earnings (though it has been rediscovered by critics since). But ultimately tension between director and star led to a break in their relationship, and Hedren never acted for Hitchcock again. In fact, she was later to claim that he actively worked to sabotage her future film career.

 Enter Donald Spoto, a young scholar and film critic who began by idolizing Hitchcock. (His first book, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, was published in 1976).) Though, while teaching in Los Angeles,  he got to meet his idol, Moral posits that Spoto was disappointed not to be able to establish a closer connection. Ultimately, after meeting Tippi Hedren, Spoto published a sensational second book, 1983’s The Dark Side of Genius, which explores what he sees as Hitchcock’s bad behavior toward Hedren and other actresses. He was to expand on this theme once again in 2008’s Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, a study even more lurid than the previous one. Moral, after doggedly questioning Hedren and other Hitchcock cast and crew members, is deeply skeptical about what Spoto sees as Hitchcock’s warped psyche and possessive attitude toward women. (For the record, Hitchcock had a long and apparently successful marriage to screenwriter and film editor Alma Reville, who was his frequent collaborator and sounding-board on his films. He had as well as a solid relationship with daughter Pat, who plays a key role in her father’s Strangers on a Train and continues to defend him today.)

 Frankly, I was surprised by how much of this book focuses on Spoto (including an exploration of his personal sexuality and his rather arcane  religious views). But Moral does make the valid point that, in a “Me Too” era, movie fans are less forgiving of behavior that once might have seemed quite normal on a film set. Did Hitchcock really demand sexual favors of Tippi Hedren? I guess we’ll never know.