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.

 

 

 

 

The Philadelphia (and Newport, Rhode Island) Story

High Society (1956) promises fun at the movies. And it delivers. This spritely screwball musical stars Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whose characters are at least somewhat in love with an elegant heiress, Tracy Lord, played by the blonde and beautiful Grace Kelly. This was to be Kelly’s very last movie role before she married a real-life Prince Charming and became Princess Grace of Monaco. Rounding out the cast are the acerbic Celeste Holm and the delightfully ebullient Louis Armstrong. The setting is ritzy Newport, Rhode Island, where the central characters live in posh mansions, surrounded by fawning retainers.  

 Armstrong’s presence is explained by the fact that there’s a jazz festival in the vicinity. He acts as a kind of narrator to open and close the film; he also memorably duets with Crosby on the up-tempo "Now You Has Jazz.” In this story, Crosby plays  C. K. Dexter Haven, a well-heeled singer/composer who is Tracy Lord’s neighbor, as well as her former husband. Though they were once deeply attached, and shared a romantic honeymoon aboard a yacht called the “True Love,” affection has turned to loathing (on Tracy’s part, at least), followed by an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy is on the brink of marrying a staid businessman, and Dex wanders over to observe the hubbub. You see, C. K. Dexter Haven has (in his relaxed way) never quite gotten over Tracy, and he’s hanging around to check on what his former wife is up to.

 Also in residence on the wedding weekend are a magazine journalist (Sinatra) and his photographer sidekick (Holm), determined to get a scoop on this big society event. Everything goes haywire on the night before the nuptials, when Tracy gets drunk and Sinatra’s character gallantly comes to her rescue.

 The Cole Porter ditties (including the romantic hit, “True Love” and a nifty Crosby/Sinatra duet) are appealing, and there are no false notes among the performers. Still, seeing High Society again after many years, I became convinced that there was a better version of this tale to be found. And so, of course, there is. Back in 1940, the great George Cukor directed The Philadelphia Story, based on a Philip Barry stage hit that starred Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn’s Hollywood career had recently been foundering, and so she bought the play’s film rights in order to reintroduce herself to the moviegoing public. It worked magnificently well, especially since Cukor invited two of the era’s brightest male stars, Cary Grant and James Stewart, to play the main men in her life., If Hoboken’s rough-and-tumble Frank Sinatra is amusing when he romances the soignée Grace Kelly in and around her estate’s swimming pool, imagine how much funnier it is when aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart pitches woo to the imperious Hepburn. And of course Cary Grant is Cary Grant, effortlessly suave and just the fellow to tame this particular shrew. What we love about Katharine Hepburn is how wonderfully she plays a woman who is absolutely wrong about pretty much everything. Seeing her get her comeuppance is a delight for those of us who admire strong women but also place great stock in happily-ever-after.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, insisted that the very rich “are different from you and me.” To which his pal Ernest Hemingway wryly reposted, “Yes, they have more money.” Movie fans, particularly in the years coming out of the Great Depression, preferred to think that—despite all their riches—the wealthy could be as foolish as those of us with emptier pockets. The Philadelphia Story certainly proves this is so.   

 

Looking Back at “Rear Window”

When I was much younger, I always had trouble with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 thriller, Rear Window.  Set in New York’s Greenwich Village, it’s the story of Jeff, a globe-trotting photojournalist (James Stewart), who has broken his leg in the line of duty. Stuck in his tiny upstairs flat, with much too much time on his hands, Jeff has nothing to do but spy on his neighbors, through binoculars, in the apartment building across the way. Critics discuss this film as an exploration of voyeurism, with audience members essentially joining Stewart as Peeping Toms. Some recent feminist scholars have gone further, seeing Rear Window in terms of the notorious “male gaze,” the way movies are designed to reinforce men’s stereotypes about the women they can’t stop watching.  

 My problem with the film was this: I too had endured a broken tibia. In fact, I’d endured two, from ski accidents a year and a half apart. (Yes, I quit skiing thereafter.) So I was sensitive indeed to any inaccuracies about life in a plaster cast. I could well understand Jeff’s restlessness, and appreciated the detail of him desperately trying relieve the itchy skin inside the cast by cautiously inserting a long-handled backscratcher. But! Why was he stuck in a wheelchair throughout the film? Why wasn’t there a pair of crutches around?  Yes, a few weeks in a thigh-to-toe plaster cast can indeed seem like an eternity, but why was Jeff so helpless, and so miserable, when his cast was apparently due to come off a mere seven weeks after the accident, thus implying that the break wasn’t all that drastic? (Try wearing a cast for six months sometime!)  

 Fortunately, my legs are both whole these days (knock wood!), which frees me to appreciate Hitchcock’s work on this clever and  original film. I was not surprised to learn that it was made entirely on the Paramount Studios back lot, with Jeff’s fixed point  of view focused almost entirely on a multi-story apartment building that spreads before him like a stage set. It’s a  midsummer heatwave, which means (in an era before the widespread advent of air conditioning) that life plays out through wide-open windows and on fire escapes. He’s spent so much time observing the building’s inhabitants that he’s given some of them nicknames, like Miss Torso (a curvaceous dancer who seems to have few clothes and a lot of company) and Miss Lonelyhearts (who only pretends to have visitors, and appears on the brink of being  suicidal).

 One neighbor (played by the hulking Raymond Burr) apparently likes growing plants in the building’s small flowerbed, but has no use for his neighbor’s little dog. He also doesn’t seem, from Jeff’s wheelchair-bound perspective, to have the best relationship with his invalid wife. He’s a traveling salesman, so perhaps it’s not odd that he comes and goes at odd hours, carrying a suitcase. But Jeff is quick to cast him as the bad guy in a murder mystery. Is he?

 Jeff’s accomplices in trying to solve this mystery that may or may not exist include a peppery visiting nurse (the always delightful Thelma Ritter) and a gorgeous socialite (Grace Kelly) who’s deeply in love with him. Kelly’s Lisa Fremont makes old-time viewers like me recall what was so great about 1950s fashion.  Lisa claims she’s ready to give up her lavish lifestyle to join Jeff in holy matrimony; he’s skeptical, and perhaps he has reason to be. In the course of this film she shows her underlying pluck, but are they ready for happily ever after? That’s one mystery that Rear Window never solves.