The Two Faces of Alfred Hitchcock

The Two Faces of Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock (2012) Dir. Sacha Gervasi

The Girl (2012) Dir. Julian Jarrold

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Please note that these reviews contain discussion of major plot points of both films and so should be considered spoiler heavy.

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Alfred Hitchcock was notoriously difficult with women.  The sound tests he made with Anny Ondra for the 1929 film Blackmail see him quizzing her about her sex life.  Just under a decade later, he maximised discomfort for Madeleine Carroll on The 39 Steps by handcuffing her to co-star Robert Donat.  Such incidents were presented as part of Hitchcock’s playful nature; they fit with the man known for directing such suspenseful pictures with tongue firmly in cheek.

When Hitch decamped to Hollywood in 1940 he was already an international star, and the studio system wanted some of that glory for themselves.  He made three pictures with super-producer David O. Selznick, and Selznick kept loaning him out to other studios, notably RKO where he made Notorious.  Hollywood didn’t serve Hitch very well in the 1940s, and he churned out some mediocre pictures (with a couple of notable exceptions, Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Notorious and Shadow of a Doubt), but the 1950s saw him moving into more fertile territory and an infatuation with a new ‘Hitchcock Blonde’, Grace Kelly.  Kelly caught Hitch’s eye in a way I don’t think any leading lady truly had since Madeleine Carroll, but Kelly left Hitch to become a princess.  Vera Miles took her place, but became pregnant. 

Two new films, Hitchcock and The Girl, both explore the genius behind Alfred Hitchcock’s films, and what it meant to be a Hitchcock Blonde.

Hitchcock, written by John J. McLaughlin and directed by Sacha Gervasi, is based on Stephen Rebello's non-fiction book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.  Gervasi is best known for his documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008), a highly regarded documentary about the Canadian heavy metal band.  This is debut fiction film.  Immediately in this picture, the blending of the real and the fictional is clear.  We open on Ed Gein’s farmhouse, in rural Wisconsin in 1949, where Ed Gein, soon-to-be-infamous serial killer is about to murder his brother.  Post-killing, however, Alfred Hitchcock steps in front of the camera and speaks to the audience.  This is a knowing moment for the cine-literate: Hitch, in his famous cinema trailers, addressed the paying public, baiting and teasing them with delights to come, as he would later do in his TV series.  It also sets the tone of Gervasi’s film early on: what we are getting here is playful Hitch, the public man with only the lightest of insights into his troubled personal life.

Gervasi’s film is a polished affair.  Playing the director, Anthony Hopkins gives a memorable, comedic performance that highlights the macabre sense of humour in the man.  At many times, the audience laughs with Hitch at the unfortunate people who are the recipient of his bad taste jokes.  His long-time wife, Alma Reville, is played by Helen Mirren.  Rounding out the picture is Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh.  

Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho

 

Janet Leigh was rarely a memorable actress, and her best role is undoubtedly as the victim Marion Crane in Psycho: but even here what makes her memorable is circumstance, and Hitch’s camera, rather than any true screen presence.  As with Tippi Hedren in the later films, the emptiness of the performance is what allows the camera to fill them up and make them shine.   There is a moment late in The Girl, the other Hitchcock bio-film to be made, when Hitch is looking at Tippi Hedren against a yellow screen as she shoots the final moments of her last great film, where for the briefest of seconds she becomes real to the great man, human, and not just an object of desire, and she acts for the first time, rather than just existing, and it is transcendent.  

Toby Jones and Sienna Miller as Hitch and Tippi

The Girl, co-produced by HBO Films and BBC Films, premiered on television.  Directed by Julian Jarrold, who has worked widely in British crime TV, and made a few well-received but underperforming films, The Girl is written by Gwyneth Hughes and based on Spellbound by Beauty by Donald Spoto.  Spoto was one of the first critics to highlight the perverse darkness that imbues much of Hitch’s cinema, and has written a number of books on the master, from when he was still alive, and beyond.  In this film, based on the making of both The Birds and Marnie (the duration of Hitch’s relationship with Hedren), Hitch is played by Toby Jones, Alma by Imelda Staunton and Tippi by Sienna Miller.

The Girl is set three years after Hitchcock, and presents a very different side to the great man.  In this film, Hitch is a lecherous dictator, whose wife is cowed by his arrogance and timid against his will. If one contrasts Imelda Staunton’s performance with that of Helen Mirren’s, who battles cheek by jowl against her husband, and is more dominant over him then he is over her, it is difficult to believe we are looking at the same woman.  The same is true of Hitch himself.  Hopkins plays the man for laughs, Jones seeks out the darkness: but here is a critical difference between the portrayals of the man over the woman – both these incarnations of Alfred Hitchcock are conceivably the same man. 

Hopkins’s performance allows the darkness in Hitch to accrue slowly.  There are subtle hints that not all is well in Hitch’s mind: we see him watching the blonde’s that walk by his office window, he begins to suffer nightmares, and soon he has Ed Gein as his psychiatrist.  Hopkins’s Hitchcock never crosses the line into brutality or sexual violence, and the psychosomatic disorders he suffers in this film are all revealed to be part of his obsession with making the perfect picture.  The darkness in this Hitchcock is danced away as the screams of the audience enjoying Psycho for the first time cleanse him spiritually, emotionally and physically.  By the end of Hitchcock, the man is in playful mood again, addressing the audience, hoping to soon have another bolt of inspiration: just as a crow lands on his shoulder before flying off.  

Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins as Alma and Hitch

In this film his relationship with Janet Leigh is kind and gentle.  He is flirtatious with her, and Alma seems to allow it (there is a niggling undercurrent in this and The Girl about Alma’s complicity in the attempted seduction of Hitch’s female leads, almost as if she knows he needs to fall in love with his leading ladies to make the perfect picture), and they strike up a camaraderie, their bond professional without ever crossing the line.  Only in one brief scene does Hitch frighten her, when she isn’t giving enough fear to her impending murder in the infamous shower sequence – but he has frightened her in the name of art, so the negativity of character is undermined by the requirements of art. 

There are other moments that suggest Hitch might have a problem with women.  In Hitchcock, Scarlett Johansson’s Janet Leigh is talking with Jessica Biel's Vera Miles, trying to find out why this actress who was meant to be Hitchcock’s next big star (following 1956’s The Wrong Man) is being side-lined in Psycho.  Miles tells Leigh it is because she got pregnant, that she wanted a family.  Leigh asks Hitch about it, and he asks with enormous sadness in his eyes, “Why do they always leave me?”  The undercurrent is him asking Leigh not to leave him too.  She will, though, for she too has a life outside Hitch: a marriage to Tony Curtis, and a two year old daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis.  The heart of this sequence, and reasoning, seems psychologically flawed however: if Hitch side-lined Miles because she started a family, why has he allowed himself to use a woman already nine years into a famous marriage, and already a mother?  In the film he uses her because his wife, Alma, says she will be perfect.  In The Girl, when he and Alma are casting about for someone to use in The Birds, it is Alma who suggests Tippi Hedren.  Are these films suggesting Hitch could only fall for those women that his wife had first approved?  Whatever the darkness is that occasionally bubbles away at the edges of Gervasi’s film, it is muted by the positive portrayal it wishes to make of the man: this is a film made by a Hollywood production company, The Montecito Picture Company, and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, and aimed at the Academy Award crowd.  It is a back-slap of a movie to Old Hollywood, and an affirmation that belief in yourself and your work will see you rewarded in the end: everybody lives happily ever after.

The Girl, however, takes us further than the playful Hitchcock, into the dark heart of the man.  This Hitchcock is a sexual predator.  In a car ride to the location shoot for The Birds, Hitchcock attempts to rape Tippi Hedren.  It is a shocking claim, but one whose authenticity has to be allowed as The Girl has been made with Hedren’s blessing.  In this film, Toby Jones plays Hitchcock as a seething, power-hungry, megalomaniac genius; he sits hunched in his chair, forcing Hedren to do take after take, allowing her to be brutalised and injured on camera, until she is broken and bleeding and catatonic. 

Tippi Hedren, like Janet Leigh, was never a truly great screen presence.  She made little impact after her two films with Hitchcock, appearing in a lot of mediocre television.  Like Janet Leigh, she was a good actress hindered by some bad film choices, but with both women, Hitchcock found a way of making them great, and for them to shine brilliantly.  Most famously, and in a moment chillingly recreated in The Girl, Hitchcock forced Hedren to endure five days of attack by real life birds (after being assured they would be mechanical) who clawed at her, but whose beaks were closed with elastic bands.  Cary Grant visited her on set and said that she was the bravest actress he knew.  On the fifth day, she was clawed close to her eye, and she suffered a breakdown on set.  Ordered to take a week off by the doctor, she endured nightmares of attacking birds.  The question becomes why was this apparent psychological and physical torment necessary?  Hitch clearly hadn’t got the scene he wanted.  He wanted to see the sheer mental and emotional turmoil of this terror destroying Melanie Daniels (the character Hedren was playing).  Did Hedron deserve to endure this torment to achieve Hitchcock’s art?  Undoubtedly not – but the scene, when seen in the finished film, is what is needed: we can see Melanie Daniels suffering and dying inside.  It is the same motivation as him attacking Johansson’s Janet Leigh in Hitchcock.

One would think that Hedren would have left Hitchcock after suffering a sexual assault by him, and the psychological assault of appearing in his film – but she still with him a year later making Marnie.  Marnie is a difficult film: Donald Spoto claims it is Hitchcock’s last great masterpiece, others feel it is an awkward watch.  It is a film interested in sex and sexual violence, and in frigidity and rape.  It fits with The Girl’s thesis that Hitchcock was a sexual predator – and Marnie does feel a very personal film, much like Frenzy, Hitchcock’s genuine last great masterpiece, and another film about sexual violence – but it serves as a great disconnect between what we have learned of the man through these films, and what we know of the man from others.  Here it should be noted that Kim Novak, another Hitchcock blonde, and the star of the film that is described as Hitchcock’s truest fantasy and the most autobiographical in terms of mood, and a family friend, Nora Brown, refute the portrayal of Hitchcock in The Girl.  The Girl’s presentation of events is that Hedren didn’t have the emotional and psychological power to break her contract with Hitchcock at the end of The Birds, but that she did by the end of Marnie.  But what has changed in that time?  He was brutal to her in the making of The Birds, and she stays.  He propositioned her near the end of Marnie and she turned him down and walked.  The Girl fails to dramatize the internal thoughts processes that led to Hedren changing her mind, and finding strength, leaving the film with a hole in its centre.

Alfred Hitchcock

So we have two films about the same man, but both are different.  He is a Jekyll and Hyde figure, shifting between macabre humour and macabre action.  He is a good husband in one, a poor one in another. Hitchcock, the film, shows us that he loves his wife dearly – he is driven into madness when he discovers she might be having an affair – but in The Girl he loathes her.  He tells Hedren he never really loved her.  There is a moment late in The Girl, when Hitch is bought home a little drunk, and he tells his friend that he has not had sex in a long time, and that he no longer gets erections.  What that moment tells us is that these unhealthy fixations with his movie blondes are not about sex, but about desire.  I wondered, as I watched him torturing Hedren with repeated attack after attack by birds, whether Hitch was self-flagellating himself for having these desires: it was not Hedren that was suffering, but him, at least in his head. 

Neither film gives us a true portrait of Alfred Hitchcock – that is impossible, especially in just 90 minutes of screen time – and neither film agrees on who and what the man really was; with The Girl especially appearing like an attack on a man who can no longer defend himself.  Also both fail to show something vitally important to the understanding of this man.  He married Alma Reville in 1926, and she was his wife until his death in 1980.  Fifty four years of marriage is a long time, and to have lasted so long there must have been love and respect, and dedication to him.  In his early days, an actress, Clare Greet, appeared in six films he directed, more than any other actress, and she believed in him so much she used some of her own money to fund Number 13.  These expressions of love and dedication are not something the figure shown in The Girl would ever receive.  Nobody doubts Alfred Hitchcock had a dark side, and that he was a troubled genius, but he must have had kindness in him too, to inspire such dedication in others, and one should remember such things when they watch either of these two films.

The Girl is now available on DVD/Blu-Ray.

Hitchcock is on limited release in the US and will be in UK cinemas in early 2013.

Adam at Six A.M.: a review

1970s American cinema was at a crossroads.  The musical-western-Technicolor extravaganzas that had dominated the 1950s and 1960s, and once so-wowed cinema audiences, were drawing less crowds.  They were stale in a contemporary world that had suffered the assassination of a president and the Vietnam War.  America had lost its innocence, and had gained a youth questioning how it had all come to this.  The ‘Young Beards’ took over from the late 1960s (Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola), and they made some loud, brash pictures.  But there was a second thread to 1970s cinema, not interested in chasing the youth money, as many of the pictures now were, but instead choosing to try and answer some of the questions of its demographic:  Why?  How?  What is the point?  Some mature, interesting pictures came out of that period: Five Easy Pieces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Two-Lane Blacktop.  What these pictures shared was a gaze not ordinarily seen in American cinema, at least not for a long time: the lives of the poor, the disenfranchised, the workers.  Many of the films that came out of that time are cornerstones of American film studies today.  Not all of them made an impact, though.

In 1970, a yet to be famous actor by the name of Michael Douglas was trying to make his name in his father’s industry.  He’d already done one film that reflected the youth dissatisfaction with contemporary American politics, in Hail Hero! (1969). For his second film, a journeyman TV director by the name of Robert Scheerer signed him up to play the titular Adam, in the film Adam at Six A.M..   Written by Elinor and Stephen Karpf, Adam Gaines is a lecturer in semantics at a Californian university.  At the start of the summer break, a relative dies and he travels back to the Missouri town where she lived, and dissatisfied with his Californian life, enlists as a labourer cutting down trees and falls for a local girl.

It is an entirely unconvincing film that everybody involved in seems to think is high art.  There is an intellectual debt to European cinema – Blow-Up is mentioned, particularly to draw a contrast between the ‘yokels’ who think the film a waste of time, and Douglas’s Gaines who tells them how wrong they are.  His position as a lecturer in semantics leads to an explanation of what that subject is, given to the same ignorant ‘yokels’ – and here is the big difference between European cinema and a film that wants to be considered in the same breath: a European film would not have semantics explained in dull exposition. In fact, such a film would never have explained the subject, but rather allowed us to see how the film plays out a semantic argument.  In this film, what people think they want is not what they want – and director Scheerer plays out the semantic arguments in obvious visual and textual ways, allowing no nuance or subtlety to develop in his picture.

That said there are some things of note here.  Occasionally – and it really is only once or twice – Scheerer’s direction takes on a greater visual quality that previously shown (there is a well shot, lit, and directed sequence of a character alone in the dark, with only the light of the phone-booth to keep him company, as he drifts further away from people he thought friends and a woman he doesn’t know but wants to).  The cast really go for it as well – Michael Douglas, looking as young as a student rather than a lecturer, commits himself admirably – star wattage is in evidence, even here.  Lee Purcell as the girl, Jerri Jo Hopper, is given a rather thankless duty as a girl who just wants marriage and a home of her own, but manages to do something with it.  She is a girl you’d want to marry, until you know she wants to marry and have the same life her folks had too: that is, she’s a girl who’d go to those musical-western-Technicolor extravaganzas and be happy – and aren’t we past that now?  Joe Don Baker manages to do something as well with another underwritten part, of the labourer best friend who wants to go into TV repair but can’t ever get the money because he’s spending it on booze and gambling.  

The end of the film has many of the characters riding off into the sunset, and Adam Gaines settling down to be with the woman he loves. But it’s not the end of the story – and here is where the fact that Gaines is a lecturer in semantics becomes important plot-wise, and so unsubtly done – for as he walks around a home filled with memorabilia for his forthcoming wedding, he reads the signs and in them sees his future.  One visual clue would have been enough in a European film, but in Scheerer’s the whole house is filled with them, it is a grotesque realisation of the nightmare that awaits Gaines if he stays in Missouri, if he stays with Jerry-Jo.  For after all, for these young men of America, isn’t the future in tackling injustice and asking questions, not settling for what your parents had and being happy?  As the ice-cream melts on the two-lane blacktop, the total rejection of past attitudes is forged, and Gaines is off to an uncertain future.

Adam at Six A.M. was never a hit in its own day.  It is too unsubtle to ever be a hit, and too weakly directed.  Its script is laboured, a bloated exaggeration of European art-house movies of the day.  It has some lovely scenery – the film was shot in the backwaters of Missouri – and Michael Douglas would go onto bigger, better things: as producer he would unleash some of those aforementioned great pictures into the world.  But this, it’s a relic of another age now, full of rusted ideas.  It could have been great, it just wasn’t.

Une Vie Sans Joie (1924): A Review

Une Vie Sans Joie (1924) aka Backbiters, and sometimes called Catherine, is the first film on which Jean Renoir – that giant of French cinema – received a directing credit.   He shared directing duties with Albert Dieudonné, an actor and writer as well as director, who had some major roles in the silent era (including in this) before retiring from cinema with the onset of sound (though he would be recalled from retirement in mid 1930s and early 1940s for a couple of roles).  Despite the co-direction credit, Une Vie Sans Joie is stamped with certain Renoir preoccupations and imagery that his hand is easy to detect – some sequences are so painterly in their use of light, that one might even detect the hand of Pierre-Auguste in certain scenes.

Looking back on this film, almost ninety years later, is really looking into history: the scenes of provincial life display rustic charm and ingrained poverty – at times it could be a Zola novel bought to life, but this was the reality of French rural life in the 1920s (though it could easily be rural life of the 1880s).  The Zola connection is not made lightly – Renoir would, two films on from this, film a version of Zola’s seminal classic Nana.  Cinematically this is also ancient – the acting, from Catherine Hessling as the lead to Maud Richard as Madame Mallet is over-emphasised in that silent movie way, almost as if they didn’t believe the camera could pick up the nuance of the face.  Catherine Hessling is given free-reign, mostly I suspect, because she was Renoir’s wife.  

Catherine Hessling as 'Catherine'

 

The story is also ancient: the maid to the Mallet family upsets the Madame and so is forced onto the street.  She finds accommodation but cannot pay the rent.  She hears of a job but Madame Mallet controls it.  Monsieur Mallet, who has always taken sympathy on her, hires her has his secretary but Madame Mallet controls her husband too well.  The ending, which should resolve these problems, instead resorts to a runaway tram, and an almost Keystone Kop-esque chase, filmed though in seriousness not jest.  I also suspect there was some disconnect between what Renoir wanted to achieve with this movie, and what Dieudonné desired.  The base comedy – the runaway tram, but also a scene of two men attempting to outdo each other with their ability to put up political posters that ends in slapstick – doesn’t always rest easy against the solemn tone of Catherine’s descent from satisfied life.

Jean Renoir in later years

 

As a beginning to a cinematic career, Une Vie Sans Joie displays certain skills.  When Renoir & Dieudonné’s camera lingers on faces, when it shows us those scenes of provincial life – the crosscutting between a carnival and seduction becoming death – it is a film that reveals talent, but too often it resorts to cheaper tricks, it is occasionally bathetic and most often relies on sentimentality to provoke a reaction.  Later in his career Renoir would show how to create a reaction in an audience without resorting to such base manipulations, but he wasn’t there yet.