The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  Corroboration of that appears in the production files of numerous Hitchcock films. To pick just one example from dozens, the well-known moment in The Birds in which the camera cuts to the caged love birds on the back seat of Melanie’s car, swaying left and right on their perch as Melanie tears around corners was a touch Hitchcock added himself. Being tossed this way and that in a speeding car was something that tickled him, and it crops up as a moment of physical comedy in Notorious, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, and Family Plot.† In the latter two, he strung the joke out for so long that we seem to have left one film and entered another, as though the director had wanted to make a straight-up comedy all along. It is, though, a flourish entirely in keeping with Hitchcock, whose comedic sensibilities stayed conspicuously constant across six decades of filmmaking—in fact, it might be the most recurrent element of his artistic style, even more than the suspense on which his legend has been built.

  Evidence of his early interest in comedy surfaces in several humorous pieces he wrote for the Henley Telegraph, published between 1919 and 1921. None evinces skilled comic writing. Yet it’s remarkable to see how much of Hitchcock’s core personality, his sense of humor, and the subjects of his interest were locked in at a young age. One piece was presented as a melodramatic scene of love and hate between a married couple, only for the twist at the end to reveal it to be a scene from a play, acted out before an audience. Another is a drawn-out joke about a man who unwittingly arranges for his friend to go to bed with his wife. His spoof essay “The History of Pea Eating” speaks of “a process by which a pipe was placed in the mouth and the peas drawn up by pneumatic means. But in the trials the inventor unfortunately turned on the power in the reverse direction, with the result that the victim’s tongue is now much longer than hitherto.” It’s a bit of absurdist drollery in the wry voice that evokes the style of Hitchcock’s television monologues forty years later.

  Hitchcock’s sense of himself as funny was utterly crucial to his identity as a public and private person. Humor was his default means of communication. Shy, and awkward around strangers, he could appear pompous and disdainful to new acquaintances, something that happened regularly in his youth. Learning how to make others laugh offered him the opportunity of “fitting in.” Colleagues at Henley’s remembered him as what the English people of the day would have described as a “good sort,” always ready for joshing and “leg-pulling,” meaning teasing and hoaxing. At Gainsborough Pictures, too, where he worked for Balcon, he was valued for his good cheer as much as for his talent and uncontainable ambition. It was in this period that he began to compile the storehouse of ribald jokes and stories from which he would draw for the rest of his life as a means of connecting with others. The bantering style of the young Hitchcock is even caught on camera. When Hitchcock set his mind to filming Blackmail as a sound movie, he had the problem of what to do about Anny Ondra, the film’s star and one of his favorite actresses, whose strong Czech accent was deemed inappropriate for a story about the travails of a typical girl-next-door Londoner. To test her voice, Hitchcock stood with her in front of a camera and recorded an exchange in which he teased Ondra into a fit of nervous laughter, asking her whether she has “slept with men.” As Ondra turns from the camera, giggling, Hitchcock tells her to “stand in your place, or it will not come out right—as the girl said to the soldier.” Thus, among the first dialogue Hitchcock ever recorded was him embarrassing a woman with a quip about her sex life, topped with a double entendre. He started as he meant to continue. Thirty years later he tried something similar with Tippi Hedren in her screen test, though Hedren navigated the joke without being thrown off track.

  On film sets and at restaurant tables, Hitchcock liked to work out whether he could connect with someone based on their response to his scabrous jokes. His love of creating shock and playing with taboos played some part in this, but he also felt accepted by those who laughed at his gags, and trusted those who understood his sense of humor. When Peggy Robertson first worked with Hitchcock, as script supervisor on Under Capricorn, she felt entirely frozen out; he wouldn’t look at her, let alone speak to her. It wasn’t until she laughed at a dirty story he was telling the actress Margaret Leighton that his attitude changed. “From then on I was his pet,” and part of the inner circle, invited to the end-of-day cocktail sessions in Hitchcock’s office. Hitchcock even arranged for his car to pick her up on the way to collecting him from the Savoy. A quarter-century later, Bernard Cribbins broke through Hitchcock’s on-set formality by reciting limericks about “sex-starved gorillas” and the like.

  Hitchcock’s urge to entertain through comedy was strong and self-evident. He had a catalog of party tricks, anecdotes, and rhymes. He was also very quick-witted, capable of sharp one-liners and bursts of physical comedy, impersonating people with his body and his voice. The film publicist Herb Steinberg remembered being at Chasen’s one evening when Hitchcock bounced to his feet to mimic a little girl in a ballet class, a sight Steinberg recalled as both uncannily accurate and unforgettably funny as Hitchcock did fumbling pliés and pirouettes on the restaurant floor.

  Gags, however, are only one part of the sense of humor that colors Hitchcock’s films. Clive James once wrote that “common sense and a sense of humor are the same things moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.” That definition beautifully describes what humor typically provides in Hitchcock’s work: a perspective that shifts us one step from the world as we know it. There are laughs in most Hitchcock films, plenty of them, but more important, there are layers of irony, coincidence, and uncanniness. Even the most earnest of his films can be seen as bleak jokes played on the protagonist. The Wrong Man and Vertigo, for instance, torment their heroes with situations of role-playing and mistaken identity that could be taken from the text of an Elizabethan-era comedy, the audience watching as characters stumble through a maze that has sprung up around them, constructed of deceit, misunderstanding, and confusion.

  Hitchcock as comedian.

  Going back as far as The White Shadow (1924)—the recently rediscovered movie on which Hitchcock worked, about two twins who swap identities—teasing and deception, puzzles and games, feature prominently. Hitchcock’s role on that film was relatively minor, reminding us that those features of his work that seem most identifiable with him may also have been influenced and nurtured by those he was reticent to credit—producers, writers, other directors, and the conventions of the culture in which he lived and worked. These influences made themselves very apparent on the first films Hitchcock directed. His nine silent movies are of surprising variety, but the ironies of masquerade and performance are prominent in most of them. For example, central characters in Easy Virtue and Champagne are—in very different ways, for very different reasons—forced to change their identities, living lives that are not their own. In the Hitchcock universe, however, it is ultimately impossible to hide one’s real self, a truth that persists right up to Family Plot in 1976.

  At times, audiences struggle to tell whether the implausible situations his characters get wrapped up in are meant to elicit gasps of horror or belly laughs. Hitchcock enjoyed perpetuating the ambiguity, even though he sometimes complained that people misconstrued his intention. When the reviews came out for North by Northwest, Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker declared it “the brilliant realization of a feat he [Hitchcock] has unintentionally been moving toward for more than a decade—a perfect parody of his own work.” Hitchcock liked the “brilliant” bit, but grumbled that there was nothing unintentional about it; the allusions to his previous work were all deliberately crafted in what was intended to be the “Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Rodney Ackland said that he and Hitchcock had done something similar in the 1930s with the film Number Seventeen, which they wanted to write “as a burlesque of all the thrillers . . . and do it so subtly that nobody at Elstree would realize the subject was being guyed.” When Mel Brooks made his film High Anxiety, an a
ffectionate send-up of Hitchcockian thrillers, Hitchcock was so flattered that he sent Brooks a case of Château Haut-Brion. But as many reviewers pointed out at the time, it’s hard to parody something as knowing as Hitchcock, a body of work in which repetitions and clichés come off as ironic in-jokes, parodied in their very telling. Audiences sometimes detected humor in places Hitchcock didn’t intend it. At a test screening for Torn Curtain there was laughter in several unexpected places, including the drawn-out murder scene. Hitchcock put this down to audience anxiety, a need to relieve tension. It might also have been the laughter of recognition, the audience making it known that they were wise to Hitchcock’s strain of irony and self-parody, to the extent that they spotted humor where it wasn’t meant to be.

  When Claude Chabrol—accompanied by Truffaut—interviewed Hitchcock in 1954, he described it as a thoroughly Hitchcockian experience: compelling, disorientating, but ultimately one big joke at his expense. Hitchcock was engaging, but not quite engaged. “We don’t know where to begin with this crafty dissembler,” writes Chabrol, describing how he and Truffaut watched Hitchcock perform, substituting serious answers with jokes and “anecdotes that apparently have ceased to make him laugh some time ago.” At the point that Hitchcock insists that he has no regard for any of his American films, Chabrol realizes that “none of this is serious; he’s just taking us for a ride.” To the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, Hitchcock was pretty explicit in admitting the pleasure he took in leading journalists up the garden path, straight into a brick wall: “You have to write an article about me,” he said toward the end of a playful, almost flirtatious conversation, “and you don’t know anything about me.” “But I do,” retorted Fallaci. “With all your cordial humor, your nice round face, your nice innocent paunch, you are the most wicked, cruel man I have ever met.”

  The English sense of humor—more usually, but less precisely, conflated into the British sense of humor—is often spoken about, not least by the English themselves, as some complex curiosity. In truth, there is nothing elevated about English humor, though elements of it may be distinctive. Its biggest defining feature is perhaps its ubiquity in social interactions among the English. Which is not to say that the English are funnier than any other people, just that even the least funny among them habitually revert to humor as a means of communication, often to mask emotional reserve. A case in point is Hitchcock and his mental Rolodex of daft one-liners and weak puns of which he made frequent, extensive use. Actors were told to mind the “dog’s feet,” meaning “pause”; “don’t come pig’s tail,” he advised dinner guests, meaning “don’t come too early”; “Hitch, without the cock” is how he sometimes introduced himself. Desmond Tester, the boy who played the hapless Stevie in Sabotage, was addressed as “the testicle” on set; Georgine Darcy (Miss Torso in Rear Window) would be asked whether she had indulged in “mastication” during her lunch break. Although such gags grated on some, Darcy adored Hitchcock and his juvenile wordplay. The same was true of Cary Grant, who bonded with Hitchcock over a shared sense of humor. Grant filled pages of notepaper with groan-inducing puns, cheesy jokes, and lightweight witticisms, including a list of spoof film credits that Hitchcock once recited to a reporter: a camera operator by the name of “Otto Focus,” an editor called “Eddie Tor,” and so on.

  In explaining the English sense of humor, the anthropologist Kate Fox says “seriousness is acceptable, solemnity is prohibited. Sincerity is allowed, earnestness is strictly forbidden. Pomposity and self-importance are outlawed.” George Orwell put it even more succinctly when he said that humor is “dignity sitting on a tintack.” It’s a decent working definition of a type of joke that occurs in Hitchcock films from the 1920s to the 1970s, in which Hitchcock attempts to undermine, deflate, and ridicule those who get too big for their boots—including himself, in some of the cameos in which he sends himself up as a passenger who gets bullied by a kid on the train, an exasperated photographer lurking outside a courthouse, a man who has a bus door closed in his face during the New York rush hour. In Murder!, Hitchcock put his lead character, Sir John Menier, through a similarly demeaning experience when he is awoken in a boardinghouse by an army of unruly children and their animals who charge into his room and leap onto his bed. At the same time as making the English version of the film, Hitchcock was filming an exact replica with a German-speaking cast, and he claimed that this scene was struck from the German version as it was deemed inappropriate for a man of such standing to have his dignity compromised for no apparent reason. Hitchcock was bemused: to him, there was nothing funnier than seeing people brought down a peg. There’s even a hint of this in the famous Mount Rushmore scene in North by Northwest, for which Hitchcock’s original idea was for Cary Grant to have a sneezing fit while inside Lincoln’s nose, a funny tableau that would gently mock American reverence for the monument. The humor in Hitchcock’s work might help explain why he never won an Oscar, an award that almost always favors the “serious” over the comedic. He was nominated five times, though three of those—Rebecca, Lifeboat, and Spellbound—are among the most earnest work he ever made, and although Hitchcock thought Psycho was funny, few others agreed.

  On the whole, Hitchcock found a way of translating his humor for American audiences, although it took several years for him to produce work that fused menace and humor as the best of his late English work had. When he did so, it was two American writers who most effectively captured his comedic voice. One was James Allardice, the man responsible for Hitchcock’s television monologues; the other was John Michael Hayes, screenwriter of The Trouble with Harry, a much-overlooked gem of the Hitchcock canon, valuable not only because it is well structured and highly entertaining but also because Hitchcock felt it reflected much of his personality. Adapted from the novel by Jack Trevor Story, the action in Hitchcock’s film is transposed from rural England to Vermont, but its humor of ironic understatement stays decisively on the other side of the Atlantic. The eponymous Harry is a corpse, lying on the ground of an autumnal woodland. Four eccentric locals stumble on him, three of whom believe, wrongly, that they must have been responsible for his death; “the trouble with Harry” is what to do about his body without getting the law involved. As Harry is buried and dug up twice, two love affairs begin among the lead characters. The film ends with both couples planning marriage and the discovery that Harry died of natural causes, letting them all off the hook. The dead body is what Hitchcock referred to as a “Mac-Guffin,” a plot device that acts as a catalyst for the action in a story but is immaterial to its substance. These are very common in Hitchcock films, and although he never intended for the audience to worry about them, the characters usually care very much, such as when Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman go on the hunt for hidden Nazi uranium in Notorious. Not so in The Trouble with Harry. The sudden appearance of a dead body in a quaint New England hamlet doesn’t trigger dread, panic, or anguish, just irritation at the amount of bother involved in covering up a homicide. This was macabre Hitchcock played strictly for laughs.

  With lovers meeting and stumbling across strange secrets in the woods, The Trouble with Harry resembles A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in its highly mannered comedic take on death and violence in out-of-the-way America, it has the look of an ancestor of the Coen brothers’ Fargo. It is, though, Hitchcock’s sense of humor undiluted—albeit one that must also have been very close to that of John Michael Hayes and Jack Trevor Story—and includes what Hitchcock claimed was his favorite line in any of his films, when the bashful Miss Gravely sees Captain Wiles standing over the corpse and asks, “What seems to be the trouble, Captain?” The English silliness and dark understatements were less appreciated by American critics and audiences—The New Yorker harrumphed about the declining quality of Hitchcock by alleging the film “skids to preposterous depths”—though it fared far better in the United Kingdom and in France. Hitchcock felt a little stung that in making a film that so thoroughly pleased himself, he had failed to entertain an audience.

&nb
sp; Someone else who had misgivings about The Trouble with Harry was Thelma Ritter, who had recently performed so brilliantly in the role of Stella in Rear Window. Admiring her comedic talents, Hitchcock asked Ritter to take the part of Miss Gravely (ultimately given to Mildred Natwick), but in a letter to her husband, she sounded appalled at the prospect: “I must not have much vision but this one scares me. It’s lewd, immoral, and for anyone without a real nasty off beat sense of humor, in very bad taste.” The writer Peter Conrad once dubbed Hitchcock “everyone’s wicked uncle,” a homely looking man, ever ready with a barbed gag, intended to “prod at the bad conscience of the twentieth century.” Hitchcock’s sense of humor produced unease, even among many of those who liked and admired him. As already noted, Oriana Fallaci, an avowed fan, labeled him “the most wicked, cruel man I have ever met.” Descriptions like that, whether in jest or in earnest, have been attached to Hitchcock for decades, at least since he cuffed Madeleine Carroll and had her dragged around the set of The 39 Steps. Her costar Robert Donat looked back on the incident with admiration for her stoicism but winced at the “weals and bruises which the handcuffs made on her delicate wrists” and the “humiliations” she endured. John Gielgud, who played alongside Carroll in Secret Agent, also thought Hitchcock was “beastly to her.” Cruelty was something Hitchcock took very seriously—perhaps that’s why he made it the subject of so many jokes.