The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

by An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense (epub)

  Three years later, the success of that campaign shaped the promotion of The Birds. “The star of this picture, as with Psycho, is Alfred Hitchcock,” stated the shrewd Madison Avenue PR man William F. Blowitz in a memo to his colleagues. “Therefore, a pivotal element in publicity and advertising will be Hitchcock. In the notes on the magazine campaign, the trailer and ads, all of this is emphasized. The point of the campaign is to sell tickets to The Birds; Hitchcock will be a principal element.” Hitchcock was not just placed at the center of it, he served as its propelling force. As with his work with writers, in matters of publicity he needed collaborators with skills and talents he lacked—yet the entire project was guided by his image and bursts of brilliance. Hitchcock invited the photographer Philippe Halsman to take a series of pictures that would position the director as the star of the film, and remind the audience that he looked on the mayhem in front of his camera with a twinkle in the eye. The screenwriter Evan Hunter remembers how, with hands spread wide as if framing the words on an imaginary billboard, Hitchcock pitched the movie’s tagline to Universal Pictures’ moneymen: “The Birds is coming!” A young executive in the meeting, unused to Hitchcock’s sense of humor, was the first of many to raise a syntactical objection; surely it should be “The birds are coming”? The complaints of grammar pedants notwithstanding, the slogan was perfectly Hitchcock and set the tone for a marketing campaign that provided a seam of humor that the film itself lacks.

  The campaigns for Psycho and The Birds, inspired as they were in many ways, built on practices that Hitchcock, and those who worked to publicize his movies, had been developing for years. Even in promoting The Lodger, there were publicity stunts designed to bring the menace of the film out into the real world, and sound rather like the kind of marketing strategies we more readily associate with our own era. In various towns, men dressed up as the Lodger/the Avenger in shrouding capes and scarves, handed out flyers, and, in one case, acted as walking billboards, carrying suitcases bearing messages such as “BEWARE GIRLS!” and “MEET ME AT THE GRAND,” the name of the local cinema. The Balham Palladium in south London took things an inventive step further by arranging with a nearby shop to re-create a pivotal scene in the film in its window, complete with atmospheric Hitchcockian lighting. The scene caused a buzz along the High Street and “proved very successful as a business proposition,” according to a report from the time. It’s unknown whether Hitchcock had anything to do with such stunts, but he (or perhaps a clipping service in his employ) collected the press coverage of them and pasted them into his scrapbooks, evidence at least of his awareness of and interest in how his work was promoted.

  One of Philippe Halsman’s famous publicity photos for The Birds.

  Within a few years, “Hitchcock” was a big enough name in Britain to dominate marketing campaigns. The same wasn’t quite true in the United States until several years after his relocation, but the publicity staff at the studios found working with Hitchcock a delight; he was full of ideas, open to those of others, and happy to do as many interviews as could be scheduled. Other studio figures were sometimes less enamored of Hitchcock’s brilliance for publicity. As Leonard Leff has written, “feature stories on Spellbound (a David O. Selznick production) somehow became feature stories on Hitchcock (distinctly not a David O. Selznick production).” By 1959, when audiences turned up at their local movie theater to see North by Northwest in its opening weeks, they were confronted—just as they would be for Psycho and The Birds—by life-size cut-outs of Hitchcock, and his name and face were incorporated into much of the marketing paraphernalia that was sent out across the United States. The hero of that movie, Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, is a Madison Avenue advertising guru, a prototype of Don Draper from Mad Men, a devastatingly suave, cynical genius in the grips of a severe identity crisis. Ernest Lehman recollects that when he and Hitchcock were piecing together the ideas for the script, “advertising executive” was just one of dozens of occupations he had written down, but it seemed the perfect fit for a tale about a superficial nowhere man.

  Advertising fascinated Hitchcock. It was modern, open to innovation, multidisciplinary, and it sought to manipulate human behavior by tapping into people’s hopes and fears, just as he did in his films. It was in the advertising department of W.T. Henley’s Telegraph Works Company that Hitchcock’s creativity was given its first professional outlet. There, his strong pictorial imagination and lively wit were put to good use, sketching clever, economical designs to sell electrical cabling. He considered his strongly visual imagination to be more attuned with the disciplines of poster design, photography, and advertising layouts than with many of the traditional, figurative painters he admired. It’s another reminder of the cultural environment from which he emanated. Hitchcock embodied a new type of Briton, an educated member of the urban lower-middle class thoroughly versed in new media—cinema, advertising, radio—that permeated the barriers between commerce, mass culture, and art. The material culture of that environment is strongly present in a number of Hitchcock’s British films—the ads on the train that make Fred yearn for a more exciting life in Rich and Strange; the advertisement for a brand of tea that facilitates a crucial plot point in The Lady Vanishes; and the neon signs in Blackmail, selling West End excitement to ordinary folks on a night out. The series of billboard advertisements that Dorothy Parker worked into the script of Saboteur, which cleverly address the unfolding action, brought the motif into Hitchcock’s American work for the first time.

  The boldness and ubiquity of American advertising was of particular interest to Hitchcock. When he arrived in the US, he was fascinated to hear commercial spots on the radio; back in Britain, the BBC monopoly of radio that lasted until 1973 meant advertising was banned on the airwaves. On his television series, he gained a reputation for his withering remarks about commercial breaks, but the deprecation was deliberately crafted to draw more attention to the slots.

  Hitchcock’s process as a director was folded into the marketing of his films almost from the moment his name was in the public consciousness. While making Easy Virtue in 1927, Hitchcock and his producer gave journalists extensive access to various aspects of the production process. One wrote about his trip to Nice where a portion of the film was shot; another described the exact replica of a London divorce court that he had built. A month later came a story detailing the various glamorous places Hitchcock had shot, such as the polo ground of the exclusive Roehampton Club. In publicity for Downhill, British critics raved about a scene in which Ivor Novello’s character travels glumly down an escalator into the London Underground, symbolic of his descent into existential despair. Anticipating the stir that would be caused by this use of a landmark of modern London, Hitchcock made sure that several reporters and critics were invited to witness the scene being filmed. The shoot took place at night and attracted a large crowd of onlookers, many excited to see Novello, a bona fide star of the British stage and screen. Not to be outdone by a mere actor, Hitchcock made the grandest entrance of the evening, dressed in white tie and tails, as he’d come straight from the theater. Around this time, Ivor Montagu, the film’s editor, was rapped on the knuckles for playing the footage to people unconnected to the production. The studio reminded Montagu that only Hitchcock had the privilege of showing rushes to those he deemed useful for publicity purposes.

  Using his set as a hub of publicity was a key feature of so many Hitchcock films, including Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window, all of which were reported on as being technologically groundbreaking in one way or another. Here again, the practice was precedented by Hitchcock’s pre-Hollywood career, on films such as The Farmer’s Wife and The Ring, both of which attracted publicity for their ambitious and novel set designs, and the farsightedness of their pioneering director. The Ring featured a clever reproduction of the Albert Hall and a working fairground, which was constructed solely for the shooting of the film’s opening scenes but which was made open to the public, in order that the director could capture
authentic footage for the start of the film. A couple of weeks before the shoot took place, Hitchcock swore to one journalist that to ensure he remained incognito, he planned to be “thoroughly disguised as a showman wearing the traditional frockcoat, red silk handkerchief and ebullient silk hat.”

  Over the coming years, the line between publicizing a Hitchcock film and publicizing Hitchcock could be hazy, at least for those who oversaw the budgets. In the summer of 1935, Hitchcock received a terse letter from H. G. Boxall at the Gaumont-British studio complaining about an article Hitchcock had written that had been accompanied by a photograph of Alma and him on the set of The 39 Steps, none of which had been authorized and was therefore an obvious breach of contract. Not that Hitchcock was always keen for outsiders to come and see how the magic happened. The photographer Michael Powell had to finagle his way onto the set of Champagne to take publicity stills, because Hitchcock was so unhappy with the script that he didn’t think there was anything to publicize. “I don’t wish my name to be associated with this film,” he said as he sat glumly in his chair. “I think this film is shit.”

  The older he got, the more Hitchcock professed that for him filmmaking was about the perfection of form. “As far as I’m concerned,” he avowed in the 1960s, “the content is secondary to the handling; the effect I can produce on an audience rather than the subject matter” was the chief interest. This line helped him dodge questions about whether the increasingly strange subject matter of his films—from Vertigo onward—revealed anything about him as a person, though it’s also indicative of the pleasure he took in grappling with intractable technical problems in a way not shared by all film directors. When he chose to reinvigorate his career by breaking from Selznick to make Rope and Under Capricorn through his own production company, the long-take filming method he adopted on both films posed an unwieldy bundle of complex challenges. On Rope, the interior of a Manhattan apartment was built, with sliding walls and props and furniture on rollers, allowing the camera to glide around on floors designed to silence the noise of all these enormous moving pieces. Each scene had to be painstakingly choreographed, leading James Stewart to complain that “the only thing that’s been rehearsed around here is the camera.”

  In Under Capricorn, the same challenges presented themselves, though on a larger scale: instead of being set entirely in the reception rooms of a Manhattan apartment, the movie took place in a range of locations in colonial-era Australia, including a sprawling mansion through which the camera roamed, occupying as many as six rooms in one scene. In one of Hitchcock’s most memorable dining scenes, a special table had to be made, a jigsaw of fourteen pieces that could be whipped out of shot, allowing a crane to move unfettered. Recalling how the actors in the scene were required to double as stage hands, the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said it was “positively weird to see them suddenly grab a section of a table, with a candle or a plate of food fixed on to it, and fall wildly out of picture into the perspiring melee with their own parts of the table clutched in their hands.” Despite the inevitable stresses entailed in such an ambitious and minutely choreographed production, Hitchcock—who also chose these two films to be his first foray into Technicolor—was energized by the technical complexity. At the time of its release, he proclaimed Rope “the most exciting picture I’ve ever directed.”

  Hitchcock prided himself on knowing more about each department on a film set better than anyone other than the department heads. He enjoyed telling people that it was he who taught Jack Cox, the cinematographer on several of his British films, how to shoot on the job, as they made The Ring. When Cox called in sick one day, it was Hitchcock, so he claimed, who lit the day’s scenes himself. It was that firsthand knowledge that spurred him to approach sequences in novel ways. Hitchcock’s silent films abound with trick shots and visual inventiveness. Easy Virtue opens with a shot of what looks like a crop circle but is slowly revealed to be the top of a judicial wig. As the judge looks wearily across the courtroom, we see what he sees: his hand bringing his monocle slowly to his eye, the magnified image of the barrister getting ever larger in the screen. Something similarly convoluted was applied to the start of Champagne, in which the disembodied arm of a waiter holds a champagne bottle at the camera, the cork staring at us as if the barrel of a gun. The cork pops, and champagne runs over the lens, at which point Hitchcock cuts to a close-up of the wine being poured into a glass that is then instantly tilted back, as though the audience is downing the contents. In a single bubble at the bottom of the glass, a distant scene is magnified: a jazz band playing on stage, while a couple spins on the dance floor. It’s a delightfully clever sequence, if rather empty. As Hitchcock matured, such set pieces would become more integrated into the story of the film; there are moments in his silent films that resemble the show reel of a director of commercials, rather than the work of a feature film storyteller. Unlike the authorship of Hitchcock’s stories and scripts, there is little doubt from whose mind such visual sequences came; this, ultimately, is the essence of the Hitchcock touch.

  As soon as sound was introduced into Hitchcock’s armory, he sought ingenious ways of incorporating that, too. Blackmail was already in production as a silent film when its producers decided they wanted it to be a talkie. Hitchcock saw the problems this presented as an opportunity, and he found ways to use sound that few other filmmakers of that generation even attempted. Shortly after Alice kills her attacker in self-defense, we hear what she hears when her family discusses reports of the man found stabbed to death in his own bed. To Alice, guilt-ridden and panicking, the dialogue becomes babble in her ears, apart from the word “knife,” each sharp utterance of which is a reminder of the stab with which she killed her attacker. Eight years after the film’s release, a respected critic watched it again and was moved to write that “there is a freshness about the approach to sound in it that is positively startling in these days of stereotyped dialogue and balanced background.”

  The Skin Game is one of Hitchcock’s most prosaically shot films, reverting to lengthy single takes with a static camera as though the action is taking place beneath the proscenium arch of a theater stage–the type of film that Hitchcock himself frequently derided as “pictures of people talking.” Even here, though, he found moments to experiment: a montage of sound in the opening scene in the marketplace is followed by a shot of the darkened doorway of a house, out of which spills a conversation we can hear but cannot see. Overhearing and conversations out of earshot are a motif of the film, used to stress various social divisions in 1930s England: north and south, town and country, old money and the nouveau riche. As the film reaches its climax, Chloe Hornblower, the female protagonist, hides behind a curtain, terrified that a shameful secret from her past is about to be exposed, and eavesdrops on her husband denouncing her—but Hitchcock shoots it in such a way that the voices seem to be in the woman’s head, her guilt and shame tearing her apart from the inside, driving her to suicide.

  Hitchcock (with Anny Ondra) working with the latest technology on the set of Blackmail.

  Undoubtedly, many of the stylistic trills that ornamented his films, whether in London or in Hollywood, stemmed from Hitchcock’s search for novelty, or his desire to create a problem in order that he could find its solution. It was also a means of keeping himself on screen while remaining behind the camera. At first, so he claimed, he laid his clever touches and in-jokes for critics to pick up. Later, when he was a household name and much less reliant on critical appreciation to carry his public reputation, these were things he felt duty bound to include for paying customers who had certain expectations about what constituted a Hitchcock movie. Other filmmakers weren’t always impressed. For Orson Welles, the elaborate shots were clever but hollow, stunts to distract from Hitchcock’s essential vacuity. “His contrivances remain contrivances,” said Welles in 1967, “no matter how marvelously they’re conceived and executed. I don’t honestly believe Hitchcock is a director whose pictures will be of any interest a hundred yea
rs from now.”

  Welles’s criticism was uncharitable, but not without foundation. There are certainly examples of Hitchcock putting on film clever bits of business mainly because it had never been done before. Equally, there are many stunning moments in Hitchcock when his thirst for novelty meets the needs of storytelling and characterization, resulting in the visceral expression of physical and emotional experience. At some point during the twenties or thirties, Hitchcock attended the Chelsea Arts Ball in London, where he drank too much and experienced the peculiar “sensation that everything was going away from me.” For years he thought about how he might express that feeling with the camera. He’d wanted to incorporate it into Rebecca as a means of communicating the disorientation and fear experienced by Joan Fontaine’s character, but he and his crew were unable to find a way of achieving the shot. The idea sat with him for a further fifteen years until he began planning Vertigo and wanted to express Scottie’s sudden wooziness when looking down. At last, a solution was found: by moving the camera away from James Stewart’s face at the same time as zooming in on him with the lens, that strange, dizzying sensation that Hitchcock had first experienced when drunk could be achieved. The only problem, Hitchcock’s cameraman told him, was that to do this at the top of the staircase would be enormously expensive, around fifty thousand dollars. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, he came up with a neat solution: he laid a miniature model of the staircase on its side, performing a tracking shot and a zoom flat on the ground. The pride and satisfaction at having thought his way through the problem was palpable: “So that’s the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.” He tried for something similarly inventive in the beautiful sequence in Shadow of a Doubt in which young Charlie, on her own in the library, reads about her uncle’s horrific crimes. The camerawork and lighting help make this a dramatic high point of the film, but Hitchcock had originally planned an extra element: at the precise moment of revelation, the camera would jolt upward, as though experiencing a sharp intake of breath along with Charlie. Try as they might, Hitchcock and his director of photography, Joseph Valentine, could not find an adequate method. A sanguine Hitchcock apparently brushed it off, telling colleagues that “if I get fifty percent of what I want to get I feel lucky.”