Trial and error, and the toleration of failure, were built into the Hitchcock operation. Considering his reputation for preproduction planning and his stated dislike of on-set experimentation, it might sound surprising that Hitchcock welcomed compromise and disappointment as part of the filmmaking process. Rather than an artist’s studio in which he strove for visionary perfection, his workspaces were more like a technician’s laboratory, where hypotheses were formulated and tested, and valuable lessons were learned. Just as he aimed at playing his audience like an organ, pressing the keys and the pedals at the right times to induce particular emotions, so he used his films as a way of exploring the potentialities and limitations of the technology at his disposal, making it more expressive, closing the gap between our willingness to be moved and the camera’s ability to emote.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Birds. The film has myriad obvious flaws. Much of the intended humor falls flat; certain characters appear to have wandered in from some other corner of the Hitchcock universe. What nobody can criticize is the scale of the film’s ambition. In attempting to realize that ambition, Hitchcock assembled a remarkable team of artists and technicians, many of whom were Hitchcock veterans, including Bernard Herrmann, George Tomasini, production designer Robert Boyle, and director of photography Robert Burks. Hitchcock never spoke dismissively of technicians in the way he could do of actors and writers. Partly, this must be because camera operators and set designers represented less threat to his public profile as a sun king in charge of his court. But it’s also because he had such esteem for their skill sets. Gregory Peck felt that Hitchcock regarded actors as animate props, or bits of equipment, in the manner of a camera or a lighting rig. He didn’t so much give “notes” to his cast as command words in order to switch them from one acting mode to another. On one occasion, he is reported to have prepared Norman Lloyd for a dramatic close-up with the instruction, “Please start sweating now.” James Stewart never heard him call actors cattle, but he agreed that Hitchcock had an essentially technocratic approach to filmmaking in which actors were a cog in a machine. “Hitch believed you were hired to do your job . . . know your lines and carry your part.”
When Hitchcock encountered a director of photography, set designer, illustrator, or any other member of production staff he liked and trusted, he kept hold of them. He was “extremely possessive of people who worked for him,” remembered his secretary Carol Shourds, “especially the crew.” Not that it was always obvious whether one was in favor or not. Hilton Green, an assistant director on Hitchcock’s television shows who filled the same position on Psycho, recalls that Hitchcock didn’t speak a word to him when they worked together the first time. Assuming he had fallen short of the director’s high standards, Green was stunned when he got a call asking if he’d like to work on future projects, so pleased had Hitchcock been with his work.
Green was of a mind with other of Hitchcock’s off-camera collaborators who found the experience of working with him stimulating but infuriating. Robert Burks, one of the great Hollywood cinematographers of his era, was frequently exasperated with the late nights spent working through some convoluted technical challenge set by Hitchcock’s desire for a particular effect. “This is the last one I’m going to do for Hitch,” his colleague Robert Boyle recalls him saying on several occasions, “it’s just too much.” Boyle shared the frustration, remembering that seemingly every day on a Hitchcock film “you had to solve a problem, and if you were on location, Hitch would come out in a big black limousine, drive up, lower the window about an eighth of an inch, look out the window and ask you a couple of questions, and then leave!” However, Burks, Boyle, and others stuck with Hitchcock because of the creative latitude he gave them and the respect he paid to their expert opinions. It was “the most collaborative of all the working relationships I had,” was Boyle’s ultimate assessment.
The Birds demonstrates Hitchcock’s understanding of suspense as well as any film he made. The famous scene outside the school in which the birds are seen to gradually amass on the jungle gym was filmed precisely as storyboarded by the illustrator Harold Michelson, but Michelson had taken his cue from Hitchcock’s own vision for the scene: each time the gaze of the camera cuts to the playground, more birds have amassed, the tension rising inexorably. From the beginning, however, Hitchcock knew that the finely wrought suspense would be ruined if the special effects were not adequately convincing. To assuage this, Hitchcock—on the advice of Robert Boyle—pulled in the artist Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney’s longtime collaborator, to lend his expertise on the sodium vapor process, a method of color separation that allows the merging of separately shot backgrounds and foregrounds, and that was used to create the attack scenes.* Following the example set by Bernard Herrmann’s remarkable score for Psycho, Hitchcock also wanted to do something radical with sound in The Birds, and was excited to learn of Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann, two German pioneers of electronic music, who had demonstrated to other members of the Hitchcock team that they had the ability to create, electronically, an enormous range of sounds, thereby providing limitless options for film soundtracks. The introduction of electronic sounds into his toolbox was a great boon to Hitchcock. When he heard a demonstration of the sounds Sala and Gassmann could create, he was delighted, and recalled to others how impressed he had been by a film of a tank battle in which all the sound had been created electronically. Ultimately, though, it was the capacity to conjure new, expressive sounds—new possibilities for the evocation of atmosphere and emotion—that most motivated him. As Sala and Gassmann created their soundtrack in Berlin, Hitchcock issued directions, asking them to give sonic form to abstract concepts such as menace, anger, and confusion. For the final sequence of the film, he asked for “electronically the equivalent of brooding silence. Naturally, to achieve some effect like this will necessitate some experimentation.”
Correspondence with Hitchcock’s office suggests Sala and Gassmann were stressed by the workload but happy that Hitchcock trusted their ability to interpret his ideas. He was very satisfied with their labors and enjoyed seeing them work up close when he accompanied Bernard Herrmann to Berlin just before Christmas 1962. Back in Germany among avant-garde technologists, exposing himself to new elements of his craft, the trip was a homecoming of sorts. The machine that Sala and Gassmann used was a Mixtur-Trautonium, an electronic instrument based on the Trautonium, one of the world’s first synthesizers, which had been invented by Friedrich Trautwein in the late 1920s, and which Hitchcock had supposedly heard during a visit to Berlin around that time. As much as The Birds was an ambitious leap for Hitchcock, it was also a reinforcement of a core aspect of his identity as a filmmaker—a drive to realize a creative ambition through the exploitation of technology and technique.
The link with the German avant-garde is also a reminder of the milieu from which Hitchcock had emerged as a Hollywood director of note more than twenty years earlier. He had been part of a pioneering wartime generation of European filmmakers who came to Hollywood, what has been described as “an eruption of film talent” matched only by the arrival of the New Hollywood generation of the sixties and seventies. As a leading member of that wave of émigrés, Hitchcock’s first few American films helped to set patterns that would proliferate over the ensuing two decades. His focus on the trials of complexly alluring female characters, suspense, psychological themes, and expressionist filming techniques are the key elements of film noir, and they exerted a huge influence on the era of classical Hollywood cinema.
Hitchcock grumbled that he was forever being copied, which made it difficult for him to remain fresh and distinctive—though he often conveniently forgot the many debts that he owed to the directors from whom he borrowed, especially contemporaries such as Welles, Clouzot, and Antonioni. A sense that he needed to keep a step ahead of his imitators was surely behind his periodic reinventions, such as when he took on the multiple challenges of Rope and Under Capricorn, his flirtation with social realism in The
Wrong Man, or the darker, more arthouse territory he entered with The Birds and Marnie. At every stage, the Hitchcock publicity machine—the man himself, allied with the producers, distributors, and promoters of his movies—stressed the daring inventiveness of these ventures. In promotional material published for Rope, Jack Warner, an establishment figure who thought of himself as a rebel and a rule breaker, hailed the film as “real pioneering on the part of Mr. Hitchcock and it foreshadows great potential improvements in motion picture production.” The same booklet contained a section that placed Hitchcock and Rope in the same rarified space as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Great Train Robbery, and the best work of Griffith and Méliès. Rather than selling the story of the film, Warner Bros. focused on the technological wonders involved in its production: the moving set that allowed the camera to rove without cuts; the electronic control boards from which technicians could control their equipment “with split-second accuracy”; the radical ways in which Hitchcock was using sound, lighting, and color to give a vivid sense of time and place. Hitchcock publicly boasted that Rope featured “the most revolutionary technique Hollywood had ever seen.” Given all this, it’s ironic that, to safeguard public morals, Rope was banned for a time in Germany, cradle of Hitchcock’s cinematic technique and of the Nietzschean philosophy that provides Phillip and Brandon with their chilling motivation. It wasn’t until 1963 that the ban was permanently lifted, just as The Birds, Hitchcock’s most technologically advanced film of all, was let fly.
In certain ways, The Birds was ahead of its time. Indeed, in its depiction of a panicked community sheltering in place against the assault of benign nature suddenly turned savage, it could be said that The Birds is a film more of our times than of Hitchcock’s. Yet this was also the last Hitchcock film to feel urgently relevant to the wider world. Some critics would dispute this, making the case that Marnie is the zenith of Hitchcock’s career, a forerunner of the emerging New Hollywood, and powerfully engaged with important issues that shape our society. However, key members of Hitchcock’s production team maintained that Marnie fell short of what they had hoped for. In particular, various technical aspects of the film undermine its impact, especially the backdrop of a ship looming at the end of a Baltimore street, and the close-up shots of Marnie riding her horse. Some will have us believe that these were not blunders, but evidence of Marnie’s artistic purity, augmenting the dreaminess of the film, just as Hitchcock intended, though not as he admitted to. Sounding embarrassed about the criticism the film received, Hitchcock blamed a “technical mixup, and something of which I did not approve.” If he’d had the opportunity, he would have redone several sequences from scratch. Burks and Boyle, the technicians responsible for the effects, had a different recollection. They agreed that they had both made serious mistakes with the ship backdrop, and said they asked Hitchcock if they could have another attempt. But, according to Boyle, “Hitchcock wouldn’t reshoot it. He would reshoot it if Tippi Hedren’s hair or dress was awry, but not that.”
Hitchcock primed us for the sixties, but as it swept through our culture, it left him behind. He’d always enjoyed prodding at the limits of what censors had deemed acceptable, and by the time the Motion Picture Production Code was formally dismantled in 1968, he had already prepared himself for a new era of permissiveness with a script that would make Psycho look quaint. Kaleidoscope (also known as Frenzy, though not to be confused with Hitchcock’s 1972 film of that name) proposed to take Hitchcock’s demonstrable interest in sexually motivated murder to graphic new heights—or depths, depending on one’s perspective. The story was loosely inspired by the real-life crimes of English murderer Neville Heath in the 1940s, though Hitchcock intended to set his film among the hippies of 1960s New York. The screenplay—one draft of which Hitchcock wrote himself—and the film tests he carried out in 1967 indicate that he planned a bracing new iteration of a Hitchcock film, with more nudity, sex, and violence than ever before. But his pitch was rejected by his studio of the time, Universal. Had it been made, it’s possible that Kaleidoscope might have taken its place alongside Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and other daring classics of the era. As Dan Auiler succinctly puts it, “This project was an intended turning point in Hitchcock’s career—a turn that the studio denied him.”
In a sense, he had become a victim of his own wild success. By the mid-sixties, Hitchcock was a cultural institution, an establishment figure who had hosted Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural gala and had lunched with Henry Kissinger. Moreover, after his agent and friend Lew Wasserman negotiated the purchase of Universal Pictures by his company MCA in 1962, Hitchcock signed lucrative deals with Universal in which he exchanged the rights to Shamley Productions, his production company, the television shows, and various of his movies, including Psycho, for a colossal amount of corporate stock, making him one of the wealthiest people in Hollywood, bolstered by his substantial investments in oil and livestock. He had always been acutely interested in the business side of the movies. Rodney Ackland recalled that when Hitchcock returned to England during the forties, his “conversation was of finance, mergers between Hollywood film companies, problems of distribution, how much his last picture had taken and so on.” Thirty years later, nothing much had changed when Hitchcock wrote to another old acquaintance in England about industry news that was of immense interest to him and his bank manager, but one wonders how much it would have excited distant friends across the pond: MCA’s huge slush fund, for example, “which they don’t know what to do with. The shares stand at $40, higher than anyone else. All of this, of course, has been given a lift by the film JAWS. Now I think that the next thing liable to happen in a lesser degree is Fox, whose shares have jumped 5 or 6 points in the last few days, following the release of a picture called STAR WARS.”
Unfortunately for him, executives at Universal were unable to reconcile Hitchcock the venerable shareholder with Hitchcock the artistic defiler of public morals. When the studio signed him, the hope and expectation was that Hitchcock would bring prestige and critical acclaim to their brand, along with box-office clout. They looked to him for another North by Northwest, not a leap into the mind of—as he himself put it—the “questionable old man of the later movies, who occupied himself dispassionately with sex matters.”
Ultimately, the two films Universal did allow him to make in the second half of the sixties were among the biggest failures of his Hollywood career, artistically and commercially. Torn Curtain is a diverting but uninspired revisitation of earlier Hitchcock spy thrillers. In that same genre, Topaz (1969) is a disjointed, meandering mess, the high point of which is Karin Dor’s death scene, in which her dress spreads around her as she falls to the gleaming tiled floor, like a flowing pool of purple blood. Both were attempts to engage with the state of the world in the Cold War era—as his classics The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes had engaged with the atmosphere of 1930s Europe—but neither feels urgently topical. Torn Curtain caused the implosion of Hitchcock’s association with Bernard Herrmann, who failed to provide the pop score that Universal wanted. A year earlier Hitchcock had lost another vital collaborator, when George Tomasini died of a heart attack. The unraveling had begun.
Hitchcock remained fascinated by the times in which he lived, collecting files’ worth of newspaper clippings about hippies, the Black Power movement, anti-apartheid and anticolonialism across Africa, the Weather Underground, the “opening-up” in China, and third-wave feminism. Nothing came of them. To François Truffaut, he complained that he was “completely desperate” for new material.
Now, as you realize, you are a free person to make whatever you want. I, on the other hand, can only make what is expected of me; that is, a thriller, or a suspense story, and that I find hard to do. So many stories seem to be about the neo-Nazis, Palestinians fighting Israelis, and all that kind of thing. And, you see, none of these subjects has any human conflict.
By “human conflict” Hitchcock presumably meant confli
ct within the human mind, the psychological struggles of the individual. Ideology, religion, and the wounds of history held no intrinsic interest to Hitchcock the filmmaker.
Hitchcock felt “typed” and unable to shake himself loose from the straitjacket of his own reputation. “I’m in competition with myself,” he complained. The last two films of his career were Frenzy—a variation on the Ripper theme—and Family Plot, an enjoyable caper that lacks the sharp edges of Hitchcock at his best. The critical response to the final two films was markedly more generous than that afforded the previous three. At this advanced stage, Hitchcock was yogi-like, beyond praise or disparagement as meted out to other directors. As Truffaut observed, “a director who is over seventy years old and still working enjoys what might be defined as critical immunity.”
Attempting to make sense of “late style,” the work of great artists in their final years, Edward Said contrasted those whose efforts display a serene wisdom, with those such as Beethoven whose final works are defined by “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction,” a challenge to the idea that art can ever bring resolution and harmony, “a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness.” The academic Mark Goble contends that this description fits Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, in which Hitchcock pursued outsized commercial ambition with films that were darker, more ambiguous, and more provocative than any he had made, each one featuring a different sort of technical complexity, and challenging expectations of what a mainstream Hollywood movie could or should be. But no matter how pioneering or provocative Hitchcock thought himself, he was wedded to the movie business, and therefore incapable of using his films as a form of self-exile in the way Said believes Beethoven did with his final compositions. After Hitchcock’s late style came a post-late style—or “too-late style,” in Goble’s words—a heavily self-referential period in which the master exhibited some of his enviable skills, but to no great effect. In trying to re-create the magic of times past, he drifted further from the present.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 27
