As Hitchcock was wont to say, style is the act of self-plagiarism. For his entire career, he returned to, and then innovated on, a tradition he—with vital contributions from his collaborators—created for himself. This is why a Hitchcock film becomes more fascinating the more one watches other Hitchcock films; each of his works is in deep conversation with the rest. After Marnie, the conversation became more of a circular monologue about the Hitchcock canon rather than an attempt to take it somewhere new. The clever elaborations that allowed Hitchcock to revisit old ground while staying fresh and vital had vanished. Finally, the master had run out of reinventions.
* Two years after The Birds was released, Iwerks won an Academy Award for his special effects work on Mary Poppins, which used the same sodium vapor process.
11
THE LONDONER
Hitchcock preferred to begin his fairy tales by giving the audience a sense of time and place—“once upon a time in a land far, far away.” Sometimes, these openings were performed with real style and imagination, of a piece with the rest of the film. The opening sequence of North by Northwest, for instance, has Saul Bass’s Mondrian-like graphics, beautiful in their clever, sleek economy, appearing on the side of a Madison Avenue skyscraper; the yellow cabs reflected in its glass panes tell us we could be nowhere else but 1950s New York. It was only Hitchcock’s overspending that prevented him from realizing the opening he first devised, in which the camera would float through a window into the office of Roger Thornhill’s advertising firm, where the credits would appear as designs for a new ad campaign, immersing us in Thornhill’s world of pretense and artifice before a single line of dialogue was spoken.
It was a simple matter of story structure, said Hitchcock: begin in wide shot, and by degrees allow the audience to get closer and closer, until nestled right inside the heads of the characters. Repeatedly, he tried to take that principle to its conclusion, starting up in the clouds and homing in on a small pocket of action, some tiny scene that would turn out to be something scandalous. It wasn’t until his penultimate film, Frenzy, that he managed to do it just as he’d envisaged. Against a stirring orchestral score, the camera swoops down a great stretch of the Thames, showing London, new and old, magisterial and modern. As the music fades, the camera zooms in on the bankside, where a pompous official boasts to a small crowd that the dank stretch of water on which the city’s fortunes have been built will soon be “clear of industrial effluent, clear of detergents, clear of the waste products of our society.” Then, a startled bystander points out a naked floating corpse, quickly identified as another victim of the “necktie murderer,” a serial killer who strangles women with his own clothing before disposing of their bodies. Staring at the dead woman, the crowd gossips about the psychopath and his victims, with a mixture of morbid curiosity and terror.
For anyone with a knowledge of London’s past, it’s an obvious evocation of Jack the Ripper; for anyone with a knowledge of Hitchcock’s past, it’s a revival of The Lodger, which begins with the discovery of a female corpse by the side of the Thames and the reactions of gawking locals. Now in his seventies, Hitchcock was back on his old turf, the city that made him, telling the world that despite all this talk of a new, swinging London, this was the same glorious and rotten place it had always been, the greatest shithole on earth.
Like many before and since, Hitchcock was frequently guilty of eliding “British” with “English,” using them interchangeably, saying one when he really meant the other. In his book English Hitchcock, Charles Barr astutely asserts that we get a better grasp of Hitchcock, either side of his move to Hollywood, by thinking of him and his work as more English than British. With few exceptions, the British characters in his films are from the south of England, reflecting a particular version of Englishness with which Hitchcock himself identified. To be more specific, Hitchcock was a Londoner, denizen of a global capital that was brasher, more cosmopolitan, and more outward-looking than anywhere else in the country.
The significance of London to Hitchcock can be parsed into two sections. First is Hitchcock in London: the life he had there prior to his relocation to Hollywood in 1939, where he developed the craft, skills, and reputation that facilitated his stellar rise in the United States—all greatly assisted by the talents of those in the London film industry with whom he worked.
Second is London in Hitchcock. Pre-Hollywood, Hitchcock used the British Isles as the precinct for most of his work. London was a notable setting in eleven films: The Pleasure Garden, The Lodger, Downhill, The Ring, Blackmail, Murder!, Rich and Strange, Number Seventeen, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Sabotage. None of them are gritty, social tracts; some are as phantasmagorical as North by Northwest and Psycho. Yet all are wonderfully evocative of the London he knew—an environment that never left him. At the time of his death, he’d lived in California more than half his life. But he never knew that place, or anywhere else on the planet, in the way he knew London. His films are set in locations across the globe, but it’s only London that appears to be in the bones of his characters, rather than as the backdrop of their existence. A notable exception could be made for the San Francisco of Vertigo. Even then, there’s something of Hitchcock’s London about it: a city of mists and winding streets, where history piles up on itself and, for all their nosiness, no one really knows anyone else.
Arguably, Hitchcock was not a native Londoner, as the Essex town of Leytonstone in which he was born would have then been too far east to have been enveloped by the city sprawl. He was touched when, late in life, he received a letter from the vice chancellor of the University of Essex, referring to him as “a son of Essex” in his offer of an honorary doctorate. These days, Leytonstone has another world-famous son, David Beckham, who embodies a type of emotionally expressive, seemingly classless Englishness that Hitchcock would have barely recognized as English at all. Yet Hitchcock still has a home there: tiled to the walls of the local Tube station are mosaics of legendary Hitchcock scenes, a kitsch but fitting tribute to a man whose lifelong interest in travel and transport began here as a boy, transfixed by the tram service that ran from Leytonstone into the wheezing city to the west, the place that became the Hitchcocks’ home when Alfred was around six years old.
Through the years, Hitchcock’s social awkwardness and his sense of himself as an outsider may have encouraged some to have spotted “otherness” in his life where it didn’t exist. True, the family’s Catholicism made them anomalous in a nation where followers of the Roman Catholic Church had faced centuries of persecution. Yet Limehouse, Poplar, and Stepney, the East London communities in which the family lived and worked, were among the most diffuse mix of ethnicities and religions to be found anywhere in western Europe. Moreover, it is inaccurate to suggest, as one biographer has, that the family was “not socially respectable.” The Hitchcocks were an unremarkable lower-middle-class family, whom only the tiniest, most elite percentage of British society would have considered anything other than respectable. Likewise, though it’s true that Hitchcock was sensitive about his relative lack of formal learning, he would have had a quality of education superior to most in the East End. It was only in the year of his birth that the age for leaving school was raised to twelve, but Hitchcock attended school until the eve of his fourteenth birthday, after which he studied engineering, followed by classes in art at the University of London, acquiring diverse skills that stayed with him for life. If his American friend John Houseman was correct in saying that Hitchcock bore “scars from a social system against which he was in perpetual revolt,” it was not because he was a member of the downtrodden proletariat, but because of a frustration about the narrow existence prescribed to those from any particular class background, the sense that one must know one’s place, which has long been the ambient hum of English life.
Accordingly, referring to Hitchcock as a Cockney (a label widely applied to him but never used by himself) is not without complication. His childhood London homes were in traditi
onal Cockney terrain, but as with “Scouser” in Liverpool and “Geordie” in Newcastle, “Cockney” is loaded with social complexity. The word is often a designation of class identity as well as geographic location, and the Hitchcocks perhaps considered themselves a little too well-to-do to qualify as true “Cockney.” Unquestionably, Hitchcock was an East Ender who grew up immersed in Cockney culture, felt kinship with it, and recognized all the associated attitudes, traits, and character types—but he was more among them than of them. England being a place where accents carry heavy associations, it’s worth regarding that several of those who worked with him in London found his speech interesting because it was difficult to pin down. When Jack Cardiff first met him in 1930, Hitchcock spoke in a “plummy, posh-cockney voice.” Four years earlier, according to June Tripp, he “spoke in a curious mixture of Cockney and North Country accents with a laboured stress on elusive aitches.”
The primary way in which London shaped Hitchcock’s Englishness, and his identity as a filmmaker, was that it instilled in him a thoroughly urban, modern outlook. The year 1899, when Hitchcock was born, fell in the middle of what have been described as the thirty most transformative years in London’s history. Between the mid-1880s and the outbreak of World War I, the city experienced a rush of self-conscious modernity: “electrification, motorization, socialism, secularism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, family planning, suburbanization, mass entertainment, modern retailing, democracy, state intervention,” as well as the arrival of London’s notorious tabloid press, and panics about the uncontrollable spread of moral turpitude. The most obvious symptom of this rapid change was the thicket of humanity that clogged London’s streets, particularly in the East End in which the young Hitchcock grew up and the West End in which he sought entertainment as an adult. During these three decades, the population soared by two and a half million; there were more than seven million Londoners in 1914, rising to eight and a half million by 1939—the year Hitchcock moved to Los Angeles—a figure unsurpassed until 2015. One East End resident of the early 1900s recalled its profusion of markets that “swarmed with people . . . you could have walked on the people’s heads all the way from Commercial Road to Cable Street.” That Hitchcock remembers the dense throng is viscerally evident in almost every film he set in London—down by the Thames in The Lodger; under the neon dazzle in Blackmail; in an overcrowded train on an unpleasant commute in Rich and Strange; amid the bustle of hustlers, hawkers, and shoppers in Sabotage.
In the 1950s, Hitchcock reflected on the impact of England’s high-density population on the national character, and he concluded that it fostered an “inordinate regard for personal privacy.” That was something he knew intimately well; Hitchcock, the inveterate self-publicist, performed a conjurer’s trick of disappearing in plain sight, being constantly present while remaining aloof. Like Londoners of both his day and ours, he learned the trick of guarding his privacy in a pack, living cheek by jowl with countless people but connecting with barely any of them. It’s a long-standing English style of disengagement, raised to Olympian heights in London, what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “stony neglect, each of every other.” Emerson observed that a happy product of this obsessive minding of one’s own business was the English tolerance of eccentricity, but it made chipping through the cladding to reach the human being beneath a fearsome challenge. “In short,” he wrote, “every one of these islanders is an island in himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of strangers, you would think him deaf; his eyes never wander from his table and newspaper.” Aloofness and secrecy were part of Hitchcock’s DNA, and he passed that on to his most intriguing urbanites. The inscrutable Roger Thornhill; the chic, mysterious drifters played by Tippi Hedren; the Manhattanites in Rope with their scandalous, secret lives; Jeff and his neighbors in Rear Window, all together and all alone in Greenwich Village. Islanders, these city dwellers, every one.
The need to keep oneself to oneself in the world’s most populous city could result in explosions of indignity of a sort that fascinated, and horrified, Hitchcock, who was chilled by the prospect of public embarrassment. In his movies, he favored scenes of what one might term “an ecstasy of fumbling,” to borrow Wilfred Owen’s description of the panicked rush of bodies in the trenches of World War I. The climax of The Lodger, with a baying crowd squashed together in violent pursuit of a man they believe to be a murderer is the earliest example. Away from London, the awkward pressing of bodies is used for comic effect in the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, when a sudden accident on a Swiss ski slope knocks over a dozen people, creating an undignified jumble of limbs, noses in armpits, boots up arses. In a moment of tension rather than comedy, Paul Newman and Julie Andrews are pulled this way and that in Torn Curtain by an amorphous panicking crowd, rushing from a cry of “Fire!” in a crowded Berlin theater, a reprisal of a scene in The 39 Steps when a gunshot causes a stampede from an East End music hall of the type Hitchcock frequented as a child.
Sudden, shocking violence was a feature of the East End. The district was notorious for its pub fights and street brawls. An exact contemporary of Hitchcock’s named Eileen Bailey recalled that in their neighborhoods violence broke out so frequently that locals “developed a kind of instinct, an embryo ability to tell when a fight was going to peter out or flare up into a scrap worth watching.” Sometimes the fights were between women, who would “use their long hat-pins on each other’s eyes.” On the walls of his second home in Santa Cruz, Hitchcock hung five pictures by Thomas Rowlandson, an eighteenth-century artist who depicted the most scabrous, frenzied scenes of London life, two of which detail women grappling and clawing at each other in the street. Here is a London Hitchcock recognized: a rowdy place of endless entertainment in which an act of spontaneous violence was only ever a dodgy look away.
The London neighborhoods of Hitchcock’s youth showed a double face to the world. On the one hand, they were insular and guarded, filled with intensely parochial communities that were conscious of a certain separateness, even from the rest of the city. On the other hand, the East End was the opening to a world beyond England. Limehouse had prodigiously busy docks and was home to many ethnic groups, including London’s Chinatown, an enclave that inspired the fictional character Fu Manchu and D. W. Griffith’s movie Broken Blossoms in the 1910s. Stepney was the center of the East End’s Jewish community, one of the largest populations of Jews in western Europe. In the vicinity of both places ran the River Lea and the Thames, the historic conduit between London and the rest of the globe. If his recollections can be trusted, Hitchcock the child was acutely aware that the lazy old river was a superhighway of possibility. During the filming of Frenzy he recounted to the critic Charles Champlin that as a child of about nine, back in the days when his father supplied fish and poultry to ocean steamers, he was allowed to ride the steamboats all the way to Gravesend, at the mouth of the river, before climbing down the rope ladder with the pilot. Returning to the city had rekindled his old feelings for the ships: “The Royal Albert Docks, now there is romance.” In a similarly nostalgic mood a year later, he told the journalist Margaret Pride that as a boy he became so obsessed with ships from all over the world that he could recognize them in silhouette, and would track their movements with pins stuck into a world map he kept in his bedroom.
Hitchcock beside the River Thames with Ingrid Bergman, October 1948.
Once Hitchcock entered the movie business, his horizons grew even wider, and his social circles ever more cosmopolitan. It was, after all, at the London branch of the American firm Famous Players-Lasky that he got his first job in the film industry, working alongside the American women who dominated the writing department. Michael Balcon, the man Hitchcock credited with launching his career, was the son of east European–Jewish émigrés and was married to a South African woman of Polish ancestry. When Balcon gave Hitchcock his chance to direct, it was in Germany not England that he did so, gaining a grasp of the German language along the way. Around this time, Hi
tchcock was part of the London Film Society, recently established by (among others) his friends and sometime collaborators Ivor Montagu and Sidney Bernstein as a forum in which to exhibit and discuss the best cinema from across Europe and to promote “the production of really artistic films” in Britain, “those which the trade deemed uncommercial or which the censor refused.” The society announced itself to London on the front page of the Daily Express in May 1925, the same month that Hitchcock left for Germany to begin shooting his debut feature film. For Montagu, too, Germany was a beacon of cinematic art, and his initial aim was to screen titles that are now considered modernist classics, including Murnau’s Nosferatu. Over time, though, it was Soviet cinema that really enthused him, and it was through Montagu and the Film Society that Hitchcock got to examine the “pure cinema” techniques of Russian filmmakers including Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 28
