So much of what Hitchcock learned and developed during his two decades in the London film industry he took with him to America, and repurposed it for Hollywood with stunning results—from the narrative formula of the Hitchcock chase thriller and the MacGuffin plot device to his manipulation of the press. One thing he left at home was his sharp take on place and the characters who inhabit them. Shortly before he left for Hollywood, Hitchcock said, “You’ve got to live twenty years in a country before you can express its idiom.” It didn’t take him that long to engage with American society in his films, but when he did, it came from the perspective of a perceptive outsider, not from somebody whose pores had been clogged with the place since the day he was born.
In front of American audiences, Hitchcock exploited his Englishness. The displays of deadpan reserve—almost flamboyant in their denial of emotion—the sharp-tongued drollery, the fastidious attention to doing things properly, these all played upon his Old World origins. At times, it was knowing parody: he appeared on television with a bowler hat and umbrella, and posed for photographs reading The Times or taking tea on set. In interviews and articles he explained himself, often rather plausibly, in terms of his nationality. His understanding of violence, sex, food, humor, art, literature, clothing, child-rearing, home furnishings, sports, politics, world history, all derived from the central, inescapable fact of his Englishness, he said. Curiously, in her biography of her mother, Pat Hitchcock wrote that while Alma kept her native accent, Hitchcock lost his. Perhaps she meant that the glottal stop and rounded vowels of East London became diminished in his speech over time. Or, maybe in private, as an off-duty professional Britisher, he sounded more American. Either way, most who heard him speak on late-night talk shows or in the weekly skits on his television programs would identify him as he encouraged them to: a gray, old-fashioned Englishman amusingly out of place in the ceaseless sunshine of California.
Even as he wore his Englishness on his sleeve, Hitchcock resisted unalloyed patriotism. As with his size and shape, being English was a stubborn fact of his existence, but not necessarily a source of pride. He was happy to poke fun at the English for their cult of tradition, their cage of class, and their knee-jerk anti-American prejudices. In this, the Londoner in Hitchcock reappeared: the cosmopolitan, skeptical piss-taker, individualistic to the point of contrariness, rooted as an oak tree in the English soil, but wary of flags, salutes, and oaths of allegiance. This ambivalence about national identity manifested itself in his eventual decision to swap his British citizenship for American, which he did in 1955, five years after Alma had done so. To the friend who drove him there, he explained that he was nervous about the ceremony because “the Hitchcock name goes back almost to the beginning of the British Empire. It isn’t easy giving up a lifetime surrounded with British tradition and history.”
Still, lightening oneself of a little of that baggage could be liberating; he was quietly proud to be an American citizen, because, to him at least, it meant being a citizen of the world. He loved that America is a “polyglot country. I often tell people, there are no Americans, it’s full of foreigners.”
A world full of foreigners rather neatly describes a feeling that works its way through Hitchcock’s Hollywood canon, in which location and identity are regularly smudged to a blur, and accents roam freely, sometimes absurdly so. In The Birds, the first person Melanie meets in the tiny, insular Californian community of Bodega Bay sounds so much like a New Englander that it seems deliberately disorienting. In Foreign Correspondent, Laraine Day and Joel McCrea encounter the Latvian ambassador in London who, inconceivably, speaks not a word of English, German, or French, so Day talks to him in his mother tongue; handily she knows “just enough Latvian to get about.” Later in the film, a little Dutch girl assists some of her compatriots by translating English into their native language, but does so with such a strong American accent that one wonders whether she might be better off having a stab at Latvian herself. The Rutland family in Marnie is an upper-crust Philadelphian clan as old as the Liberty Bell, but its eldest son, played by Sean Connery, speaks like a born-and-bred Edinburgher. Ingrid Bergman had kittens trying to modulate her Swedish-American-English into an Irish brogue for the Australian-based Under Capricorn. Her on-screen husband, Joseph Cotten, didn’t bother; Hitchcock was happy for the script to be altered, switching the character’s origins from Dublin to Virginia, Cotten’s home state.
Topaz is a bad picture, but it’s the ultimate example of Hitchcock’s cosmopolitan and internationalist outlook, with its united nations of cast and characters. Indeed, the United Nations was a topic of great interest to Hitchcock. It was at the site of the UN building in New York that Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill—the apotheosis of Hitchcock’s unplaceable globalist—witnesses the murder that sends him on the run in North by Northwest. But Hitchcock had toyed with the idea of designing a film around the United Nations several years earlier, when he exchanged letters, and had at least one meeting, with Mogens Skot-Hansen, a UN representative from Denmark, about the ways in which Hitchcock could lend his talents to depicting the organization’s work on screen. Thirteen years later, in the spring of 1964, he agreed to direct one of six feature-length episodes of an ambitious television drama series designed to sell the United Nations to the American public. Press reports of the time suggest it was a surprising move for a commercial, nonpolemical director such as Hitchcock, on account of the “widespread organized opposition to the U.N. in this country.”*
Of course, Hitchcock did cling to his English cultural roots in the making of his Hollywood movies. He turned time and again to English source material, English screenwriters, and English actors. He also returned to London as a venue for production, and three of his 1950s movies were set in the city. In Stage Fright, a little of the Hitchcock feel for Londoners comes back: Kay Walsh is deliciously good as the sour, dyspeptic Nellie, a pub gossip and resentful maid for a sultry cabaret star (played by Marlene Dietrich), who seems like the kind of character that Hitchcock and Alma had encountered a hundred times before. But, on the whole, an authentic reflection of London ceased to be a key part of Hitchcock’s films and public image. Neither has Hitchcock’s take on London and England left much of a cinematic legacy. The best of the Bond films—an obvious heir to Hitchcock—have something of the wit of early Hitchcock, but the franchise has only ever offered a flattened, thinned-out version of Englishness, akin to Hitchcock’s Hollywood years, devoid of the beautifully observed gems that punctuate The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes.
Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that as Hitchcock’s Hollywood legend has mushroomed and obscured the earlier chapters of his career, acknowledgment of his role in the story of twentieth-century London has dwindled. Today, at the site of Gainsborough Studios, where he made some of his earliest films, sits an enormous bust of Hitchcock. But it’s not the head of the young Londoner who toiled to make his name, rather the older, jowly, glum-looking man from California who came to define the popular idea of Hitchcock. The importance of his London years, to Hitchcock’s career as well as to the history of the city, is consistently overlooked, even among those who know a vast amount about both. In recent social and cultural histories of interwar London, Hitchcock barely makes an appearance, despite being one of the city’s most famous, commercially successful, and influential creative figures of the last hundred years. Amid a galaxy of other Londoners—from Aldous Huxley and the Kinks to Peter Stringfellow and Leon Trotsky—Jerry White’s enthralling book, London in the Twentieth Century (2001), carries not a single mention of Hitchcock’s name. Juliet Gardiner’s equally riveting chronicle of British life, The Thirties: An Intimate History (2010), mentions Hitchcock in one paragraph, less than the space given to John Grierson and the Left Book Club, and about the same as Hitchcock’s sometime collaborator, Charles Laughton, who won an Oscar for his star turn in The Private Life of Henry VIII. In other works, aristocratic socialites, such as the Mitford sisters and the so-cal
led Bright Young People, are used as ciphers of the interwar decades, while Hitchcock, whose best London films filled cinemas and, in their idiosyncratic way, engaged with the reality of modern urban life as lived by millions, is thought of as an entity unto himself, somehow not entirely plugged into the life of the city. It seems that even to scholars of cultural history, there is an assumption that Hitchcock’s London period was merely the apprenticeship of a master craftsman whose work tells us little, if anything, about the times in which he lived, or the more celebrated work he would go on to create.
A Londoner to his bones. Hitchcock, 1972.
It’s redolent of the kind of marginalization that he experienced firsthand. Laurence Olivier was eight years younger than Hitchcock, yet he received a knighthood “for services to stage and film” in 1947, just two weeks after his fortieth birthday. Similarly, David Lean, who made his name in epics about heroes and adventurers of the British Empire, and in adaptations of Dickens novels, was nine years Hitchcock’s junior and didn’t direct his first film until 1942, yet he was elevated to Commander of the British Empire in 1953. When Hitchcock was offered the same honor in 1962 (a year after John Grierson had been given his), he declined it, probably because he felt insulted that it did not sufficiently recognize his achievements. Back in London on the filming of Frenzy in 1971—a few months after receiving the Légion d’honneur from the French government—he told Charles Champlin that after thirty years out of the country, the British honors system seemed as baffling to him as ever. “I’ve never really understood titles. You become Sir George. But who ever really calls you Sir George? Waiters in good restaurants and your servants at home. To your friends, you’re still good old Stinky.” Still, that didn’t prevent him from accepting a knighthood a few months before his death, even though the fact that he was no longer a subject of the Crown meant he was not technically entitled to call himself “Sir.” When asked by reporters why he thought it had taken the queen so long to honor him, he shrugged that she probably had other things on her mind.
Despite his self-exile, Hitchcock never took his eye off Britain’s film industry. During the fifties and sixties, he watched the “kitchen-sink” films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, and Billy Liar, which put working-class and lower-middle-class life on screen in a way that Hitchcock had fantasized about many years earlier. Frenzy attempted to capture something of that atmosphere, set in a version of the London Hitchcock had grown up in, one of greengrocers and market traders, publicans and barmaids, coarse humor and an edge of menace. Yet Frenzy also shows us how the London in Hitchcock’s core was not quite the city of 1972, the home of Marc Bolan and Spare Rib magazine. During the scripting of the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1955, Hitchcock noted certain small inaccuracies that had strayed into John Michael Hayes’s script, including in the sections set in London: the conduct of the receptionists at Claridge’s, the finer points of English reserve, the demeanor of MI6 agents. He also questioned the Americanisms Hayes had put in the mouths of the English characters and recommended changing them—but then added the caveat, “I am out of touch with the English.” That is plainly evident in Frenzy. The London here is like an alternate reality, one in which the fog has lifted, fashions and technology have moved on, but in every other respect it has been frozen in 1939. Arthur La Bern, the author of the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, on which the film was based, found Frenzy “distasteful,” and watching it was a “most painful experience.” He groaned at the dialogue, too, an “amalgam of an old Aldwych farce” and various hackneyed British television series. He lamented the absence of his “authentic London characters.”
Barbara Leigh-Hunt, the last of Hitchcock’s slaughtered London blondes, agrees that there was a discrepancy between the London of the 1970s and the city that Hitchcock attempted to evoke: “England had changed since he had lived and worked here. The club that my character was supposed to go to, that sort of thing didn’t happen anymore, and women didn’t dress like that anymore. I felt it was dated.” But reviewing the film in 2018, she was no longer bothered by the clunky anachronisms. “So much time has passed, it doesn’t matter now.” As the seventies drift into the waters of distant memory, what Hitchcock’s farewell to London gives us isn’t an accurate record of that moment in its history, but something equally vital: a concentrate of Hitchcock’s London, a feeling of the city untethered from time.
* Hitchcock’s episode was to celebrate the work of the World Health Organization. He dropped out over scheduling pressures and concerns regarding the quality of the script written by Richard Condon. Ultimately, four episodes were made by other directors and aired on ABC.
12
THE MAN OF GOD
In the final year of his life, Hitchcock’s health declined precipitously. For Alma and him, the previous decade had been increasingly testing. During the filming of Frenzy in 1971, Alma suffered a stroke, followed by another, far more debilitating attack in 1976, the year Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot, was released. Her ill-health left her largely housebound and in need of round-the-clock nursing. Hitchcock was devastated. For fifty years Alma had been his closest friend, constant collaborator, and emotional counterbalance. Her decline had him fretting for her well-being but also scared of his own vulnerability. He did his best to tend to her but was burdened by his problems with arthritis, his heart, and, lately, his kidneys, all likely exacerbated by excessive drinking, which made him tired, confused, and irritable. As his mortality came into ever sharper focus, the familiar pose of equanimity shattered. Several family members, colleagues, and friends saw him cry in fear that Alma might be slipping away; he asked some of them how much longer they thought he had left to live.
During those years of Hitchcock’s physical and creative decline, his presence in contemporary cinema was maintained by his disciples. So many classic seventies films bear his thumbprint, from Don’t Look Now to Jaws to Carrie and the Bond franchise. Martin Scorsese, arguably the most accomplished American filmmaker of the last fifty years, credits Hitchcock as a key influence, especially on Taxi Driver, released a matter of weeks before Family Plot opened in theaters.* Travis Bickle might be an East Coast cousin of Norman Bates, or perhaps the charmless, estranged son of Uncle Charlie; the New York he inhabits is as dangerous and sordid as the London of The Lodger, oozing with violent misogyny, male rage, and disgust for the filth of the city. Beneath the patina of character and setting, Hitchcock’s commitment to showing over telling is also shared by Scorsese. “The Hitchcock pictures I like looking at repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly,” Scorsese told Roger Ebert, “often without the sound.” On Taxi Driver, it was Hitchcock’s ability to silently express the emotional experience of Catholic identity that most influenced him. “The Wrong Man . . . has more to do with the camera movements in Taxi Driver than any other picture I can think of. It’s such a heavy influence because of the sense of guilt and paranoia.”
In May 1979 it became obvious, even to Hitchcock, that making another film was an unreachable fantasy. He abruptly closed his office at Universal, leaving his devoted, long-serving staff suddenly unemployed. Life away from work proved an oxymoron. After a short while, he began turning up as though he’d never left, always in the same suit-and-tie uniform, pushing bits of paper around a desk, getting a haircut and a shoeshine, receiving the odd guest to hear his patter. On January 3, 1980, he received his knighthood in a special ceremony arranged, fittingly, on a Universal sound stage. The following day, the biographer Gilbert Harrison dropped by to interview him about Thornton Wilder. Afterward, Harrison reflected that he’d encountered “Alfred Hitchcock,” the myth rather than the man:
His face was florid. He was balding but not entirely bald. The main thing about him is his bulk. He seemed like a tuskless walrus dressed in a well-cut black suit with vest, white shirt and tie, propped up in a high-back swivel desk chair. And, out of that bulk which remained largely immobile dur
ing the interview, came this low, carefully modulated, middle-class English accent. There was little spontaneity in what he said. He chose his words carefully, and it seemed to me he had said them all before. It was as if he was remembering some script that he had written earlier. It was a little difficult to keep him on Wilder, who I think did not much interest him, and off of himself and his work.
Hitchcock died of renal failure on the morning of April 29, 1980. His funeral took place at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. A few days later he was cremated, his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean, a conspicuously unconventional farewell for a Catholic born in the nineteenth century. Though the Vatican had allowed cremations since 1963, the idea was that one’s ashes should still be interred; to do otherwise would be a denial of the Resurrection. On June 3, a memorial Requiem Mass was held at Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. The first hymn was the signal anthem of England’s late nineteenth-century Catholic revival, “Firmly I Believe and Truly.” Quite how firm or true was Hitchcock’s belief is an enduring mystery.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 30
