The difficulties for Hedren were compounded by the filming of the most savage sequences of the film when, in an attic room, the throng of birds attacks her. She had been told that the birds were only mechanical. When she arrived on set, however, she realised that the bird handlers had arrived with protective gloves and boxes of furious birds. She was asked to stand in a corner of the set while the handlers threw pigeons, gulls and crows towards her, according to Rod Taylor, “one after another, again and again.” It had, in appearance at least, all the marks of a ritual stoning. As the filming continued she became covered in bird excrement.
She said later that “the week was perfectly dreadful, really the worst week of my life.” For one sequence on the fifth day of filming the birds were tied to her with elastic bands and so “they would bound and perch all over me.” On that occasion one of the birds hopped on to her face and scratched her eyelid, at which point “I just sat and cried.” The studio doctors ordained a few days’ rest.
Hitchcock had remained out of sight for most of the proceedings, only appearing when the cameras were about to roll; as always, he preferred to avoid threatening or unsettling scenes. It is not at all clear, however, that he was engaged in an illicit act of hostility towards the actress. The attic scene would be the most powerful sequence in the film, and he wanted to ensure that it looked authentic. It also became clear to Hedren why he had wanted an unknown for the part; a more experienced performer would have balked at his demands. But she recovered and came back on set to film her awakening from the shock of the attack.
It had been decided from the beginning that no explanation would be offered or given for the attacks by the birds; it would be an entirely mysterious event without a cause. “You know,” he told Albert Whitlock, the matte artist who created so many of the birds and so much of the landscape, “we’re not making a science-fiction movie.” Whitlock then asked him what it was they were making. The director was not sure. The new ending did not satisfy those members of the audience who wanted finality, or reassurance, or explanation. The film was as mysterious as the sudden appearance of the birds themselves.
He had decided to hold the European premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, a sure sign of the artistic ambitions he harboured for the film. He also arranged for a preview to be screened at the Museum of Modern Art, as a precursor to a season of Hitchcock films. The Birds was not precisely an art-house picture but it flaunted the conventions of the American cinema with its unsteady atmosphere and its refusal to close on a harmonious note. He deployed bird sounds, created both naturally and electronically, as the music; birds are always somewhere in the background, cawing and murmuring, yet with sudden silences to destabilise the audience.
In his publicity tour in America he struck a more jocular tone. He described The Birds to a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle as “a fowl epic if ever I made one. Biggest cast of extras I ever had, too. Over 28,000 birds. Of course they all worked for chicken feed except for the buzzards which had agents.”
“The ads quote you as calling it ‘the most terrifying picture I have ever made.’ Is that true?”
“Oh, indubitably. I financed it myself, and I’m terrified at the thought of losing all my money.”
He did not lose all of his money, but he did not make a great deal. The Birds did not come close to matching Psycho in terms of revenue. The audiences were not impressed by the apparently random nature of the bird attacks and therefore of the waywardness of the narrative itself. They were also surprised and annoyed by the inconclusive ending. Evan Hunter recalled that the audience at the special preview in the Museum of Modern Art “was, to say the very least, somewhat glacially polite in its reception. A stunned silence greeted the final complicated mosaic.” When Hunter attended a public cinema he noted that “people actually turned to each other and mumbled, ‘Is it over? Is that it? Huh?’ ” In trying to contrive an unusually mysterious ending Hitchcock had fatally misjudged the reactions of an ordinary audience.
The reviews were therefore mixed, with a tendency to criticise Tippi Hedren’s performance as too controlled and unsympathetic. That is in fact a comment on Hitchcock’s close direction rather than on any deficiencies in Hedren herself. He was particularly incensed by the attacks of what he called “the highbrows” who criticised the film as “corny.” Once again he seems to have fallen into the gap between the artistic and the popular. Hitchcock said later that “Alma had never liked the original idea of doing The Birds. She didn’t think there was enough story there. Well, she was right. Not enough story, too many birds.”
The film has gained recognition in later years. It was not the first “disaster film” or “catastrophe film,” as has sometimes been suggested, but it did set out the paradigm for every successful one that followed. All sorts of suppositions have been imposed upon it: the birds represent female aggression, the male will to power, or a universal attack upon the “meaning system.” In one of his few remarks on The Birds, he said, non-committally, “if you like you can make it the theme of too much complacency in the world: that people are unaware that catastrophe surrounds us all.” It is clear that he did not care very much what the film meant, as long as it had the required effect upon the audience.
Of Melanie, played by Tippi Hedren, he stated that “the girl is a nothing. She just represents complacency and smug satisfaction, in order to contrast that with the ultimate happening.” That “ultimate happening” was the key. Every scene takes place in an atmosphere of mounting tension, so that any and every action becomes surrounded by a multitude of sinister possibilities. What was comfortingly solid at the beginning of the film is seen to conceal a world of threat. The tension is never reduced for a moment. This was his great gift. He maintained it on the set itself. He hired a timpanist to play an amplified drum close to the actors, so that they would instincively play to a relentless and menacing rhythm that might have been the beat of doom. He deployed red colours—of clothes, of hair, of umbrellas, of furniture, of balloons, and of interiors—to communicate danger and violence to the audience.
When the seagulls attack Melanie with diabolical cries, their savage shrieks might have been an echo of Hitchcock’s earlier films where he equates the screaming of birds with violent death. The murderer in Murder! wore a bird costume in his circus performance; the stuffed birds in Norman Bates’s office imply a sense of death and corruption in Psycho; a chirping bird in a cage greets Alice White after she has returned from a scene of murder in Blackmail; the caged canaries in Sabotage are the camouflage for a deadly bomb; screeching gulls fly over the corpse in Young and Innocent. Many other examples could be adduced for this primal image, not all of them susceptible to interpretation, but we may adduce William Blake’s short poem from his “Auguries of Innocence”:
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
. . .
In a further bid to acquire artistic respectability he had agreed to a series of long interviews with François Truffaut, while the final editing of The Birds was taking place in the summer of 1962. He was not thinking of any English honours. In this year he turned down the award of CBE “because, in his view, it did not do justice to his contribution to British culture.” Despite his statements to the contrary, he did have a full sense of his own worth.
When Truffaut wrote his letter of proposal, which entailed examining each of Hitchcock’s films, concentrating upon “the birth of each film, the development and construction of the scenario, problems of direction in respect to each picture, the situation of a film within the body of your work,” Hitchcock was sincerely touched. He replied that “your letter made me cry and how grateful I am to receive such a tribute from you.” Truffaut was one of the leaders of what became known as the “nouvelle vague” and had already directed The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim. In private Hitchcock described the contemporary group as the “nouvelle vagrants,” but he was not about to let his feelings show. Such homage from a younger director was r
icher than incense; it implied approval from those at the front edge of cinematic change. His tears were genuine; the sign of an emotional and fearful man, they represented the fulfilment of a long-awaited ambition.
At first he wanted to control the content of the interviews. In an unsent letter he insisted on seeing the transcript in advance and on having the power to alter any passage to which he took objection, with the terms of default set at half a million dollars. He did not send the letter, no doubt realising that it would be construed as a deep insult to a fellow professional.
The interviews were based on the relatively new concept of the director as “auteur,” the sole begetter of the film just as an artist was the sole begetter of a painting. This was far from the case in Hitchcock’s films where he required the active collaboration of many people, notably the screenwriter and the cameraman, but it suited his purpose to minimise their contributions. He described John Michael Hayes, who had crafted Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much, as “a radio writer” who simply “wrote the dialogue.” It was a wilful twisting of the truth.
Through the middle of August Hitchcock would pick up Truffaut and his interpreter from the Beverly Hills Hotel at eight in the morning, take them by limousine to his offices in Universal Studios, and talk until six in the evening with an interval for lunch of steak and fried potatoes. Truffaut reports that at first Hitchcock adopted his familiar jovial and anecdotal persona and that “it was only on the third day he became more sober and thoughtful in spelling out the ups and downs of his career.” This was not like any other interview Hitchcock had given. This was to be his testament.
Truffaut asked questions of a man whom he considered to be a “very fearful person” as well as a “deeply vulnerable, sensitive, and emotional man who feels with particular intensity the sensations he communicates to his audience.” Small insights into his personality emerged in the interview but largely of a clipped nature. “Precisely.” “Exactly.” “That’s right.” “Right.” Hitchcock preferred anecdotes and technical detail to any disquisitions on theme or meaning. He did not wish to enquire too deeply into his motives, or the reasons for any particular subject or film. He was only interested in content or plot in so far as they prompted his visual imagination. He had said, on more than one occasion, “I don’t give a damn what the film is about.” It had only to be seen, and not interpreted. No philosophical theory or analysis interested him in the least. Or, to put it another way, any film had different and multiple possibilities of meaning, which is perhaps the condition of life itself.
Yet he did plead guilty to certain aesthetic preferences. He explained to Truffaut that Rear Window was “the purest expression of a cinematic idea” that allowed him to create “a purely cinematic film.” It was a film of gesture, of an image that only became significant when placed beside another image. He once said that an artist, painting a still life of a bowl of apples, would not care whether the apples were sweet or sour. That was a level of reality that did not interest him. He was preoccupied with order, and pattern, and symmetry. The spirals and staircases, the vertical bars and window blinds, all testify to that.
A film was more akin to a dream sequence, “daydreams probably,” he told Truffaut, that were more powerful than reason or logic. He had previously said in an article for The Stage in 1936 that “I visualise my story in my mind as a series of smudges moving over a variety of backgrounds.” He saw vague patterns, as if through a haze. Some poets have described the process of inspiration in a similar fashion. Music and colour affected him profoundly. Music was for him a medium “to express the unspoken,” as he said on another occasion, and was often a simulacrum of the dream state he wished to invest in his work. Colour was also subtle and subliminal. He would orchestrate the colour of cars and advertisements in a street, of lampshades and flowers in a room. Cool colours such as pale blue and lime green were used to convey rationality and objectivity; hot colours such as yellow and red were designed to suggest emotional turbulence and danger. In Dial M for Murder Grace Kelly’s outfits move from red to orange and then finally from grey to black; every passage of her emotional journey is dramatised by colour. For the heroine of North by Northwest, he imagined “a heavy black silk cocktail dress subtly imprinted with wine-red flowers in the scenes where she deceives Cary Grant.”
He has often been described as an artist of the surface, and his films as the quintessential art of the surface, but in truth the surface covers the whole of life. He is close, perhaps, to the judgement of Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Yet Hitchcock is aware all the time that “it’s only a movie,” that it is a game and an artifice. He delights in cinematic effects that are demonstrably artificial, or deliberately unreal.
But he is not an aesthete in the late nineteenth-century style. He had too strong a sense of his audience. “I don’t make pictures to please me,” he told an interviewer in 1972, “I make them to please audiences.” “It all comes to this,” he once said. “How do you apply glue to the seats of the audience?” The glue comes from fear, or anxiety, or terror, or suspense, or curiosity. Hitchcock knew how to elicit all of these. He was always asking his scriptwriters to keep the focus on the audience response. What do you want the audience to feel at this point? What do you want the audience to be thinking? How can you screw the audience to a pitch of unbearable tension? He also appreciated the fact that his audiences in Tokyo or in New York, in Paris or in London, were responding with the same emotions. His was a global medium quite unprecedented in scale and effect.
He was above all a pragmatist. If he had been asked to choose between art and commerce he might have hesitated, but only for a moment. “Do you think of yourself as an artist?” Peter Bogdanovich once asked; “No, not particularly.” And to another interviewer he remarked, “I really hate the word artistic.” He disliked all the associations of “the studio” in film-making and would have preferred it to have been known as “the factory.” The studio system in which he laboured was imagined by him as a kind of prison. “We’re inside on a stage,” he once said, “the big doors are closed, and we’re down in a coal mine.” Truffaut recalled that in his interviews with Hitchcock the director more than once used the expression “when the heavy doors of the studio close behind me.”
. . .
He kept on his treadmill. Characteristically he had been thinking of his next film long before he finished work on the last. He had remained interested in a novel, Winston Graham’s Marnie, that had been sent to him before its publication in January 1961. It told the story of a female kleptomaniac, Margaret “Marnie” Edgar, who is forced into marriage with one of her rich victims, Mark Rutland, who has discovered her proclivities and blackmails her. It turns out that she has been traumatised by a childhood episode in which she had killed one of her prostitute mother’s clients with a poker. From that time forward she had an aversion to men and to red, the colour of blood. It is psychological hokum, but it had possibilities for the screen.
The central idea, with all the opportunities it afforded for the portrait of an ambiguous lady, was strong enough for him to purchase the film rights immediately and even to take part in the advertising around the novel’s publication in the United States. He is stated as saying that “the book is about one of the most unusual heroines I’ve ever encountered.” He was still contemplating the return of Grace Kelly to the screen. He sent her a copy of the book, and awaited favourable news.
She had seemed at first excited and ready to recommence her career in film but suddenly, in the spring of 1962, she decided to turn down the role. It came as a severe blow to Hitchcock, who had put all his faith in her return to the screen under his auspices, and of course he also took it as a personal affront; his anger was compounded by disappointment. Kelly cited family reasons and the difficulty of travelling to Hollywood now that she lived in Monaco, but Hitchcock suspected t
hat the cause was financial. She had hoped to make a great deal of money out of the film, which could then be used to assist Monaco, which was under financial pressure from France, but at a late stage another source of revenue was found. She was never going to do it for the sake of Hitchcock alone. Grace Kelly was not free to go, and certainly not to play the role of an obsessive thief. In a letter to her at the end of June 1962, he wrote that “after all, it was only a movie.” But he was hurt.
Evan Hunter recalled that throughout 1962, while filming The Birds, “we discussed Marnie on the sixty-mile ride to and from location. We discussed Marnie during lulls in the shooting and during lunch and during dinner every night. We discussed Marnie interminably.” At the beginning of 1963, just as The Birds was entering its final phase of post-production, Hitchcock began the preparations in earnest for a film about the beautiful but cold kleptomaniac. In the absence of Grace Kelly, he turned once more to Tippi Hedren. Although she had been shaken by her experience in The Birds, normal relations—or as close as Hitchcock ever got to normal relations—had been resumed, and in January he gave a dinner party for five people to celebrate her birthday. In February he began holding story conferences with Evan Hunter and Robert Boyle, the production designer. There was one planned sequence, which according to Hunter “disturbed me enormously.” Hitchcock asked him, innocently enough, what scene that might be. Hitchcock knew exactly which scene it was. It was the scene in which Marnie’s new husband, Mark Rutland, rapes her on the wedding night. “Oh don’t worry about that,” Hitchcock replied. “That’ll be fine.”
Hitchcock had paid much attention to the rape and, with the tape recorder switched off, had described all of its details to Hunter. The writer later told an interviewer that “he framed me up with his hands the way directors do, and said ‘Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!’ ” But Hunter balked. He did not want to write the scene, simply because it was without motive. The new husband, played by Sean Connery, would be acting quite out of character. Hunter wrote an alternative scenario for the unfortunate honeymoon night, on yellow rather than white paper to differentiate it from the rest of the script, but it was rejected by Hitchcock, who wrote back quickly saying that he felt “there is still a lot of work to be done on it.” He added ominously that it might need “a fresh mind altogether, and this probably will have to be the next procedure.” He had effectively fired the scriptwriter.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 23
