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Hitchcock on Hitchcock
Selected Writings and Interviews Volume 2
By Sidney Gottlieb UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Sidney Gottlieb
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27960-5
CHAPTER 1
STORIES AND SUSPENSE
INTRODUCTION
Before he was in a position to make films, Hitchcock wrote stories that, not surprisingly, are recognizably Hitchcockian in tone and subject and are also remarkably cinematic. "Gas" (reprinted in the first volume of Hitchcock on Hitchcock), a story he published in the Henley Telegraph, a magazine put out by the company he worked for after he left St. Ignatius school, is often taken as a template for many of his future works, with its imperiled woman, evocation of sadism, detailed description of the experience of fear, and twist ending: it's all been a dream, prompted by anesthesia in a dentist's office. But subtleties and complexities exist here as well. For all that he talked later in his career about avoiding clichés, this story is based on them. He sets the mood in "Gas" with a shorthand reference to Grand Guignol and a subsequent piling up of conventional details. Ultimately it is a story based on clichéd stories, not experiences—in fact, it is a dramatization of a woman steeped in stories and drama that overheat her imagination and color her sense of the world around her. The clichés of the story turn out to be part of a conscious examination of how clichés fill one's mind and shape one's experiences. It is a study in hysteria originating in possession by lurid art.
But "Gas" is only the first of seven stories that Hitchcock published in the Henley Telegraph. The remaining stories were unearthed and reprinted, with a full commentary, by Patrick McGilligan (30–46), and I include them herein. McGilligan calls the second story, "The Woman's Part," "especially cinematic" (26) and relates its frame-within-a-frame structure, theatrical setting and imagery, and unstable sense of truth and reality to numerous later Hitchcock films. It is worth adding that this story, like the first, is also an early Hitchcockian exercise in the subjective point of view, with the twist at the end coming from the revelation of how limited and distorting this point of view is. The title of the story is particularly significant, referring not only to the literal subject matter revealed at the end—that the narrator's wife is an actress playing a role on stage—but to the way that the husband is feminized, identifying with the woman he watches as he himself is a passive victim observing events around him that he cannot direct. The story is a preliminary sketch of a disempowering rather than an empowering gaze, an important but often overlooked motif for Hitchcock, especially in films like Rear Window and Vertigo, arguably his most profound analyses and dramatizations of "the woman's part" played by both a man and a woman.
"Sordid" is a rather simple tale of drama and deception, once again, like "Gas," showing the contrast between the stories we tell and the often far more mundane truth that lies behind them. The revelation at the end explains the otherwise inscrutable title by turning it into a pun: as McGilligan explains (27), it is indeed a sorry sight to realize how routinely we accept an extravagant legend that upon closer examination proves to be completely fabricated, betrayed by the "words" that compose our tales about the "swords." One of Hitchcock's main concerns in the stories he told is the lesson of unreliable narration: stories are inescapably captivating but also misleading and problematic in numerous ways. The Henley pieces vividly illustrate that Hitchcock was an inveterate storyteller and one whose recurrent concern was the very subject of storytelling itself.
Little good can be said about "And There Was No Rainbow," which is at best a trifling bit of attempted light humor at the expense of a "poor Romeo," his friend who is far from the "brainy man" he seems to be and whose silly man-to-man advice almost gets him cuckolded, and the woman in question, who must be faulted for being susceptible to the advances of both of these two boobs. This is a comically grim view of men, women, and eros, but there is no need to take it overly seriously: plenty of far more substantial evidence in Hitchcock's later work will support our sense of his comically grim view of men, women, and eros.
This one comedic dud in the series is followed, however, by two more appealing bits of humor that Hitchcock published in the next issue of the Henley Telegraph. "What's Who?" may be closer to music hall silliness than Ionesco and Pirandello, but it nicely captures the escalating dizziness that occurs when a group of actors enter the vortex of impersonating one another and release the genie that inevitably arises from the unanswerable questions "who's you?" and "what's me?"—the presiding genie, as it turns out, of many of Hitchcock's later films. And "The History of Pea Eating" is perhaps the most assured and literary of the Henley pieces, effectively adopting a kind of Swiftian satiric drollery in showing how a penchant for immodest proposals and misguided experiments characterize modern man as Homo ridiculoso.
These first six pieces do not prepare us for the last in the series, published just before Hitchcock left the company for a job at British Famous Players-Lasky. There's no way of knowing whether or not "Fedora" is based on a real woman actually seen by Hitchcock, but his description of her and fantasies about her future career and the men she will profoundly affect (there is perhaps a little Pygmalion in him as he envisions different shapes she may take, although for other men, not him) are deeply felt and effectively conveyed. And this sketch is not only a story about his desires and ambitions for "worldly greatness" as well as romance but also a musing on stories in general. The fact that "every person has a plot ... and every plot is the same" entails the responsibility to express and explore that plot, a task that Hitchcock was in the process of turning into his vocation.
The discovery of a manuscript in Hitchcock's own hand dating probably from the very early 1920s gives us a good glimpse of the next stage in his storytelling career. "Good-night, Nurse!" is not a fully fledged tale intended for print but an outline of a plot, a treatment evidently aimed at attracting the attention of a studio as a possible film project. It focuses on a young man (Felix) who wants to satisfy both his romantic and financial needs and can do so only if he escapes from his plan to elope with a Spanish dancer (Juanita), using her to spoil the reputation of his cousin (Egbert) so that he will be disinherited by their uncle, leaving Felix as the heir. Egbert marries Juanita, but rather than tarnishing his reputation this marriage leaves his uncle grateful, because he himself had been trapped "in the clutches" of the Spanish dancer. In a final twist, things work out well for everyone but Felix: Egbert becomes confirmed as the new heir, and the uncle ends up with Mary, his nurse, the woman Felix had hoped to marry. It is easy to imagine "Good-night, Nurse!" printed on the last dialogue title card, literally describing the ending but also perfectly expressing Felix's feelings as he mouths this common term of exasperation. One wonders what Hitchcock had in mind that led him to believe such a story might open any doors for him: he must have imagined that there was a substantial demand for eccentric and exotic characters, as well as farce and erotic intrigue driven by implausibility and coincidence—qualities that after all pulled Jazz Age audiences to Feydeau and DeMille, among many others. And it is curiously coincidental that around the same time Hitchcock was working as the title designer for a film titled The Spanish Jade (directed by John Robertson, 1922) he was writing a sketch featuring a woman who could figuratively be called a Spanish jade, although as yet there is no further demonstrable link between these two projects. In any event, this early manuscript perhaps illustrates not so much Hitchcock's skill at or particular interest in romantic comedy as his effort at this time to become as versatile as possible in his quest to make himself the kind of person who would someday be allowed to make films.
Hitchcock continued to write stories long after he was well established as a filmmaker, and I include several examples of his later efforts. "Death in the Crystal Ball," which purports to be based on a real experience that he had with his family more than a decade earlier, takes place in one of his favorite settings, an amusement park, home to the unconscious and the uncanny. (It was published while he was working on Strangers on a Train, which similarly concludes with a shocking death witnessed by "hundreds of witnesses" who "shrieked in horror.") This story is structured quite literally as a variation on the classic example Hitchcock used to define suspense (the hidden bomb, set to go off at a time that we know), but in this case not just the audience but the protagonist as well—he himself—is told the exact time that a horrible event will happen. We are all left to nervously await the arrival of 6:07, which indeed brings a catastrophe that is both expected and shocking, a useful reminder that while Hitchcock always highlighted the differences between suspense and surprise, as well as his preference for the former, he nevertheless used both effects, often in tandem.
"The Wise Man of Kumin" is similarly structured as a tale of suspense but is also a reflexive meditation on that dramatic device. A Chinese leader lives his life beneath a heavy chandelier dangling from a frayed rope, a condition made even more perilous by the rumbling of the train that passes by every day. The ruler's imperviousness to this constant danger is taken as unshakable bravery, and his reputation protects his kingdom from attack by neighboring warlords hesitant to challenge such a fearless ruler. Only years after the man's death is it revealed that living a life of suspense is a strategic ruse: the chandelier will in fact never fall because it is supported by a steel wire. The twist ending lays bare the truth behind the appearances that constantly mislead us and perhaps looks forward to Family Plot, Hitchcock's most fully developed presentation and demystification of the occult. The wink at the end of that film (also associated with a chandelier, as in "The Wise Man of Kumin") does not challenge the power of the occult but reveals that it rests on something mundane rather than mystical: the expert manipulation of suspense, a talent shared by fortune-tellers, the wise man of Kumin, and the wise man of Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock.
The final story I include is not the most artful but is in some respects the most compelling, in part because of what may be an undercurrent of oblique topical references to Hitchcock's real, not just fantasy, life. "The Chloroform Clue" is a detailed retelling of what Hitchcock calls "one of the strangest stories I have ever encountered," that of Edwin and Adelaide Bartlett and Reverend George Dyson. Edwin invited Dyson into the household to educate Adelaide and then apparently encouraged their intimacy and watched approvingly as the two carried on romantically in his presence. After settling his estate on his wife and naming Dyson the executor of his will, Edwin became increasingly sick, and he died not long afterward, poisoned by chloroform, which Adelaide had procured. While the sensational trial that followed reaffirmed the "grave suspicion" of her role in the death, the mystery of how she might have administered the chloroform was unresolved, so she was acquitted, much to the approval of the courtroom audience, which "burst into cheers and applause."
Hitchcock introduces this story as an example of how much he is "fascinated by tales of murder," "suspense," "sudden death," and "most unusual love stor[ies]," all qualities of his newly released film at that time, I Confess. It's not surprising that in summarizing the story to Truffaut he notes, "I often thought it might make a good picture" (206). But numerous aspects of the story relate it to a scenario that Hitchcock was perhaps not just envisioning but living through. The snapshot of the husband-wife relationship —"The Bartletts' marriage ... had been entirely platonic. Except for one occasion which resulted in a stillborn child, they lived together as friends and nothing more"—is uncomfortably close to the way that Hitchcock often described his life with Alma (although with one key difference: their one sexual act, as he told it, led to the birth of their daughter, Patricia). And the insistence that Adelaide and Dyson's act was specifically not "illicit" but one conducted "in the presence of her husband" and with his awareness parallels Patrick McGilligan's speculation of what may have characterized Hitchcock's own domestic as well as working environment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with Whitfield Cook joining Alfred and Alma as the third Hitchcock (415 and elsewhere). McGilligan confidently states that Alma and Cook had a sexual relationship, and while lacking hard evidence about what Hitchcock knew and didn't know, he repeatedly suggests that it is at least plausible that the ongoing cordiality of the three Hitchcocks may have been based not on the director's obliviousness but on his approval and willingness to "sympathetically allow the flirtation to progress" (427). The information provided by McGilligan helps explain why the Bartlett story was even more of a touchstone for Hitchcock than the cases of Crippen and Christie, which he also frequently mentioned. It is less about violent death than complex domestic relationships, and its reference points are not only historical but also contemporary and personal: a "true mystery" in unexpected ways, the Bartlett story is in its essence arguably Hitchcock's story as well.
While in his interviews and writings Hitchcock often took great pleasure in telling stories about his films, he also frequently made clear how important the element of story was in them but did so in carefully qualified ways. In "Hitchcock on Stories," he notes that work on a film begins with the search for a story, and he briefly defines the kind of stories that are most suitable. His general advice is that a story must be unified and focused but also capacious enough to allow for the addition of the other ingredients that drive a film: "glamour, suspense, romance, charm, drama, emotion, and so forth." But he calls attention to a kind of tension between story and cinema, warning that while story is necessary for a film, it can also be a distraction, especially in his chosen genre: there is some palpable irony in his comment that "murder mysteries are not often great successes on the screen ... because they demand too much acute concentration." Hitchcock is of course famous for telling the story of the MacGuffin, but here he comes close to saying that story in general is itself a MacGuffin: extremely valuable and captivating but basically a pretext. The key challenge, if not paradox, is that story should get and keep things going, catching the attention of the audience, but not get in the way or dominate. Even at this point relatively early in his career (these comments were published in 1937), Hitchcock was preparing a response to what he identified somewhat later as his archenemy, the "plausibles." At the core of his defense against misapprehension and criticism, from audiences enraptured by narrative and always on the lookout for lapses in his works, is perhaps aHitchcockian version of René Magritte's well-known painting The Treachery of Images (1928–29), picturing a pipe and the caption (in French) "This is not a pipe." In discussing his productions in numerous interviews and articles, Hitchcock repeatedly announced in one way or another, "This is not a story: it's a film." The real work of cinema is not "logical," which in this present essay as elsewhere he associates with clear and linear narration, but "visual," presumably not limited to the demands of faithful representation of people, things, and actions. Story is not abandoned or disrespected, but it is put in its proper place, included but subordinated in his definition of and plea for pure cinema: "It is no use telling people; they have got to SEE." For all its brevity, "Hitchcock on Stories" effectively conveys a fundamental truth: Hitchcock was always a storyteller but always aware of "the Treachery of Story."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hitchcock on Hitchcock by Sidney Gottlieb. Copyright © 2015 Sidney Gottlieb. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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