The Two Faces of Alfred
Hitchcock
Hitchcock
(2012) Dir. Sacha Gervasi
The
Girl (2012) Dir. Julian Jarrold
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Please
note that these reviews contain discussion of major plot points of both films
and so should be considered spoiler heavy.
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Alfred
Hitchcock was notoriously difficult with women.
The sound tests he made with Anny Ondra for the 1929 film Blackmail see
him quizzing her about her sex life.
Just under a decade later, he maximised discomfort for Madeleine Carroll
on The 39 Steps by handcuffing her to co-star Robert Donat. Such incidents were presented as part of
Hitchcock’s playful nature; they fit with the man known for directing such
suspenseful pictures with tongue firmly in cheek.
When
Hitch decamped to Hollywood in 1940 he was already an international star, and
the studio system wanted some of that glory for themselves. He made three pictures with super-producer
David O. Selznick, and Selznick kept loaning him out to other studios, notably
RKO where he made Notorious. Hollywood
didn’t serve Hitch very well in the 1940s, and he churned out some mediocre
pictures (with a couple of notable exceptions, Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Notorious
and Shadow of a Doubt), but the 1950s saw him moving into more fertile
territory and an infatuation with a new ‘Hitchcock Blonde’, Grace Kelly. Kelly caught Hitch’s eye in a way I don’t
think any leading lady truly had since Madeleine Carroll, but Kelly left Hitch
to become a princess. Vera Miles took
her place, but became pregnant.
Two
new films, Hitchcock and The Girl, both explore the genius behind Alfred
Hitchcock’s films, and what it meant to be a Hitchcock Blonde.
Hitchcock,
written by John J. McLaughlin and directed by Sacha Gervasi, is based on Stephen
Rebello's non-fiction book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Gervasi is best known for his documentary
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008), a highly regarded documentary about the
Canadian heavy metal band. This is debut
fiction film. Immediately in this
picture, the blending of the real and the fictional is clear. We open on Ed Gein’s farmhouse, in rural
Wisconsin in 1949, where Ed Gein, soon-to-be-infamous serial killer is about to
murder his brother. Post-killing, however,
Alfred Hitchcock steps in front of the camera and speaks to the audience. This is a knowing moment for the
cine-literate: Hitch, in his famous cinema trailers, addressed the paying
public, baiting and teasing them with delights to come, as he would later do in
his TV series. It also sets the tone of
Gervasi’s film early on: what we are getting here is playful Hitch, the public
man with only the lightest of insights into his troubled personal life.
Gervasi’s
film is a polished affair. Playing the
director, Anthony Hopkins gives a memorable, comedic performance that
highlights the macabre sense of humour in the man. At many times, the audience laughs with Hitch
at the unfortunate people who are the recipient of his bad taste jokes. His long-time wife, Alma Reville, is played
by Helen Mirren. Rounding out the
picture is Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh.
 |
| Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho |
Janet
Leigh was rarely a memorable actress, and her best role is undoubtedly as the
victim Marion Crane in Psycho: but even here what makes her memorable is
circumstance, and Hitch’s camera, rather than any true screen presence. As with Tippi Hedren in the later films, the
emptiness of the performance is what allows the camera to fill them up and make
them shine. There is a moment late in
The Girl, the other Hitchcock bio-film to be made, when Hitch is looking at
Tippi Hedren against a yellow screen as she shoots the final moments of her
last great film, where for the briefest of seconds she becomes real to the
great man, human, and not just an object of desire, and she acts for the first
time, rather than just existing, and it is transcendent.
 |
| Toby Jones and Sienna Miller as Hitch and Tippi |
The
Girl, co-produced by HBO Films and BBC Films, premiered on television. Directed by Julian Jarrold, who has worked
widely in British crime TV, and made a few well-received but underperforming
films, The Girl is written by Gwyneth Hughes and based on Spellbound by Beauty
by Donald Spoto. Spoto was one of the
first critics to highlight the perverse darkness that imbues much of Hitch’s
cinema, and has written a number of books on the master, from when he was still
alive, and beyond. In this film, based
on the making of both The Birds and Marnie (the duration of Hitch’s
relationship with Hedren), Hitch is played by Toby Jones, Alma by Imelda
Staunton and Tippi by Sienna Miller.
The
Girl is set three years after Hitchcock, and presents a very different side to
the great man. In this film, Hitch is a
lecherous dictator, whose wife is cowed by his arrogance and timid against his
will. If one contrasts Imelda Staunton’s performance with that of Helen Mirren’s,
who battles cheek by jowl against her husband, and is more dominant over him
then he is over her, it is difficult to believe we are looking at the same
woman. The same is true of Hitch
himself. Hopkins plays the man for
laughs, Jones seeks out the darkness: but here is a critical difference between
the portrayals of the man over the woman – both these incarnations of Alfred
Hitchcock are conceivably the same man.
Hopkins’s
performance allows the darkness in Hitch to accrue slowly. There are subtle hints that not all is well
in Hitch’s mind: we see him watching the blonde’s that walk by his office
window, he begins to suffer nightmares, and soon he has Ed Gein as his
psychiatrist. Hopkins’s Hitchcock never
crosses the line into brutality or sexual violence, and the psychosomatic
disorders he suffers in this film are all revealed to be part of his obsession
with making the perfect picture. The
darkness in this Hitchcock is danced away as the screams of the audience
enjoying Psycho for the first time cleanse him spiritually, emotionally and
physically. By the end of Hitchcock, the
man is in playful mood again, addressing the audience, hoping to soon have
another bolt of inspiration: just as a crow lands on his shoulder before flying
off.
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| Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins as Alma and Hitch |
In
this film his relationship with Janet Leigh is kind and gentle. He is flirtatious with her, and Alma seems to
allow it (there is a niggling undercurrent in this and The Girl about Alma’s
complicity in the attempted seduction of Hitch’s female leads, almost as if she
knows he needs to fall in love with his leading ladies to make the perfect
picture), and they strike up a camaraderie, their bond professional without
ever crossing the line. Only in one
brief scene does Hitch frighten her, when she isn’t giving enough fear to her
impending murder in the infamous shower sequence – but he has frightened her in
the name of art, so the negativity of character is undermined by the
requirements of art.
There
are other moments that suggest Hitch might have a problem with women. In Hitchcock, Scarlett Johansson’s Janet
Leigh is talking with Jessica Biel's Vera Miles, trying to find out why this
actress who was meant to be Hitchcock’s next big star (following 1956’s The
Wrong Man) is being side-lined in Psycho.
Miles tells Leigh it is because she got pregnant, that she wanted a
family. Leigh asks Hitch about it, and
he asks with enormous sadness in his eyes, “Why do they always leave me?” The undercurrent is him asking Leigh not to
leave him too. She will, though, for she
too has a life outside Hitch: a marriage to Tony Curtis, and a two year old
daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis. The heart of
this sequence, and reasoning, seems psychologically flawed however: if Hitch
side-lined Miles because she started a family, why has he allowed himself to
use a woman already nine years into a famous marriage, and already a mother? In the film he uses her because his wife,
Alma, says she will be perfect. In The
Girl, when he and Alma are casting about for someone to use in The Birds, it is
Alma who suggests Tippi Hedren. Are
these films suggesting Hitch could only fall for those women that his wife had
first approved? Whatever the darkness is
that occasionally bubbles away at the edges of Gervasi’s film, it is muted by
the positive portrayal it wishes to make of the man: this is a film made by a
Hollywood production company, The Montecito Picture Company, and distributed by
Fox Searchlight Pictures, and aimed at the Academy Award crowd. It is a back-slap of a movie to Old
Hollywood, and an affirmation that belief in yourself and your work will see
you rewarded in the end: everybody lives happily ever after.
The
Girl, however, takes us further than the playful Hitchcock, into the dark heart
of the man. This Hitchcock is a sexual
predator. In a car ride to the location
shoot for The Birds, Hitchcock attempts to rape Tippi Hedren. It is a shocking claim, but one whose
authenticity has to be allowed as The Girl has been made with Hedren’s
blessing. In this film, Toby Jones plays
Hitchcock as a seething, power-hungry, megalomaniac genius; he sits hunched in
his chair, forcing Hedren to do take after take, allowing her to be brutalised
and injured on camera, until she is broken and bleeding and catatonic.
Tippi
Hedren, like Janet Leigh, was never a truly great screen presence. She made little impact after her two films
with Hitchcock, appearing in a lot of mediocre television. Like Janet Leigh, she was a good actress hindered
by some bad film choices, but with both women, Hitchcock found a way of making
them great, and for them to shine brilliantly.
Most famously, and in a moment chillingly recreated in The Girl,
Hitchcock forced Hedren to endure five days of attack by real life birds (after
being assured they would be mechanical) who clawed at her, but whose beaks were
closed with elastic bands. Cary Grant
visited her on set and said that she was the bravest actress he knew. On the fifth day, she was clawed close to her
eye, and she suffered a breakdown on set.
Ordered to take a week off by the doctor, she endured nightmares of
attacking birds. The question becomes
why was this apparent psychological and physical torment necessary? Hitch clearly hadn’t got the scene he
wanted. He wanted to see the sheer
mental and emotional turmoil of this terror destroying Melanie Daniels (the
character Hedren was playing). Did
Hedron deserve to endure this torment to achieve Hitchcock’s art? Undoubtedly not – but the scene, when seen in
the finished film, is what is needed: we can see Melanie Daniels suffering and
dying inside. It is the same motivation as
him attacking Johansson’s Janet Leigh in Hitchcock.
One
would think that Hedren would have left Hitchcock after suffering a sexual assault
by him, and the psychological assault of appearing in his film – but she still
with him a year later making Marnie.
Marnie is a difficult film: Donald Spoto claims it is Hitchcock’s last
great masterpiece, others feel it is an awkward watch. It is a film interested in sex and sexual
violence, and in frigidity and rape. It
fits with The Girl’s thesis that Hitchcock was a sexual predator – and Marnie
does feel a very personal film, much like Frenzy, Hitchcock’s genuine last
great masterpiece, and another film about sexual violence – but it serves as a
great disconnect between what we have learned of the man through these films,
and what we know of the man from others. Here it should be noted that Kim Novak,
another Hitchcock blonde, and the star of the film that is described as
Hitchcock’s truest fantasy and the most autobiographical in terms of mood, and
a family friend, Nora Brown, refute the portrayal of Hitchcock in The
Girl. The Girl’s presentation of events
is that Hedren didn’t have the emotional and psychological power to break her
contract with Hitchcock at the end of The Birds, but that she did by the end of
Marnie. But what has changed in that time? He was brutal to her in the making of The
Birds, and she stays. He propositioned her
near the end of Marnie and she turned him down and walked. The Girl fails to dramatize the internal
thoughts processes that led to Hedren changing her mind, and finding strength, leaving
the film with a hole in its centre.
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| Alfred Hitchcock |
So
we have two films about the same man, but both are different. He is a Jekyll and Hyde figure, shifting
between macabre humour and macabre action.
He is a good husband in one, a poor one in another. Hitchcock, the film,
shows us that he loves his wife dearly – he is driven into madness when he
discovers she might be having an affair – but in The Girl he loathes her. He tells Hedren he never really loved
her. There is a moment late in The Girl,
when Hitch is bought home a little drunk, and he tells his friend that he has
not had sex in a long time, and that he no longer gets erections. What that moment tells us is that these
unhealthy fixations with his movie blondes are not about sex, but about
desire. I wondered, as I watched him
torturing Hedren with repeated attack after attack by birds, whether Hitch was
self-flagellating himself for having these desires: it was not Hedren that was
suffering, but him, at least in his head.
Neither
film gives us a true portrait of Alfred Hitchcock – that is impossible,
especially in just 90 minutes of screen time – and neither film agrees on who
and what the man really was; with The Girl especially appearing like an attack
on a man who can no longer defend himself.
Also both fail to show something vitally important to the understanding
of this man. He married Alma Reville in
1926, and she was his wife until his death in 1980. Fifty four years of marriage is a long time,
and to have lasted so long there must have been love and respect, and
dedication to him. In his early days, an
actress, Clare Greet, appeared in six films he directed, more than any other actress,
and she believed in him so much she used some of her own money to fund Number
13. These expressions of love and
dedication are not something the figure shown in The Girl would ever receive. Nobody doubts Alfred Hitchcock had a dark
side, and that he was a troubled genius, but he must have had kindness in him
too, to inspire such dedication in others, and one should remember such things
when they watch either of these two films.
The
Girl is now available on DVD/Blu-Ray.
Hitchcock
is on limited release in the US and will be in UK cinemas in early 2013.
