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The Sunday Times (02/May/1999) - A master manipulator

(c) The Sunday Times (02/May/1999)

A master manipulator

George Perry applauds a fascinating account that reveals, from hitherto private papers, how Alfred Hitchcock set about creating his films When explaining why he generally regarded the shooting stage as a necessary chore and not much more, Alfred Hitchcock would often say, "My films are made on paper." Few directors ever went on set with so much of what was intended already carefully planned, not just with a detailed script, but sometimes complex storyboards showing every shift of the camera. For him, the creative core was the mapping out of a film. After that, shooting what was already embedded in his imagination was a formality. He frequently displayed a studied detachment from the preparations on set. "My people know what I want" was another of his dicta. I remember him at Universal during Family Plot, his last film. Ensconced in his Winnebago trailer, he was retailing a lengthy shaggy-dog story as a shot was lined up. There came a tap on the door: "We're ready, Mr Hitchcock." He rose, waddled to his canvas chair 50ft away, sinking his massive bulk. The actors waited. He gave his command. "Action, please." When their stuff was done, he said: "Cut. Thank you very much." Only one take was needed, then back to the trailer to finish the joke.

So what has happened to all that paper on which he made his films? In the writing of Hitchcock's Secret Notebooks (Bloomsbury Pounds 20) Dan Auiler, the author of a formidable study of Vertigo, has dug into the huge personal collection given by Hitchcock's daughter Patricia to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was generous, considering her father's dearth of deserved Oscars. The substantial compendium that Auiler has gleaned from this material shows how Hitchcock set about creating his films: memos, transcripts of script discussions, outlines, treatments, correspondence, storyboards, and much else.

Two of the three geniuses of American cinema who emerged from the silent era are Londoners - Chaplin is the other - but you must look elsewhere for a biographical account. Hitchcock has attracted more books than any other director (I have even lobbed two modest ones of my own on to the mountainous pile) and in this, his centenary year (he was born on August 13, 1899, in the London suburb of Leytonstone), you can expect several more, but this will be the one that counts.

Hitchcock, an extraordinary master of the manipulative, persuasive qualities of cinema, had a Shakespearian gift of appealing to all levels of his audience. At the most basic, his edge-of-the-seat suspense technique made him as famous as his stars. Yet he continues to provoke discussion on complex themes of guilt, redemption and irony ad nauseam. Such attention both pleased and amused him. I remember a National Film Theatre discussion in which an earnest semiologist droned on about how in Marnie the distorted backdrop of a ship moored at the end of her mother's dockside street indicated a dysfunctional childhood. Hitchcock eventually stopped his flow, observing: "No. We had a lousy scene-painter." Among more than 50 features he made between 1925 and 1976 (he died in 1980) are many cinematic masterpieces, including Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho. The Thirty-nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Suspicion, To Catch a Thief and many others are magnificent entertainments. Sadly, one of his films is missing, and will not feature in the otherwise comprehensive screenings in New York this summer at the Museum of Modern Art. Hitherto, all that survived of The Mountain Eagle, set in Kentucky but shot in Germany in 1926, has been four miserable stills in the British Film Institute. Auiler prints page after page of stills in chronological sequence, plus several shots of the director and crew on location, all found in Hitch cock's collection. Commendably, he hopes that their publication can spur the discovery of a complete print somewhere, the film historian's equivalent of the Holy Grail.

For general guidance in screenplay construction, few books can match this one. It shows how Hitchcock would make detailed parallel comparisons between original stories and various drafts, demonstrating a script's development. Thornton Wilder's handwritten, first version of Hitchcock's favourite film, the 1943 Shadow of a Doubt, is excerpted at length, demonstrating how harmoniously their minds must have connected. There is also a revealing note from Jay Presson Allen, who scripted Marnie, describing how she wrote a sequence in which the heroine goes from her wedding to reception to a boat, and sails on honeymoon, all in a plodding, linear manner. "Hitch said: Why don't we shoot the church and hear the bells ring and see them leave? Then why don't we cut to a large vase of flowers, with a pinned note of congratulations? And the water in the vase is sloshing, sloshing, sloshing.' " The shorthand of a master.

On a personal level, Hitchcock has been ill-served by some biographers. Donald Spoto, in particular, in The Dark Side of Genius, alleged that he was a repressed sex fiend, unhealthily fixated on his leading ladies who were then to suffer torments on screen for frustrating his wish to bed them. That was not the Hitch I knew, and I went into it in detail with some of his stars, including Kim Novak and James Stewart. Stewart reminded me that putting women through it was traditional in exciting audiences, going back to when the serial queen Pearl White was chained to the railroad tracks.

I first met Hitchcock at the time of The Birds, and frequently visited him at home in Bel Air, dined with him in London, and watched him at work. On a summer day in 1966, I arrived at his office suite on the Universal lot, exhausted from a long trip to the Canadian far north. Immediately, he urged me to watch his new film, still wet from the lab. It was Torn Curtain. What do you say to the film-maker you admire most in the world who has just made a stinker? Especially when you are tired out. In fact, it did not matter. Auiler's excellent book shows that Hitchcock was already sadly aware that this time he had failed.

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