Reel Politique: Book Review, Hitchcock Studies, Part 1
Why does David Raksin hate Alfred Hitchcock?
The composer of the score for Laura and numerous other movies is on record as finding Hitchcock an “arrogant and dreadful person to so many people, ruthless and cruel … Hitchcock owed [Herrmann] everything, and [Hitchcock] had the loyalty of an eel,” as he said in the excellent one hour documentary Music of the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (part of a three or four part series). Puzzled by the vehemence and frankness of his statement, I looked up Raksin’s name in the indexes of all the likely Hitchcock books, and found no citations. Raksin never scored a Hitchcock movie, so his opinion is of unknown origin beyond his observations concerning the career-diminishing Herrmann-Hitchcock contre-temps. Yet somehow his contrary views didn’t find their way into Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, published in 1983, a quasi muckraking bio that served as a companion to the author’s earlier book, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, from 1976 (revised in 1991), at one time the longest and most sympathetic analysis of the director’s films. Dark Side came as a shock to some readers because of its salacious details about Hitchcock’s private conduct and the revelations about his harassment of Tippi Hedren, among other of his leading ladies. Raksin’s views are compatible with those found in Spoto’s biography concerning his treatment of collaborators.
Now, Mr. Spoto offers a third volume, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (Hutchinson, 256 pages, $40, 978-0091797232, currently available only in England). At once it is both a thumbnail version of Dark Side, and an updating, with information and comments which, as he says, some interviewees requested he hold back for various reasons during their or others’ lifetimes. Some passages are identical between the two books, such as the description of the agonies earlier actors before Tippi Hendren went through (The Dark Side, page 459, Spellbound page 177), but much of it is new, such as Diane Baker’s quotes on Marnie, and the anecdote about Hitchcock suddenly lunging at To Catch a Thief’s Brigitte Auber for a lip-lock at a “friendly” lunch. In keeping with the subtitle, with each film covered Spoto goes on to say what happened to the film’s main starlette (the “future” of Madeleine Carol is among the most interesting).
The portrait of Hitchcock is much like the one put forth in Dark Side, only darker. He comes off as an overgrown adult adolescent hiding behind, yet tortured by, his weight, cold and impersonal to real human beings while inwardly conjuring fantasies about his leading ladies, some of whom he fell in love with pathetically (Ingrid Bergman, Hedren), a foul mouthed lecher trapped in a marriage blanc who would sometimes throw himself physically on his stars (Karen Black was once a surprisingly cheerful victim), a money-grubing credit hog who directed his publicists to perpetuate an apparently mythical image of the director as an artist who privately visualized the movie in advance without collaborators and who became more withdrawn and unhappy as he aged, even shown weeping at his desk because Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, didn’t visit the director in his elaborate lot office complex.
It appears that Mr. Spoto is of two minds about Hitchcock, admiring the artist but deploring aspects of the human being. But what one wants from a biography writer is a reconciliation of contrary impulses. At one point he writes, in justification for both Hitchcock’s failings and his own exposure of them, that, “It is precisely this complex of elements that gives the life and character of Alfred Hitchcock such poignancy; that must evoke our compassion; and that in some marred, marvelous way for the better, still shares something of our common humanity. Were that not so, it would be impossible to explain his enduring worldwide popularity and his legacy of sleek entertainments. [page 144]”
What the reader is going to wonder, especially one who is a fan or student or admirer of Hitchcock, is what to do with all this information. How does it help us appreciate the films themselves? How do I take Marnie, now knowing his conduct with Hedren and Auber and Black? In Dark Side, Spoto goes on to say that after the break with Hedren he lost all interest in Marnie, which resulted in terrible process shots and other laughable effects that diminish the effect of the film, and he mocks critics who wrote themselves into pretzel prose to justify such sloppy work on the screen, alluding to without naming such critics as Robin Wood, whose “defense” of the process shots is in reality quite clever.
One almost pines for a time when one didn’t know so much about celebrities. Since the 1970s, perhaps starting with the Polanski case, the media and the celebrities themselves, such as Robert Evans in his memoir, are much more open about their hedonism, bragging about their drug use and sexual liaisons, creating a chasm between the image on the screen and the reality of human conduct. In the end, it is better to know the truth, if it is knowable at all, but there is a general diminishment of the achievement of Hollywood when the values of the filmmakers are so at variance with their real views, and readers are confronted with an inundation of sordid stories and neurotic behavior. As movies improve by being more realistic, the artists themselves grow less tolerable.
As an addendum to Dark Side, Spellbound by Beauty is a breezy read. well written and organized. Some of the photographs included were new to me, including one of Kim Novak obviously nude in bed during the shooting of Vertigo. And his occasional critical observations are intriguing, such as Spoto’s pointing out that Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho form a trilogy of films in which a central character is absent or doesn’t exist. As a briefer version of his massive bio, the book might appeal to readers with limited time, and Hitchcock enthusiasts will probably buy it pro forma, as this writer did. I expect, however, that Hitchcock partisans in the critical community, at whom Spoto takes occasional potshots, will be poised to attempt to refute or minimize his take on Hitchcock the man.