Alfred Hitchcock's America E-Book

Murray Pomerance

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PALS-Polity America Through the Lens series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 463

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

With a sharp eye for social detail and the pressures of class inequality, Alfred Hitchcock brought to the American scene a perspicacity and analytical shrewdness unparalleled in American cinema.

Murray Pomerance works from a basis in cultural analysis and a detailed knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock's films and production techniques to explore how America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is revealed and critically commented upon in Hitchcock's work. Alfred Hitchcock's America is full of stunning details that bring new light to Hitchcock's method and works. The American "spirit of place," is seen here in light of the titanic American personality, American values in a consumer age, social class and American social form, and the characteristic American marriage. The book’s analysis ranges across a wide array of films from Rebecca to Family Plot, and examines in depth the location sequences, characterological types, and complex social expectations that riddled American society while Hitchcock thrived there.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COVER

SERIES PAGE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: ALFRED HITCHCOCK IN AMERICA

1 HITCHCOCK’S AMERICAN SCAPES

Walden in the Woods

Atomic Modernity

Small Enterprises

City Movements

American Paradise

2 HITCHCOCK’S AMERICAN PERSONALITIES

Melanie

Dr. Ben

Beyond Baedeker

Step Jumpers

The Working Type

She

Diva

The Dark Souls

3 HITCHCOCK AND AMERICAN VALUES

Hunger for Practice: Torn Curtain

Charms of Duplicity: North by Northwest and Psycho

Plain Conviction: The Wrong Man

The Right Kind of Girl: Rear Window

The Loyal Bergman: Notorious and Spellbound

Hanging On

4 HITCHCOCK AND AMERICAN SOCIAL FORM

A Sophisticated Scene

On the Road

A Tunnel of Love

A General Store

Giants

5 HITCHCOCK AND THE AMERICAN MARRIAGE

False Marriages: Notorious, Psycho, The Birds

Marriage on the Battlefield: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Thorwalds and Kentleys

Interlude: Jessie Royce Landis

Sons Lost and Found: The Man Who Knew Too Much and Family Plot

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED

INDEX

America Through the Lens

Martin Scorsese’s America, Ellis Cashmore

Alfred Hitchcock’s America, Murray Pomerance

Spike Lee’s America, David Sterritt

Steven Spielberg’s America, Frederick Wasser

Copyright © Murray Pomerance 2013

The right of Murray Pomerance to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5302-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5303-7 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6512-2 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6513-9 (Single-user ebook)

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to Andrew Hunter

If you want to understand my films, you have to see the landscapes of my America.

Stéphane Delorme paraphrasing Abel Ferrara, Cahiers du cinéma (October 2011)

*

All of us who worked learned a great deal from Hitch … . He became fascinated with America. … He became very interested in America and he became a very staunch supporter of America and American ideals.

Robert Boyle

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to a number of individuals without whose gracious assistance I would not have been able to complete this volume: Mark Pane and Judith Wolfe, Amagansett Free Library; Anastasia Kerameos, Library of the British Film Institute; Allie Berntsen, Sue Guldin, Barbara Hall, Kristine Krueger, Linda Harris Mehr, Jenny Romero, Faye Thompson, and the staff of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills; Sandra Joy Lee Aguilar and Jonathon Auxier, Warner Bros. Archive, Library of the University of Southern California; as well as to Janet Lum, Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University. For support in acquiring a number of the images included here I thank Philip Coppack and Wade Pickren, Ryerson University. And I am indebted for their kind assistance and generous help to Kate Barrett (Greensboro) and Linda Barrett (New York); Daniel Browne (Toronto); Terry Dale (Los Angeles); Mark Kermode (Southampton); Bill Krohn (Los Angeles); Jerry Mosher (Long Beach); William Rothman (Miami), Nick White (Toronto), and Linda Ruth Williams (Southampton). My colleagues at Polity Press, Susan Beer, Neil de Cort, Andrea Drugan, Lauren Mulholland, and Vanessa Parker, have made this work a constant pleasure. Thanks also to Ian Mottashed and Eric Schramm. And my family partners, Nellie Perret and Ariel Pomerance, have been insightful, patient, and an energizing inspiration.

INTRODUCTION: ALFRED HITCHCOCK IN AMERICA

At seven o’clock in the evening of Monday, June 6, 1938, about an hour and twenty minutes before sunset, the Queen Mary docked at West Fiftieth Street and Twelfth Avenue, New York, and within the hour Alfred Hitchcock, his wife Alma, and their daughter Patricia stepped into the United States. Alfred and Alma would soon turn thirty-eight; Patricia would soon turn ten. Hitchcock had in fact been charmed by things American, especially the American city, since as a boy he memorized train and trolley schedules from printed pamphlets that had become his treasure. One of his biographers, Patrick McGilligan, suggests that “early in life he learned from Americans and practiced American strategies” and quotes Hitchcock’s self-estimation as an “Americophile” (“Dreams” 1). Now, under the stewardship of Kay Brown (1905–1992), David O. Selznick’s New York representative, and without much further ado, the Hitchcocks were bustled off to California for meetings with Selznick before their return to England. Within a year they would be back, this time for good, landing in New York in early March 1939 and, by way of Palm Beach, reaching California by the end of the month (Spoto 214). As is evidenced by photographs taken on board the Queen Mary on that sailing, especially one of the three Hitchcocks marching merrily, side by side, and in lock-step along the sunny deck, the voyage was an unqualified delight and the prospect of living in America nothing less than a dream coming true (Païni and Cogeval 440).

In the summer of 1937 they had sailed over for a quick preliminary visit (arriving August 22 at 8 A.M., with the breakup of an intense heat wave) and had a taste of American style with Brown’s hospitality. “Their life in England, after all, was quite luxurious,” writes Donald Spoto. “As undisputed prince of the British directors, he had more control than any other filmmaker in his country’s history. He was also in great social demand, and his Surrey home never wanted for grateful guests” (185). Brown saw to it that he would be fêted at “21,” where he gobbled filets, vanilla ice cream, and brandy to his heart’s content; then visit Saratoga Springs, to see “rocking chairs. Actual rocking chairs, with people rocking in them. If we have rocking chairs in England it is only as curiosities. But here you have them in real life as well as in the movies” (Hitchcock qtd. in Spoto 188) and “carefully [place it] all under the bell jar of his prodigious memory” (188); and Washington, D.C. For Hitchcock America looked the green pasture. The Hitchcocks as a family took warmly to Brown. She and her husband, the lawyer James Barrett, lived in a duplex on East Eighty-Sixth Street with their two daughters, Laurinda and Kate, young enough to be playmates for Patricia Hitchcock but never particular friends of hers. Early that first summer, the Hitchcocks were invited for a weekend in the Hamptons, at the Barretts’ summer rental, Windmill Cottage, Amagansett.1 Nearby, on low wooden fences, blankets of primroses would have been in bloom. Laurinda, who became an actor and worked later for Hitchcock,2 recollects bonfire picnics at “our beach,” which would have been Indian Wells Beach, about half a mile down a narrow straight tree-lined road dotted with clapboard houses and ending in a vast stretch of lush dunes. “Hitchcock was such a cook,” she recollects. “I learned from him that the only way to cook corn is to leave it in the husk, soak it in salt water, and put it in the coals of the fire.” Barrett told me of a later visit to the Hitchcock home in Los Angeles while he was making The Wrong Man:

I was invited to dinner, and while I was there – I can’t remember if Pat was there or not – but Alma was there. He decided he would show me the kitchen because it was pretty fancy. I remember him showing me a drawer with great pride. Instead of pulling it out squarely, you pull the drawer down so you have slots in it. He kept fourteen fry pans. He started to show me the refrigerator; it was a walk-in refrigerator. I was much taller than he was. He opens the door and goes in, and points to the cow that he had all cut up in various steaks and chops, all bundled and tied. “Well, Hitch, where’s the meat hook?” He was standing behind me. I felt this tapping on my right shoulder. I turned around. And there indeed was the meat hook hanging right off to my right-hand side. Just tap tap tap. (Interview)

On the Amagansett beach, they always had champagne, and an endlessly beautiful vista of surf and sand in both directions as far as the eye could see. It was a taste of very old American hospitality that the Hitchcocks were getting on Long Island – the village of Amagansett was founded in 1630, and there were numerous early nineteenth-century structures, and even earlier ones, to be seen in addition to long swaths of old, quite enormous trees. Brown had been working out the deal her boss so fiercely desired, to have the celebrated Hitchcock working at Selznick International, fixed on his payroll and, as he would fantasize it, under his creative control. In the spring of 1939, newly arrived in Los Angeles, Hitchcock was assigned to direct Rebecca (Leff 39).

The translation to film of this very popular Daphne du Maurier novel was a signal undertaking for Selznick, who at the time was just finishing postproduction on Gone with the Wind. But it was not a thoroughgoing American project. Fundamentally an English story set in (constructed) British and French locales, Rebecca contained only one somewhat contracted reference to America or Americans, the character of Mrs. Van Hopper (Florence Bates). This wealthy widowed harridan, whose central preoccupations are the subjugation of a charming English girl and the obsequious admiration of an aristocratic English widower, shows off a particularly fawning and anxious side of the American character. Lost in the upper climes of the American middle class, and having no true European aristocracy upon which to model herself, Mrs. Van Hopper perfectly exemplifies a kind of desperation about self-image and social control that Hitchcock was eminently equipped to diagnose, detail, and replicate (since it is virtually impossible to come of age in the United Kingdom without gaining an articulate perspective on social class). In filming Foreign Correspondent immediately afterward, on loan-out to Walter Wanger, he was able to effect a more developed reprise, posting his central American hero to war-torn Europe, an Old World that could now be made to seem quaintly puzzling even as it charmed the all-business reporter who was all enthusiasm, get-go, and make-do.3

Not all of the films Hitchcock made from 1940 onward in America can be said to be “American” in terms of their content, although they were all consistently produced through the agency of American studio practice. Suspicion (1941, with the American actor Joan Fontaine leading), The Paradine Case (1947, starring Gregory Peck as a London advocate), Under Capricorn (1949, starring Ingrid Bergman as a tormented Australian wife), Stage Fright (1950, starring Richard Todd as a two-faced English chorus boy), and I Confess (1953, starring Montgomery Clift as a Canadian priest) are thus excepted from consideration here, as are Frenzy (1972, with Barry Foster as a Covent Garden fruit dealer). Topaz (1969, an international spy thriller) is not centrally about America, although it has some American characters; and the same is true of Dial M for Murder (1953), with one well-meaning but marginal American in it.

Numerous other films show aspects of Hitchcock’s depiction of American life: Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966), and Family Plot (1976).

In Topaz (Universal, 1969), a Cuban delegation to the United Nations headed by Rico Parra has taken up residence at the Hotel Theresa (Seventh Avenue and 125th Street). Here, the bodyguard Hernandez (Carlos Rivas) points out a fleeing man. Fidel Castro had occupied a two-room suite on the ninth floor there when he visited New York for the 1960 opening of the U.N. and the film reconstructs that visit. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Of these latter, Lifeboat merits some special mention. Made at Twentieth Century–Fox, with Hitchcock on loan-out from Selznick International; through the teamwork of Hitchcock, his partner Alma Reville Hitchcock, author John Steinbeck, playwright Jo Swerling, and producer Kenneth Macgowan; and starring Tallulah Bankhead, Henry Hull, John Hodiak, William Bendix, and Walter Slezak, the film depicts the experience of nine survivors of a U-boat attack in the mid-Atlantic. One of these is a German, as it turns out the captain of the U-boat himself (Slezak). The others suffer through the torments of being lost at sea without a compass, parching thirst and hunger, storms, and the fear that the wily German is leading them surreptitiously to a rendezvous with his own supply ship, on which they will be taken prisoner. A particularly desperate survivor is Gus Smith (né Schmidt (Bendix)), a sailor whose leg has been so severely wounded that gangrene has developed and he must have an amputation at sea, at the hands of the German captain, no less, a doctor in civilian life. Produced through the great technical expertise of Fred Sersen, with crisp, even alluring cinematography by Glen Macwilliams and design by James Basevi (who had achieved the astonishing storm effects for John Ford’s The Hurricane [1937]), the film is shot almost exclusively on a rear-projection stage where the seascape plates are seamlessly blended with soundstage photography of the rolling boat. Some of the twilight sequences – such as one in which the ship’s steward (Canada Lee) recites the Lord’s Prayer at the funeral service of a young woman’s deceased infant – are directed and photographed with profound aesthetic force.

Lifeboat (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1944): From left, Canada Lee, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Mary Anderson (partially obscuring Heather Angel), William Bendix, and Hume Cronyn. The boat rig is set up in front of an eight-foot rear projection screen. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Hitchcock’s grasp of social class relations and the tiny revealing indices of class membership was more than articulate and precise. He was never unaware of the class implications of his characters’ relationships, indeed often architected his films in order to highlight class difference as an explanation for what might otherwise be seen as arbitrary behavioral thrusts. There are two very significant revelations of the class structure of American society in Lifeboat. First, we have the sharply drawn portraits of various American characters’ attitudes toward, and resentments about, the self-made millionaire C. J. Rittenhouse (Hull), owner of several companies including a shipbuilding concern.4 Happy to be saved out of the sea and eager to show how chummy he can be in situations as unfortunate as this, Rittenhouse begs his boatmates to call him “Rit.” But Kovac (Hodiak), the working-stiff hero from the engine room, and Gus, even in the agonies of his pain, are both notably put off by this false gesture of equanimity. They can see plainly that even though he’s the most philosophical and principled person onboard, “Rit” won’t take a cigar out of his mouth or stop signaling his wealth and dominance. Accordingly, they use a slight turn of vocalization when uttering his nickname, as if to say, “We call you what you command us to, but not because we feel friendly.” The hierarchy that indelibly differentiates Rit from Kovac became palpable early in the film. Coming aboard the boat, Kovac fished some cash out of the water, but meeting Rittenhouse he sighed and pressed the money into the tycoon’s hand, a gesture plainer than words: “You are the one with all the money; you will always be the one with all the money; this would seem naturally to belong to you.” Kovac is labeled a “fellow traveler” by Connie Porter, an ostensibly cold-hearted journalist/documentarian (Bankhead), mostly because his socialist views are expressed sloppily, one suspects, and she is herself too classy to appreciate his rudeness. Evident in his attitude toward Rittenhouse is a deep-seated Schelerian ressentience, a refusal to acknowledge that he himself desires to have what Rittenhouse already possesses. As Kovac and Rit play poker, the betting quickly climbs out of Kovac’s range.

A second illumination of class relations occurs in a quiet love scene between Connie and Kovac, in which she reveals to him one of the secrets of her now-glamorous professional life: she was born, like him, on the south side of Chicago – the meat-packing district – and was able to take the up elevator only because she became involved with a wealthy man who bought her a diamond bracelet. With the bracelet as her key to success she soon found her way to the Gold Coast.5 Connie’s sophistication, substantial cultural capital, and social command are only put-ons, evidence perhaps for the traditional American claim that everybody can make it yet also proof that for many – Connie is not alone – success is all show. Hitchcock knows that the only people who make it without having been there all along are the ones who have been handed directions to a secret passage, in Connie’s case the bracelet. She gives it up to the group so that they can use it as bait to catch a fish, and indeed they do, but at the same moment the African American steward Joe sights the German supply ship and in excitement the fishing line is let go and the fish, Connie’s bracelet, and the twine all slowly recede into the sea.

The America that Alfred Hitchcock knew as the 1940s became the 1950s was filled with energetic social climbers and dreamers, people convinced they inhabited a classless utopia where success and wealth could be theirs by entitlement. It was in every man’s power to transform himself and his world in this society that was rapidly accommodating to the grand shifts of modernity and marshaling its economy for the gear-up to war production and the rationalization of consumerism and advertising that burgeoned in the 1950s. Technical infrastructure was being developed – the interstate highway system and its road culture, for example – while the expansion of the cities into newly developed suburbs, the explosion of media with the growth of television, the social changes accompanying the redomestication of women, and the climate of pervasive fear occasioned by the Cold War all produced tensions, frustrations, and desires hitherto unimagined in a culture that had been stable and agrarian. The population was shifting away from the farm, toward the cities and suburbs, in a trenchant mobility both physical and social; jettisoned as dead weight were the consistencies of Victorian morality. Marital strain, psychoanalysis, space travel – all these were invoked or established by the late 1950s. Not only did this atmosphere of excitement, yearning, optimism, and deep-seated fear inspire Hitchcock’s work, but the new country displaced him: if not from his class roots and class consciousness then at least from many of his old working relationships, since the producers, cinematographers, and designers who had collaborated with him in England were unavailable – indeed often considered undesirable – in a Hollywood tightly gripped by unionized American workers. We can see that Hitchcock made the transition with ease because Rebecca, as a first American film, is a virtually flawless technical production. But culturally he was still itching. George Perry notes that although “he clearly had a great love for his adopted country and things American, relishing the variety and vastness of the landscape, the diversity and occasional eccentricities of its people,” he might “complain about some aspect of American bureaucracy that was irking him. Perhaps his airmail copy of the London Times had been held up and was a day late, or Washington had decreed that the succulent Melton Mowbray pork pies he liked to have flown in from Fortnum & Mason no longer complied with the FDA’s fierce standards” (37).

Some of the influential cultural events and transformations that Hitchcock would have experienced as a worker in America – just to give a cursory kind of glance at the era, the place, and the temper of the times without paying attention to the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any dedicated military contest: nylon stockings (1940); the Pentagon (1943); FDR winning a fourth term as president (1944); atomic bomb tests (1946); the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (1947); the UNIVAC computer (1951); the Cuban Revolution (1953); color television (1953); the civil rights movement (1955); Sputnik (1957); the Barbie doll (1959); the Playboy Club (1960); the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (1961); Bob Dylan’s debut (1961); the JFK assassination (1963); the Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964); the National Organization of Women (1966); the synthesis of DNA (1967); Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy assassinated (1968); Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon (1969); Jeffrey Miller and other students being shot at Kent State University (1970); Nixon in China (1972); the Watergate break-in (1972); the resignation of Richard M. Nixon (1974); the Apple personal computer (1976); the American bicentennial (1976).

In cinema: the three-dimensional camera movement in the animated Pinocchio (1940); the controversial Citizen Kane (1941); his cherished friend Carole Lombard perishing in a plane crash (1942); the trial of the Hollywood Ten (1947); Twentieth Century–Fox programming for television (1949); James Stewart sharing in film profits, with Winchester ‘73 (1950); VistaVision (1954); Joseph Breen replaced as Hollywood censor (1954); a rock sound track for Blackboard Jungle (1955); death of Humphrey Bogart (1957); death of Marilyn Monroe (1962); “Star Trek” (1966); the end of the Production Code (1968); the videocassette recorder (1974); Jaws, the beginning of blockbuster cinema (1975).

While Hitchcock did not make explicit reference to developments such as these,6 or to many of the ongoing political machinations that made for daily news; and while he hardly strove to substantiate David Lehman’s claim for the overriding theme in Hitchcock’s America, that “paranoia is sometimes a reasonable response to events in a world of menace” (29), his films were diligently faithful in their representation of the look and style of American everyday reality and did repeatedly focus on the “uncertainty of appearances” that Marshall Deutelbaum notices in Saboteur and elsewhere. His characters are fully sprung from the American crowd, much as though in making them he were some reincarnation of Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” mingling with strangers in the marketplace and quickly seizing their characteristics for his sketches. As a visionary adept at noticing and encapsulating tiny nuances of behavior, attitude, and conviction he was unparalleled in Hollywood. Consider even a small variegated cluster of portraits: the humiliated and snubbing expression with which Mrs. Van Hopper wishes her companion (Joan Fontaine) happiness in her just-announced marriage to Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier): the nose upraised, the smile not merely forced but virtually cranked onto the lips, the head thrown back as though confronting an impossible odor:

MRS. VAN HOPPER (with withering sarcasm): Mrs. de Winter.

(with a sour laugh): Good-bye, my dear, and good luck.

Or the traditionalist Mr. Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke) in Rope, politely declining a glass of champagne but eager to have his hands on a good solid glass of Scotch on the rocks. Again with alcohol (something Hitchcock knew intimately): in Rear Window, as Jeff (James Stewart) tries to convince his chum Doyle (Wendell Corey) that something strange is going on in the courtyard, Lisa (Grace Kelly) emerges from the kitchenette with three snifters of brandy, silently hands them around, begins a swirling motion with her wrist. Doyle picks it up like a bright monkey, swirling his wrist, too, as does Jeff. Lisa is all about the “right” way of doing things. Or consider the droning, stupefying voice of the coroner in Vertigo (Henry Jones), that echoing singsong phrasing and nasally inflected boredom as, summarizing the sad death of Madeleine Elster, he feels obliged to point to Scottie’s “lack of initiative.” Or Rita the cleaner in Marnie (Edith Evanson), eager to finish her work so she can go to bed. Or the pathetic East German bodyguard Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) in Torn Curtain, confessing nostalgically to Michael (Paul Newman) and Sarah (Julie Andrews) that he used to live in New York, used to eat at Pete’s Pizza, Eighty-Eighth and Eighth. The exorbitant fondness and pristine particularity of Gromek’s happy memory, as though dragged up from a dream childhood: he is like Hitchcock, an immigrant so absorbed with American culture that its fragments become embedded as treasures.

It is impossible to claim that this book constitutes a complete analysis, of either American culture or Hitchcockian film, and much could be said, about America and about Hitchcock, beyond what takes shape in these limited pages. The considerations that follow treat Hitchcock’s screened America as a locus of land- and cityscapes, personalities, values, social forms, and marriages – arbitrarily chosen features of American experience useful because they permit a certain organization of analysis, a hopefully refreshing reexamination of much-considered films, and a fidelity to the deep structures of American organization, behavior, and design that an astute observer such as Hitchcock would have been likely to notice and take interest in. My intention with this small book is to raise new questions and considerations, challenge viewers to look at Hitchcock’s wonderful films yet again, and see in his work an illumination of American form and life that has perhaps not been shown before in this way. Hitchcock’s films are seen here only in fragments, such as are necessary for the analyses at hand. I try to make a point of avoiding or at least diminishing conventional, canonical readings of Hitchcock films: for example, Rear Window as a murder mystery, but also a metaphor for cinema because of the limited window frames through which we see the action; Vertigo as a tale about haunting, love, and masquerade; The Trouble with Harry as a charming little murder comedy; North by Northwest as a picaresque adventure about mistaken identity; Psycho as a personality study; Torn Curtain as a spy story; Shadow of a Doubt as a dark melodrama; Rope as a study in psychopathology; Saboteur as an anti-Nazi war film; The Birds as a mystery about man and nature, and so on. Such readings as these, given out as fundamental refreshments, have been so often published and republished, so thirstily imbibed, that it has become difficult to penetrate the froth of theory and repeated observation in order to see and re-experience much of the delicacy, charge, and meaning that is available for us. I want here to work toward grasping how it is that Hitchcock’s American stories could not have been set anywhere else.

If I make bold to concentrate on tiny moments, gestures, angles, or other nuances of depiction, the reader should never forget that beyond his penetrating philosophy and arch wit Hitchcock was at heart a designer, who conceived his camera setups in physical terms and his screened images as carefully composed pictorializations. Laurinda Barrett was one of a small army of performers who worked for him, but her recollection of even a tiny engagement in The Wrong Man nicely exemplifies the Hitchcock method:

I remember the scene: police lineup. I remember offering to move, and being told that I couldn’t move a muscle, and do exactly what you’re told. I remember him showing me the pictures, and showing a window shade across the street at a certain level, and at a different level in the next shot. The fact that as an actor you didn’t have to do anything, you didn’t have to offer anything original, even a little breath of anything. I got the impression I wasn’t permitted to do it. I thought, “Ooo, I’d better shut up here.” He wouldn’t allow it at all, but he showed me the shots and he said, “That’s what every shot is.” He didn’t do anything else but what he drew on those pieces of paper. They were all followed systematically and to the letter. (Interview)

It may help to remember that for fully seventeen years it was as a British citizen that Alfred Hitchcock lived and worked in the United States. On April 20, 1955, during pre-production of The Man Who Knew Too Much (on the day a cable arrived with the news that Niall MacGinnis would probably not be available to play Drayton [Meiklejohn], and at a moment when consideration was being given to the words the dying Frenchman Louis Bernard would whisper into Ben McKenna’s ears), Henry Bumstead drove him over to the Los Angeles County Court where he swore the oath and became an official American (Spoto 388). In a charming way, then, The Man Who Knew Too Much, an American family’s encounter with the darkest side of European power struggles and a horrid personal misfortune, became Hitchcock’s first “true” American film. Ben McKenna’s tongue-tied exasperations; Jo Conway’s frustrations both as a mother who believes she has lost a child and as a performer who believes she has lost her career; the kidnapped child’s wide-eyed astonishment at the nefarious spectacles opening around him – all this brilliantly formalizes Hitchcock’s own encounter, both with America and with the possibilities of cinema.

Jo McKenna (Doris Day) and her son Hank (Christopher Olsen) singing “Que Sera, Sera” in The Man Who Knew Too Much (Paramount, 1956). The gown is by Edith Head. The opulent set was designed by Henry Bumstead and built on Paramount’s Stage 1. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Not only Hitchcock’s encounter, I should finally confess. In 1956, when this film came out, I, too, was ten years old, just like Hank (whom I watched at Shea’s Buffalo, my parents having driven us across the border just for such an opportunity). If not my very earliest encounter with film as spectacle and marvel, or with America, The Man Who Knew Too Much it was that first opened me to film’s intensity, its mystery, and its delirious complication, and to the American family as a strangely warped mirror of my own. With gratitude to Alfred Hitchcock in memory, then, I dedicate these thoughts.

Notes

1 Built by Samuel S. Babcock at the northwest corner of Montauk Highway and Windmill Lane, and operated as a guesthouse between 1880 and 1962. Other guests of the Barretts at the same location, but not at the same time, were Ingrid Bergman and Burgess Meredith (conversation with Laurinda Barrett, July 27, 2012).

2 In The Wrong Man, as one of the false accusers of Manny Balestrero.

3 “Shortly after the war broke out, a small group of British expatriates in Hollywood began to meet to devise ways to confront American neutrality and promote England’s cause,” writes Patrick McGilligan. “Hollywood mirrored America with its split between citizens anxious to join the fight against Hitler and those – a peculiar alliance of America Firsters and Communists abiding by the Hitler-Stalin pact – who preached isolationism.” The group operated “as a virtual cell of British intelligence” for two years, including among its membership Boris Karloff and others. Hitchcock was brought to meetings (256).

4 The shipbuilding magnate will return to Hitchcock in the persona of Gavin Elster in Vertigo; and will play an off-camera role in the narrative of Psycho.

5 North of Chicago’s miracle mile, an extremely elite enclave first developed when Potter Palmer moved there after 1882. In North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill will also find his way there (to the Ambassador East Hotel) after a cropduster doesn’t manage to kill him.

6 Excepting the Central Intelligence Agency, which moves the story of North by Northwest and figures prominently in Topaz.

1

HITCHCOCK’S AMERICAN SCAPES

When from a strategic promontory in the twenty-first century we look upon the cultural space of America, it seems preponderantly urban and to a significant degree internationalized. The American modern spatial form, largely agglomerated urban development characterized by dense clusters of skyscrapers and vast surrounding tracts of suburban sprawl, is also to be found in Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and parts of Africa, but in America it somehow seems aboriginal, natural, characteristic, unimposed. While in the United States there are pastoral regions spreading across parts of the south and the Midwest – central Georgia, southern Illinois, New Mexico, Arizona are some – the typical image of the American scene today is neither a pasture nor a tiny village nor a meandering river with paddle-wheelers churning upstream, but instead a seemingly endless interlocking chain of expressways jammed with vehicular traffic and a cityscape remarkably unchanging from Boston to Minneapolis to New Orleans to San Diego, one that features dozens of vertical glass-faced dominoes full of accountants, bankers, brokers, and lawyers shuffling to and from work in identical business garb, aboard a subway or tram system, and whisked to suburban homes each boasting a view of dozens like it. Mobility, instant readiness for communication, gregariousness, brevity of relationship, and self-doubt characterize the American character who inhabits this twenty-first century world.

The America depicted by Hitchcock between the 1940s and the early 1970s was altogether a different kind of place, one that only toward the end of that period was modulating into the vastly more complex social world we recognize today. What Hitchcock saw and understood was an American city still in the relatively early stages of development, with its foundation in a bucolic small town associated with agriculture and long-lasting human relations. Even New York, that American prototype, was a more characteristic environment then than it is today (see, for example, Berman “Too Much”). The view of Phoenix in Psycho (1960) is a good example: although real estate is booming (as per the storyline), what we are given to see is a modest, even genteel urban environment (some of it realized onscreen through rear-projection plates made in architecturally unprepossessing sections of Los Angeles). True, in North by Northwest (1959) and Topaz (1969) Hitchcock’s urban scene became at least occasionally caustic and dark, but in many ways Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), and The Wrong Man (1956) deploy townscapes and cityscapes still culture-bound to the nineteenth century. These films foreground interpersonal civility, living spaces intermeshed with working environments, evocative topographies, and a discreet sense of settlement and groundedness.

Los Angeles posing as Phoenix for a rear-projection plate to be used in Psycho (Universal, 1960) as Marion Crane stops her car at an intersection. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Consider the glitz-free Los Angeles of Saboteur.1 It is first presented by an aircraft factory configured like a giant barn,2 with relatively little depiction of churning machinery, mechanical grit, or regularized brutal labor; soon afterward by a community of tiny bungalows, each the shell of a warm and tightly knit family. The plot moves quickly to a lonely highway (probably in the Mojave National Preserve) – something relatively new in America in the early 1940s; it would be a decade before the substantial development of the interstate highway system – and here we discover an amiable trucker (worker bonded with the road), a territory marked by farms and ranches that bespeak an agrarian economy, and architecture set into the natural forms of the graceful hills and low mountains. Indeed, the dominance of the Californian mountainous form was conceived early on as part of the intrinsic design of this film. One farm in particular Hitchcock graces with a twinkly swimming pool; so this is a view of the West in development, a frontier heading toward a techno-topological futurity in which hard physical labor will be replaced by automation, intellectual property production and management, and leisure. Soon later, we discover a dense forest, then the stunning prospect of what was at the time a relatively new marvel of architecture and engineering – the Hoover Dam (dedicated September 30, 1935).3 When the tale finally moves to New York, it is only an abbreviated and quickly suggestive view that Hitchcock presents there, including a shot taken from a skyscraper window as a help note floats hopelessly down to the street far below. En route to the Brooklyn Navy Yard we catch a swift view (through inserted newsreel footage) of the S. S. Normandie swamped in its riverside berth, but the basic pictorial information is that of a port location with ships in place. For the climax at the Statue of Liberty, Hitchcock uses contrasty, dynamically composed establishing shots that highlight the gigantic figure as a freestanding icon, floating in a kind of patriotic-intellectual atmosphere removed from the busy streets of the city (as, indeed, the Statue is). By the time of North by Northwest, Hitchcock is revealing a different New York, plunging into those streets to find a bustling businesslike jungle.

What, then, is the America that we discover in Hitchcock, if we look at his landscapes, townscapes, and cityscapes, his ways of picturing place? D. H. Lawrence had written in Studies in Classic American Literature that there was a spirit of place, and that the spirit of America was escape. The Pilgrim Fathers “came largely to get away – that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That’s why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been” (9). How, having gotten away himself, did Hitchcock portray that spirit?

Walden in the Woods

Saboteur was Hitchcock’s first expressly American film.4 (In Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent [both 1940], he had imposed American characters and motifs, but neither film was self-consciously about America as a place.) Not far into it, earnest aircraft worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), accused of setting a factory fire that killed his best friend and in flight from the police, wanders desperately into a rain-sogged California forest. This is one of those utterly primeval stands of tall densely packed conifers, a sanctum of silent darkness, eerie foreboding, and rich natural potential.5 It is the forest primeval, the source of social formations, indeed the untapped wilderness that is one of the great strengths and beauties of the American dream. It is also the domain of those who did not reach America from Europe: “Last evening,” wrote Meriwether Lewis in his journal on June 25, 1806,

the indians entertained us with seting [sic] the fir trees on fire. they have a great number of dry lims [sic] near their bodies which when set on fire creates a very suddon [sic] and immence [sic] blaze from bottom to top of those tall trees. they are a beatifull [sic] object in this situation at night. this exhibition reminded me of a display of fireworks. the natives told us that their object in seting [sic] those trees on fire was to bring fair weather for our journey. (396)

There is a log cabin – the Lincoln model! – with smoke sweetly twisting from its chimney: habitation, the rudiments of civilization, an abode built by human hands in human proportion and with the enchanting modesty of materials taken straight from nature and used according to principles of natural harmony. This America of the woods is not only rustic but also noble and purposive, forthright and upstanding, an America of principles, signaling the undergirding importance of justice, civility, tolerance, aspiration, and trust. Seen in its best light, according to an “accurate moral compass” (Hark 297), this is the America of the founding fathers; the America that beckoned to immigrant sufferers late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, “Give me your tired, your poor … ”; the America that offered not only opportunities for advancement but the promise of fresh air unpolluted by tyranny, class conflict, hatred, or vice. Also, of course, it is an Arcadian space that for Hitchcock may have recalled the green zones and green men of British lore, for all its hazy black-and-white glow nothing less than a greenwood.

At the cabin,6 Barry meets Phillip Martin (Vaughan Glazer), an aging and blind Thoreau figure, a naturalist-philosopher and “the central spokesperson for true American virtue” (Hark 297), eager to offer this stranger hospitality and warm shelter from the rain outside. If he is not quite an ancestor of the British Henry Hastings, who, we are told by Simon Schama, “made a point of dressing only in green broadcloth” and whose hovel “that had been built for him in the hollow of an oak” was edged with “a carpet of half-gnawed marrowbones, while the evil-smelling chamber itself was filled with an inconceivable number of hunting, pointing, and retrieving dogs” (135), still Martin does have for company a gruffy and gregarious German Shepard and his own independent spirit nurtured by long silences in the awesome shades of this magnificent and uncivilized place. For some minutes, the shivering fugitive Kane has been able to keep the shackles that bind his wrists camouflaged from his unseeing host, but when the old man’s niece Pat (Priscilla Lane) arrives – she comes every year from New York to spend a month, after which time she “finds the quiet deafening” – young Barry, surprised by her stunning good looks (stunning in part because he has been seeing her face plastered on roadside billboards as he hitchhikes across the country), much too soon finds himself optically and morally probed. It is true that for all her surface glamour Pat is nothing if not the epitome of the fresh-faced and healthy all-American girl, but she harbors a fearful and anxious personality, a rote (and, in the face of her uncle it may be observed, blind) subservience to the brutalizing forces of order. She is on the point of detecting the handcuffs Barry presumes the blind seer has missed,7 and of being drawn into fear.

Eagerly, she blurts out that the police are searching for a runaway, a man who is “dangerous.” Although Barry is a shining epitome of innocence, she finds it possible to imagine in him a nefarious type who has crept malevolently through the woods. “The police,” replies the old man dismissively, “are always on the alarmist side.” But, presses she, they said he was really dangerous. “I’m sure they did. How could they be heroes if he were harmless?” Now, the manacled wrists cannot but announce themselves, and “he must be the man they’re looking for!” cries Pat, panic floundering in her voice. “Yes,” says the uncle matter-of-factly, “very probably.” The girl with some urgency: You should have given him to the police. “Are you frightened, Pat? Is that what makes you so cruel?” This last, surely an observation not merely of Martin’s but also of Hitchcock’s, is of great interest and significance, since rather than merely allaying the niece’s fears, rather than merely disagreeing with her, the wise old man is making bold to offer a critical, even pedagogical, comment, one that points neither to attitudes nor to rational alignment but to fundamental human nature and the vital necessity of standing upon it. He is offering a conviction and a way of seeing the social world: that to turn people over to the police based on one’s fears is an act not only of surrender and injustice but also of cruelty. Further, when Pat chides him about his civic duties, he continues to elevate his thoughts (in a way that no other character in Hitchcock ever manages to do): “It is my duty as an American citizen to believe a man innocent until he’s been proved guilty. … I have my own ideas about my duties as a citizen. They sometimes involve disregarding the law.”

Here is Henry David Thoreau, anticipating by almost ninety years what Hitchcock’s Phillip Martin would believe and aver:

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery “to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one’s self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society.” … This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough “in formal opposition” to what are deemed “the most sacred laws of society,” through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such. (371)

“I have my own ideas about my duties as a citizen,” says Phillip Martin. Vaughan Glazer (l.) with Robert Cummings in Saboteur (Frank Lloyd Productions/Universal, 1942). On the piano at rear he will proceed to play Frederick Delius’s “Summer Night on the River” (1911–12), explaining that he sees with his ears. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

How fascinating and revealing, then, that commencing his portraiture of America with Saboteur, and riding upon a fondness for that country and its customs cultured from afar, Hitchcock would apotheosize not the tycoon –

the “Titan,” as Dreiser called him; the “Tycoon,” as Fortune called him. Where other civilization types have pursued wisdom, beauty, sanctity, military glory, predacity, asceticism, the businessman pursues the magnitudes of profit with a similar single-minded drive. … “The business of America,” as Calvin Coolidge put it, “is business.” (Lerner 274)

– he who by the early 1940s had come to symbolize all that was energetic and indomitably progressive about the American plan, but instead this solitary and debilitated philosopher withdrawn into the rainy woods, a man stubbornly following the laws of his true self rather than society’s shibboleths.

Regardless of the weight and meaning of this scene in the overall plot (at the uncle’s insistence Barry and Pat will go off together, and he will cut his chains and eventually struggle hard to persuade her that he is the noble innocent he has been claiming to be), the arrangement of interactions functions to show a lambent vision of American civility and social organization that, whether or not it figured personally for Hitchcock at this time in his life, was distinctively absent from the films noirs and melodramas so profusely turned out by Hollywood studios in the early 1940s. There is a dim aura in Martin of Gregory La Cava’s noble and liberty-loving butler (William Powell) in My Man Godfrey (1936), but only an aura: Godfrey speaks out of dignity and insouciance, while Martin speaks as a victim and prisoner in a tormenting world that must be overcome and transcended with kindness.8 In this cabin in the woods, secluded, retreated from the pall mall of urbanizing modernity, he bespeaks the values and poise, the rugged assurance and indomitable yearning of a frontier America, exemplifying the dignity that is implicit in the act of treating all men as equals, all men as free, all men as ideal citizens.

One of John De Cuir’s numerous sketches anticipating the Statue of Liberty sequence that climaxes Saboteur. Fry is visible dangling from Lady Liberty’s thumb, and Barry Kane is leaning over the railing on the torch. Note how De Cuir artfully suggested wide-angle compositions, many of which would be used even though the action as Hitchcock shot the scene was reconfigured. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

All around him Thoreau saw “lives of quiet desperation” (see Lerner 561). So, we might surmise, did Hitchcock. As reflected in the film, such lives include those of Pat and surely Fry (Norman Lloyd), the real saboteur and a slimy and valueless punk, and every member of the Nazi coterie for whom Fry works so slavishly and with such carelessness. Even hapless Barry is desperate – and at moments only desperate – to clear his name. By contrast, Phillip Martin, the persona who reposes at the true center of this film, is a paragon of tranquility and faith, signifying and embodying a fundamental American spirit. His cabin in the woods is a bucolic dream of the simple, good, yeoman life. To depict this abode and other locations in this film (his first with designer Robert Boyle), Hitchcock and his team make use of painted backdrops, mattes, and other simulation effects. “Hitchcock,” writes Bill Krohn, “seems to have relished the idea of doing a picture so large in scope … on a modest budget, necessitating … production ingenuity and camera tricks” (Work 41). The finale sequence on the Statue of Liberty, for example, where Fry meets his doom, was shot with stereos made by John Fulton (Turner, “Saboteur” 71),9 foreshadowing a technique Boyle would use later for North by Northwest (see Pomerance, Horse 67ff.). Many of the desert shots including the circus caravan were also done using rear projection (and some of the caravan shots also used a succession of full-size sets, miniatures, and toys gradually receding from the camera [Turner, “Saboteur” 89–90]).10 Krohn specifies how “second-unit cameramen were instructed to shoot plates and scenes with extras – for intercutting with Kane and Pat against a process screen11 – using telephoto lenses, to give a sense of the vastness of the American landscape” (Work 51).

When he learns that his guest has been hitchhiking, Barry’s blind host makes a revealing comment: “I have always thought that that was the best way to learn about this country, and the surest test of the American heart.” No other Hitchcockian character thinks of the prudence of testing the American heart. There is such a thing, Martin and Hitchcock are saying, and Barry has one. Did the American viewer? More generally, the social landscape invoked by this wise hermit is framed in terms of goodness and vivacity. Given the craven deceit and hungers we will encounter later in the story, as Barry contends with the pack of German spies working darkly to sabotage American culture,12 this introduction to a vision of the enduring, the enduringly natural, and the naturally civil equips us with a dignified point of view. As Martin puts it, not without the poetic sensibility of Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, “It’s a pleasant thing to have a guest sharing the fire when the rain is beating on the roof.”

The forces of modernity had already made inroads into pastoral culture across the country by the time Hitchcock finished making Rebecca for Selznick (early March 1940). The 1920 census had “pronounced America a predominantly urban nation for the first time in its history” (Douglas 73), and Los Angeles became the most advertised place in the world (McWilliams 108). Employment was to be found increasingly in the cities. Transportation was almost universally vehicular, so that as it cut through the geographical landscape the highway system, still in its infancy, gained a certain centrality in cultural experience. Even in his isolated cabin, Martin knows what it means – both on the surface and in depth – when Barry explains he’s been hitchhiking. The idea of billboards placed end to end and stretching across America with Pat’s face on them – one of Martin’s little jokes – is by this time hardly esoteric. Small-town social relations are dissipating in the face of urban circulation and the normative encounter with strangers, a phenomenon that for a keen social observer like Hitchcock immediately implies the necessity of etiquette and social form even though those who are caught up in it, like young Pat with her new modeling career, see progress, movement, achievement, and speed as being more pressing needs than courtesy, kindness, and hospitality. Hospitality by the early 1940s is starting to become a widespread business, highly capitalized and modernized, much to the detriment of the polite interactional patterns and obligations of pastoral life, in which opening the door to strangers was an intrinsic sign of civility.13

It would be a mistake to underestimate the eagerness with which Hitchcock’s rather noble vision of American possibility and dignity was received at Radio City Music Hall when the film opened there on May 7, 1942, notwithstanding some audience confusion14 and the often equivocal response of critics: “To put it mildly,” crowed Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, for example, “Mr. Hitchcock and his writers have really let themselves go”:

Melodramatic action is their forte, but they scoff at speed limits this trip. All the old master’s experience at milking thrills has been called upon. As a consequence – and according to Hitchcock custom – “Saboteur” is a swift, high-tension film which throws itself forward so rapidly that it permits slight opportunity for looking back. … So fast, indeed, is the action and so abundant the breathless events that one might forget, in the hubbub, that there is no logic in this wild-goose chase. (May 8, 1942, 27)

Hitchcock himself thought the picture should have been “pruned and tightly edited long before the actual shooting” (Truffaut 151).

Saboteur opened only months after the Pearl Harbor attack that drew American forces to the Pacific front. An attitude of bravura seriousness had penetrated the national psyche. In every corner of the country, as though with a National Purpose, ordinary citizens were scrimping and saving to aid the war effort, collecting scrap metal, opting for cheaper clothing and food, and thinking twice before filling the car, cognizant about the fact that, as a Shell advertisement in the April 20, 1942, issue of Life magazine had it, “Oil is ammunition – use it wisely.” Oil was all over that magazine – in gasoline ads, by implication in ads for heavy equipment and transportation – just as in the early days of the Los Angeles boom after 1906 it had been all over the city that turned itself to aircraft manufacture (and thus became the platform for Saboteur). “By 1909,” writes Carey McWilliams, “the district north of Wilshire and west of Vermont15 had 160 producing wells in operation and Santa Monica Boulevard had become an oil-workers’ shacktown” (130). It was oil, ultimately, that touched off the worst of Hitchcock’s diegetic blaze, since unbeknownst to him (thus evidencing his innocence) the extinguisher Barry handed his friend for fighting a little fire had been filled with gasoline.16

An examination of the dozens of full-page advertisements in this one issue of Life