Alfred Hitchcock
By Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, 288 pages, £12.99
Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much
By Michael Wood, New Harvest, 144 pages, $20
Alfred Hitchcock, described by a colleague as “a know-it-all [expletive]”, was the man who knew too much about us. His films exploited our abiding terrors — beaked raptors assaulting us from the skies, a loose stair opening an abyss beneath our feet, nourishment concealing death in a glass of bedtime milk — and added a new one when he made the shower a last redoubt of quaking vulnerability.
Those who write about him have an anthropological conundrum to puzzle over: why are these irrational alarms so inescapable and why do we so enjoy being tormented when we watch “The Birds”, “Shadow of a Doubt”, “Suspicion”, “Psycho” and the rest?
The newest books on Hitchcock answer the questions in different ways. Peter Ackroyd sees him as a case for Freudian treatment, who assumed that his neuroses were universal. Hitchcock often hurled teacups away after draining them: the breakage demonstrated the fragility of our world. His fears were harder to bear because his supposed faith should have relieved him of them.
He was born a Catholic and Ackroyd emphasises the atmosphere of “spiritual mystery” that creepily pervades his films. “Vertigo” ends with the apparition of a sepulchral nun, and Hitchcock’s kinky fussing over Grace Kelly’s costumes in “To Catch a Thief” prompts Ackroyd to suggest he adorned her “as a hierophant might dress a Madonna”. (Hitchcock knew of course that Grace actually behaved like the loose-living Magdalene, not the Mary.)
For Michael Wood, the films disseminate an unease that is psychological rather than theological. Hitchcock, Wood says, exploits “registers of speculation” that taint his fortuitous happy endings. What if the heroes of “Rebecca” and “Suspicion”, both cleared of crimes in deference to the censors, happen to be killers after all, as they were in the books Hitchcock adapted?
Have the characters in “The Birds” really escaped when they sneak away after the last attack? Hitchcock’s seditious hints conjure up what Wood calls “a wonderfully realised world of uncertain knowledge”; at the same time, they impugn us because we secretly wish for the worst. Wood is brilliant on our identification with the necrophiliac lover played by James Stewart in “Vertigo”, and he even claims that we’re madder than Stewart because we’ve been stirred up by the Wagnerian tumult of Bernard Herrmann’s score, which only we can hear.
Terror sometimes shades into an unholy excitement. Wood has some unsettling comments on “Memory of the Camps”, a documentary about Bergen-Belsen to which Hitchcock contributed in 1945. When the huts in the concentration camp are set alight, Wood is “inclined to see the flames as colluding with the perpetrators, eerily, horribly continuing their work in our imagination”. Hitchcock here literally sets our fantasies ablaze. Wood’s aspersions are confirmed by “Lifeboat”, where the Nazi played by Walter Slezak is tougher, braver and more ingenious than the democratically quarrelsome Americans he outwits.
Biographically, Ackroyd and Wood recycle identical anecdotes, though with a telling difference of emphasis. Wood notes that Hitchcock was born in east London and leaves it at that. Ackroyd is more tenderly specific about his childhood in Leytonstone, and makes us smell the musty, dung-strewn High Street where his father kept a greengrocer’s shop. He goes on to trace this cockney heritage in the work of the Americanised Hitchcock and compares his role as morbidly sarcastic commentator in the television series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” to the ribald “chairman” who introduced the acts at Edwardian music halls.
Hitchcock’s weekend retreat in northern California was officially a ranch, though it looked, Ackroyd points out, like an English country cottage. Wood, an English academic who has spent much of his career in America, is less fondly homesick. He interprets Hitchcock’s prewar films as an attack on England’s cosy, isolationist complacency: in “The Lady Vanishes” or the first “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, the old country “means class and idiotic prejudice”.
Ackroyd regards the American Hitchcock as a Londoner in exile, whereas Wood understands that his migration was a necessary advance from a blinkered, stultified society to one that was “confident, experimental, yet still dangerous”.
As a literary critic, Wood probes more deeply into films that for him are “visual texts”. His acute ear for dialogue catches the complex implications of “intelligence” in “Bon Voyage”, a wartime propaganda film about espionage that Hitchcock made in French. As used by a francophone actor, the word refers to cleverness; translated into English, it indicates the possession of secret information. Underlining the significance of his book’s title, Wood concludes that for Hitchcock “having intelligence in both senses is tricky”.
He might have added that knowing too much can be a sign of hubris, inviting divine reproof: Hitchcock took the phrase from a story by his fellow Catholic G.K. Chesterton, for whom any detective, unless he wore a dog collar like Father Brown, trespassed on the domain of the deity.
Ackroyd the novelist is best on Hitchcock’s character. A family friend defined the perversity of his marriage by describing Hitchcock as “this odd, weird, little man” and Alma as “this sweet little boyish woman”.
I thought at first that Ackroyd was exaggerating when he suggests that all Hitchcock’s principal characters are “intimated to be bisexual”. Having ticked them off one by one, I’m not so sure. Ackroyd also correctly identifies Hitchcock’s weakness as a director, which is that plots mattered more to him than the people caught up in them — for a novelist, the most grievous of faults.
The scriptwriters Hitchcock engaged despaired of his illogic and, when actors asked him what their motive in a scene should be, he often unhelpfully replied: “Your salary”.
Francois Truffaut shrewdly observed that Hitchcock needed stars — suave Cary Grant, folksy James Stewart — because the personas they brought with them dispensed him from having to fill out their roles. He could, however, warp that image. Grant is given an edge of malevolence in “Notorious” and “Suspicion”, and Wood argues that the most chilling moment in the second “The Man Who Knew Too Much” comes when Stewart, playing a doctor, produces a hypodermic from his medical bag and administers a sedative to his bothersome wife.
The disparity between Ackroyd and Wood can be summed up in two comments on groceries. Ackroyd quotes Hitchcock’s description of Covent Garden market in the trailer for “Frenzy”: “Here,” he drawls, “you may buy the fruits of evil and the horrors of vegetables.” In a more rueful, haunting self-assessment, Wood cites Hitchcock’s admission that his murder-ridden films made him, like his father, “a speculator in perishables”.
Ghoulish jesting or a more tragic meditation on our inevitable decay? There’s no need to choose: the true obsessive, like me, will read and learn from both books.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
