Thoughts on Hitchcock

[bookmonkey44]

Alfred Hitchcock's works, despite being made before, during, and after the second world war, still stand as powerful films for audience's today. It is because he has done many daring things even directors today normally would not dare. He would dare to strive for the art of cinema over what sells, and he would do that so well audiences would love the films anyways, and still do. He dared to play with cinema as a commentary on cinema. His actors played roles within roles, using words for the cinema in situations where they normally would seem out of place, but they are woven together in such a way it all fits seamlessly. Some films are more obvious than others in that regard; but where you can find his actors' characters double playing as actors or directors in the very scenes his actors are acting in, you can find a correlation between how well those double roles are played and how good the ending is for the characters involved. Here six of Hitchcock's films will be discussed in chronological order: The 39 Steps, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Rear Window. These films have various levels of this double role playing, but each one has an ending that relates to how well those double roles were played within the plot. One possible interpretation of this commentary on the cinematic world; how well you can act or direct determines your success in the field. And who better to comment on success than Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most successful directors of the 20^th century.

My first example of this strange phenomena in Hitchcock's films will be relatively straight forward example from of of his spy movies. Mr. Hannay (Robert Donat), one of Hitchcock's regular guys that gets dragged into intrigue in The 39 Steps, ends up playing various roles in order to survive. To escape the men who probably killed the woman spy in his room and who were currently outside his apartment, Mr. Hannay makes a deal with the milkman. The milkman does not believe the incredulous story of a murder in Mr. Hannay's apartment, so in order to get the disguise, Hannay makes up a new role. He is a man seeing a married woman in the building and one of the men outside is the woman's husband. The milkman believes this scandalous story and the coat and cap are handed over for Hannay to borrow. This is Mr. Hannay's first acting success, but definitely not the last, nor is it the last of his ability to adapt his story as needed in each situation.

Mr. Hannay, in the country of Scotland, plays a city man traveling to find a job at an estate in the country. He finds out of a newcomer in the city circled on his map and plans to head there, but he needs a place to stay the night. With a bit of money the farmer agrees to put up with him for a night. When the farmer's wife sees the paper she puts together the pieces and knows it is Mr. Hannay sitting across from her who has been accused of murder. Mr. Hannay convinces the farmer's wife to help him; she even gives him her husband’s dark coat so the police have a harder time seeing him in the darkness. Success number two, Mr. Hannay manages to narrowly escape both the police and the bad spies after him as he flees to the estate of the man the farmer mentioned.

Mr. Hannay learns the hard way the city on the map housed the evil spy selling the secret the woman had warned him about. Mr. Hannay was only saved from the gunshot by the hymn book in the farmer's coat. It stopped the bullet and Hannay lived to tell the police the tale. This luck was part of Mr. Hannay's second success in his role as a spy.

Being a Hitchcock film, the police do not believe him and try to arrest him. Hannay manages to hide as a marcher in a parade and then he slips into a building where he gets mistaken as a political speaker. Using his recent experiences as inspiration Hannay makes a fine speech about making a better world full of fair chances and people helping people instead of being against them. Hannay ends his speech with his last thoughts on a future world, “a world from which suspicion and cruelty and fear have been forever banished. That is the sort of world I want. Is that the sort of world you want?” The people cheer and rush up to shake his hand and he plays along with it. Even after the bad guys acting as police take him and Pamela out of the building, people cheer for Hannay and he waves and smiles. This particular acting success does not seem to have any immediate benefit, only delaying when he gets taken by the bad spies. It is in this moment though that Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) is also taken with him, which does help Hannay hide further down the line.

After he drags Pamela with him during his escape from the two bad spies, Hannay directs Pamela to play along with his improvisation that gets them a room at an inn. He makes his point by sticking what appears to be a gun at Pamela's side, telling her to back up everything he says or else. Hannay, from a former experience with Pamela on the train, knows she fully well believes him to be the murderer and will not help him unless coerced. So, Hannay plays up the coercion with threat of violence and it gets the point across. Pamela for the most part, plays along with their charade of being a newlywed couple. She may have been reminded with the pressing of the 'gun' into her side, but Pamela played along successfully to such an extent the woman innkeeper believed the charade and does not give them up even when people start asking about them. After overhearing the men looking for Hannay, Pamela no longer believes he is a murderer. This is success number three and the men leaving the inn without any information about them allows for Hannay and Pamela to continue their journey without any more serious altercations until reaching the music hall: their final destination.

There the spy group, The 39 Steps, and the secret to making planes silent are revealed by Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson). For Mr. Memory's failure to act as on the spy group being information he should not reveal, it leads to him getting shot, and to his death. For Mr. Hannay and Pamela, they hear the secret about the plane engines, and the final shot is of them holding hands as Mr. Memory's body is dealt with and the cabaret dancers do their thing on stage. Mr. Memory was not successful in being a pawn for the use of the spy group and was punished while Mr. Hannay and Pamela were successful in their roles, and they got rewarded.

The next example's meta-commentary on film is a little more murky and the penalty and rewards for following the 'roles' is also more difficult. Then again Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt is more of a murky film filled with bits of information that all add up to an odd feeling in the pit of one's stomach. It is fitting that it is harder to discern how 'good' or 'bad' the ending is based on Yong Charlie Newton's (Teresa Wright) performances. Charlie has a mixture of failures and success in the roles of actress and director, but her ending is not as bad as some other endings as will be seen later. Charlie gets to live to tell the tale, or rather, not to tell, since she is stuck holding the terrible secret between her and Jack (Macdonald Carey) about Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten).

When Jack first comes to town looking for Charlie's uncle, Charlie, being quite perceptive, figures out he is a detective. Charlie tells him to leave her family alone. Jack does not agree and convinces Charlie to keep quiet about him and his partner investigating her uncle. Charlie's attempt at directing fell flat, but she does act and keep her promise about telling her family about the detectives. So a fail at directing and a success for acting. So far a neutral ending would be predicted.

When Uncle Charlie learns that young Charlie knows his secret he directs her to sit and hear him out. He demands for a few days of her cooperation, a few days before he leaves town. Charlie agrees and she keeps her mouth shut about him being the Merry Widow Murderer. She is successful at this since even at the end of the film the only people to know who the real Merry Widow Murderer's identity is young Charlie and Jack (possibly the other detective as well). Another success at acting, so her prospects for the end of the film are looking up.

The second detective also gets Charlie to agree to get Uncle Charlie out of town within the next two hours and report to them when he leaves. Before Charlie can act on this order Uncle Charlie overhears the news of the police tracking down the second suspect in the east, with this man's gruesome death, it seems the hunt for the Merry Widow Murderer is over and Uncle Charlie decides he might stay longer. Back to a tied score of successes and failures to perform her roles.

Uncle Charlie messes with the back stairs and almost causes Charlie to fall to her death. That night Charlie confronts him. Uncle Charlie talks about settling down with the family and how it would be better for Charlie to be his friend. Young Charlie stands up and tells him to, “go away or I'll kill you myself”. Now the success to failure ratio is in favor of failure, which bodes poorly for Charlie's ending.

Since the threat (on both their ends) does not work, Uncle Charlie makes another two attempts to kill Charlie. The last attempt is on a train when Uncle Charlie goes to leave town. The two of them struggle near the open door, and we just see close ups of various body parts and shots of the other oncoming train getting closer. Just as we fear Charlie's failures will lead to her death, it is Uncle Charlie we see falling out of the train in front of the oncoming one.

Charlie gets reunited with Jack at her Uncle's funeral. She is stuck with the revelation her uncle was actually a terrible man, and it can be argued that she made do with her final threat. If she pushed Uncle Charlie off the train, it was that success of her following her last stage direction that ultimately saved her life. With Uncle Charlie's failed attempts at keeping Charlie in ignorance or pretending as if he was not the Merry Widow Murderer he is the one that gets the bad hand: death by oncoming train.

Hitchcock's Notorious, is another film with the roles of actor and director obscure. Devlin (Cary Grant) and Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) both start out under the direction of the American espionage group in Rio. They have been teamed up to find out what a Nazi group in the area is doing in order to get enough information to take them down. It even seems that just because Alicia is following orders her downfall is evident, but she is saved from her death by a more caring director.

Alicia’s assignment is to get close to a man who she once knew, a man who used to be in love with her, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains). She manages it quite nicely; Alex proposes to her. The director, Captain Prescott (Louis Calhern), sees the opportunity as “the perfect marriage” and there is a pause as the idea sits uncomfortably with both Alicia and Devlin and then Prescott finishes his sentence with, “for us”. The ‘us’ he refers to is the group of spies as a whole, focused on their mission to stop the Nazi group. With this in mind Alicia marries Alex, with orders to get into the house as soon as possible to start the in depth investigation. Alicia carries out that role.

That role though, and the investigation in the wine cellar is what brings about trouble for Alicia. Alex gets suspicious, so he and his mother poison her. In her pride and hurt at Devlin she fakes it as a hangover until she figures out what is happening. Too late she becomes bedridden and it looks as though it is the end for Alicia, despite being successful in the investigation and getting all the information needed to stop the Nazis.

In Notorious, the first director is an uncaring individual. Prescott sees nothing wrong with Alicia missing for five days due to “quite some hangover”. Here Devlin decides to take action. He decides to go and check on Alicia at Sebastian’s estate, though Prescott warns Devlin not to “mess anything up”. Devlin now becomes his own director, heading to the house to make “just a social call”.

This ‘social call’ and what Devlin does during it ends up saving Alicia’s life. Devlin escorts her out of the house, despite it being filled with the whole Nazi gang. Alex and his mother spot him and the three of them end up having a whispered conversation on the stairs as the other three Nazi men look on and ask about the events taking place.

Devlin makes the choice to tell Alex that he knows Alex and his mother has been poisoning Alicia. This choice makes them both anxious; because if the other Nazis find out about Alicia being an American spy, they will kill Alex. During their trip down the stairs Alex claims he is “not afraid to die”. That claim worries his mother who also answers for Alex when one of the Nazi members asks where they are taking Alicia and Devlin whispers “You answer that one Sebastian”. Near the bottom of the staircase Alex starts to play the role of concerned husband better, but that doesn’t stop Devlin from locking Alex out of his car and letting him face the wrath of the Nazis.

Alicia had the information the espionage group needed to stop the Nazi group from exporting the uranium, and since she was on her way to the hospital it is inferred she lives to tell the tale. For their happy ending, their roles had to be controlled by someone who cared about their fate. Devlin had to take on a director’s role and act how he saw fit, not as Prescott saw fit, to ensure this ending. In Alex’s case, he did not play the role of the concerned husband well enough to trick the other Nazis. It did not help that Devlin did not care about Alex’s fate as he pleaded to ride with Devlin to the hospital. Alex’s fate may even be tied to his last words as himself and not playing a double role, “I’m not afraid to die”. Strong words and it seems like he regrets them as he begged Devlin to let him into the car. If he played the role of caring husband better, he could have had his own car brought around to take Alicia to the hospital. He did not play the role well though and his punishment was probably death.

Probably one of Hitchcock's most obvious films in terms of having actor and director roles Rear Window has a little bit more of an ambiguous ending. It is not great, but it is also not horrible for the characters playing their various roles.

Jeff (James Stewart) has been seen as a director in Hitchcock's Rear Window (Stam and Pearson 201). This is because Jeff can be seen calling the shots in multiple scenes. He tells Stella (Thelma Ritter) and Lisa (Grace Kelley) in turn to fetch him various things: his binoculars, paper, pencil, the phone, phone book, and even bits of film and a viewer. These are all done on Jeff's command. Jeff also tends to talk to people in the other apartments, for example, when he sends Lisa over to Thorwald's (Raymond Burr) apartment to deliver the note he says to Thorwald, “Yeah you've done it alright”. As Jeff confirmed out loud that Thorwald is guilty, the audience sees Thorwald grow more suspicious of the note and tries to find the person who left it. When the women decide they want to dig up the garden and find what is buried there, Jeff decides to buy them time to do so unseen by Thorwald. Jeff calls Thorwald and basically commands him to meet him at the Albert Hotel bar. These scenes were moments where Jeff's directing was successful.

The digging in the garden was purely Stella and Lisa's idea, but getting into the apartment was mentioned by Jeff, before he dismissed the idea as being too dangerous. As Lisa goes ahead with it anyway, Jeff tries to command her not to. It did not work, and Lisa's instructions to Jeff were also not successfully acted upon. When Jeff and Stella were distracted by Miss Lonely Hearts' possible suicide attempt, Jeff could not phone Thorwald's apartment in time to warn Lisa before Thorwald entered the apartment. Instead since he had already had the police on the line, he reported of a woman being assaulted in Thorwald's apartment.

Since there was nowhere for Lisa to hide, this particular scene that Jeff called was also a successful directing moment. Though when police arrived Lisa played a successful first time burglar, and managed to get herself to safety outside of Thorwald's apartment.

With Lisa, Stella, and Jeff being the roles of actors and directors they had many chances for success. Not everything was successful though. There were several directing and a couple of acting attempts by Jeff that were unsuccessful. These unsuccessful attempts do not go unpunished as Jeff fell out the window of his apartment and broke both of his legs. Overall though, the ending for Jeff and Lisa ends on a good note. Lisa and Jeff seemed to be at a compromise for their relationship as Lisa is shown at Jeff's apartment in the end reading both a book about a foreign nation and a fashion magazine when Jeff is asleep. Together, their successes in their roles of actors and directors outweighed their failures and lead to a not perfect but mostly happy ending.

Hitchcock's Vertigo may be famous for using the vertigo inducing camera shot for the first time, but it too fits this pattern of meta-commentary on cinematography. The main character Scotty (James Stewart) starts out under Elster's (Tom Helmore) directing skills. At first we see Scotty resist the role telling Elster, “This isn't my line” referring to his line of work, but we can take the double meaning of it is not in Scotty's lines to agree to Elster's plan. Scotty eventually gives in though, and does what Elster wants; follow his wife around and report to him her whereabouts. Scotty seems to be on a good start then, successfully acting as a private investigator tailing someone. There are a few problems with this scenario though; Scotty falls in love with the woman he is tailing, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). With Mr. Elster saying in the beginning that they have a happy marriage, this act of falling in love is indirectly not allowed. The other problem with Scotty seemingly being successful at his private detective work is that Elster is the villain and tricking Scotty anyway as a means to kill the real Madeleine Elster and make it look like a suicide. With Scotty getting tricked by his employer, he is not a very successful private eye.

Later on Scotty tries to redeem himself by making a new Madeleine out of Judy (also Kim Novak). He chooses the clothing, the hair color and style, tries the walk and the talk, but overall he is not successful. Partially because Judy resists the idea of turning back into Madeleine by Scotty and Scotty also realizes that Elster had “trained” her, and “rehearsed” her too.

Judy had resisted being turned into Madeleine during every step of the way. She tries to convince him to buy her a different suit, a different dress. She questions why she should have to dye her hair, and her final form of resistance is coming back from the salon with her hair dyed, but still down as Judy wore it and not up like Madeleine wore it. Judy said the hair up did not seem to suit her, but she gives in with Scotty's pleas to wear it up for his sake.

Judy's reluctance to do as Scotty demanded leads her to her fall from the church bell tower. Scotty stands out on the precipice and looks down, and the audience is left with a strange feeling for Scotty. Scotty, since he messed up his roles as an actor and director, gets left with the worst ending of them all. The audience can just feel that Scotty is not going to bounce back easily from losing 'Madeleine' a second time.

Another spy movie of Hitchcock's, North by Northwest, plays on the meta-commentary of film. Here though even the characters use the play on cinema in their lines much like Rear Window. For this movie though it seems the characters have the most success in their various roles and leads to the best ending in the films addressed here. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) can be said to be a versatile actor within the film itself. The villain Vandamm (James Mason) even comments on it when Thornhill finds him and Eve (Eva Marie Saint) in the auction house,

 

Has anybody ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely Mr. Kaplan? First you're the outraged Madison Avenue Man who claims he's been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn't commit. Now you play the peevish lover stung by jealousy and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and more from the Actors' Studio.

 

Even though Mr. Vandamm sees the protagonist as overplaying every role, it is hard to imagine that doing anything less would have led to his survival this long. Which is exactly what Thornhill has done: Thornhill has adapted himself into whichever role he needed in order to avoid police capture or death at the hands of Vandamm's men. Just after this talk with Vandamm, Thornhill has to adapt again. With his exits blocked by Vandamm's men, Thornhill knows that he has a better chance at the hands of the police so he proceeds to make himself look like an idiot disrupting the rest of the auction.

Thornhill bids amounts of money under the current bid, makes jokes about how much the items are actually worth, and actually calls one item a fake at one point. A woman in the row ahead of him turns to face him and says, “Well, one thing we know. You're no fake. You're a genuine idiot.” Thornhill gives her thanks to this, because it actually is a genuine compliment since Thornhill acting like an idiot, and the auctioneer believing this is what brings about Thornhill's salvation: the police. This is one huge success on Thornhill's part, not counting how many times he has evaded police capture or death up until this point (the crop duster scene for example). This move by Thornhill also causes the espionage group originally willing to let Thornhill die at Vandamm's hands get involved.

With the police involved the Professor from the espionage group in charge of Eve also gets involved, and Thornhill gets assigned a final role. Thornhill plays Kaplan getting shot by Eve and critically injured, to protect Eve from Vandamm's suspicion. It seems to be successful, but Thornhill is upset he had not been informed that Eve was going to leave the country with Vandamm. He even tells Eve “I won't let you”, before getting knocked out and taken to the hospital where he is subsequently locked in his room.

He is supposed to keep playing as Kaplan as critically injured and stay in the hospital room, but he decides to follow his own orders again, and he acts accordingly. He tries to convince the Professor to keep the door unlocked, but with that unsuccessful Thornhill makes his escape through his window and another patient's room. Thornhill has his own objective and it is to make sure Eve does not leave the country with Vandamm. Turns out to be a good thing Thornhill went out, because while he tries to get Eve's attention he learns that one of Vandamm's men discovered the gun was full of blanks.

Because of Thornhill's actions he manages not only to save Eve from Vandamm, but he also stops the bad guys from taking the film with some secret information on it out of the country. And since Thornhill was so successful in his actions he gets the happy ending of saving Eve from falling off Mt. Rushmore and pulling her up into his arms as Mrs. Thornhill on another train adventure.

Six films spanning nearly twenty years consisting of different levels of double acting as actors or directors within the film itself, and overall the commentary is relatively consistent: be successful at each acting or directing event and you turn out more successful in the end. Hitchcock was meticulous in his directing work and it shows as his films still stand up to audiences today as powerful pictures with lots to discuss. He was also known for working his actors hard to get them to be just right, and it is hard to find fault within the films about most of the acting. Hitchcock got it right as he showed his various characters playing different roles within the film and measuring their ending based on their success. Life of the real actors is also measured by their success at playing various roles. It is fitting that a few of the actors repeat in the films chosen to be examined. Carry Grant plays the leading men in both Notorious and North by Northwest, while James Stewart stars in both Vertigo and Rear Window. These were two big names in acting at the time, and seeing their performances in these films proves why they were big names. They were successful in the very different roles they played in the films and as such they were rewarded with success in the real world as well.

North by Northwest. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. Turner Entertainment Co., 1959. DVD.

Notorious. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, and Madame Leopoldine Konstantin. American Broadcasting Companies Inc., 1946. DVD.

Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, and Thelma Ritter. Universal Studios, 1954. DVD.

Shadow of a Doubt. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Macdonald Carey, Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, and Wallace Ford. Universal Studios, 1943. DVD.

Stam, Robert, and Roberta Pearson. “Hitchcock's Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism.” A Hitchcock Reader. Ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 199-211. Print.

The 39 Steps. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. Delta Entertainment Corporation, 1935. DVD.

Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. James Stewart and Kim Novak. Universal Studios, 1958. DVD.