San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Entertainer, dandy, womanizer: Hitchcock from every angle
Was there ever a filmmaker more playful, seductive, ruthless and obsessed than Alfred Hitchcock? He could make you chuckle, then scare you out of your seat. He created male characters who were handsome, charming and accomplished, yet blind to their own failings and the mortal dangers stalking them. He gave us beautiful, independent women, stripped them of their poise and dignity, then rescued them in the last reel — unless of course he’d already had them killed off in a motel shower by a madman with a butcher knife.
He was the master of suspense, a trickster, provocateur and “everyone’s wicked uncle,” as British author Peter Conrad once described him, a sardonic, roly-poly-looking man ever ready to “prod at the bad conscience of the 20th century.”
Yet for all of Hitchcock’s bombast, no films were more thrilling than “Rear Window” and “North by Northwest,” nor more disturbing than “Vertigo,” “Psycho” and “The Birds.” And no one bridged the gap between art and entertainment with more aplomb. Although Hitchcock never won an Oscar for best director, his body of work has come to be recognized as among the most imaginative and artful in cinematic history, earning him a place on the Mount Rushmore of great filmmakers alongside John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini and a handful of others. At the same time, he was a rabid self-promoter with his own weekly television show, mystery magazine and fan club. He was Pablo Picasso as carnival barker.
There are several impressive, fulldress biographies of Hitchcock, but Edward White’s thoughtful and nuanced book takes a different approach. “The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock” explores the master’s life and work through a dozen different prisms that expose and illuminate his various personas. Some are obvious to any Hitchcock fan: the Murderer, the Womanizer, the Auteur, the Voyeur, the Entertainer. Others are more original: The Dandy, for example, explores Hitchcock’s fascination with fashion design for both men and women.
“Anxiety, fear, paranoia, guilt and shame are the emotional engines of his films,” White writes. “Surveillance, conspiracy, distrust of authority and sexual violence were among his most abiding preoccupations.” As a result, White argues with cogency and passion, Hitchcock still “speaks with urgency to today’s audiences.”
Born in 1899 and raised in east London, Hitchcock had a cinematic career that spanned silent films and talkies, black and white and color, and thrillers, romantic comedies and horror, from the golden age of Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s to the rise of television and the swinging ’60s. “The Lodger” (1927), his first big hit, resonated with what became some of his favorite themes: the hounding of
an innocent man, the malevolent power of the state and the mesmerizing allure of blond victims. And he made his first trademark cameo appearance, basking in his own sly persona.
His blazing success in London inevitably led him in the late 1930s to Hollywood, where he ultimately made his most memorable films. Although he frequently worked with famous writers, including John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Raymond Chandler, Ben Hecht, Clifford Odets and Dorothy Parker, he treated them and most of his collaborators as employees and hoarded most of the creative credit. He viewed actors with an equal measure of disdain, although he enriched the careers of luminaries such as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. “The best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well,” he once declared.
Even his long-suffering wife, Alma Reville, who often served as assistant
director, writer and uncredited coproducer, was often shoved to the background. White doesn’t hesitate to redistribute credit where he believes it is due, especially where Reville is concerned, but he also concedes that Hitchcock’s films reflected his distinctive sensibility and deserved the adjective “Hitchcockian … some inarticulable mix of suspense, melodrama and humor.”
Things get especially complicated when White comes to the chapter titled “The Womanizer,” which focuses not just on Hitchcock’s cinematic portraits of female characters but on his obsessions with the actresses who played them. Hitchcock believed that his audience was predominantly female and sought to make his female characters complex and intriguing. Yet he inevitably pandered to male fantasies. Kelly, who starred in three of his best films during her brief acting career, was his ultimate incarnation of the strait-laced, aloof, decorous woman who harbors hidden