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Why Hitchcock Tortured His Stars
by Davell Swan and Doniphan Blair
Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife, script consultant and early assistant director, as well as the only person he was actually scared of, works on with him 'Marnie', circa 1963. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockALFRED HITCHCOCK WAS A "MOMMA'S
boy.” He was the youngest of three children in a family dominated by his mother, Emma Jane Whelan (1863–1942), who was known as a willful woman. Perhaps it was from her he developed the double quality of declining to prove his manliness through "butch" behavior or physical daring but dominating intellectually.
After living at home way into his twenties, he married the similarly strong Alma Reville. A film editor, while he was a mere title designer, she was more advanced in her film career and became his life-long artistic partner.
From assistants and designers to writers and editors, he worked with many women and enjoyed the company of smart, strong women although headstrong beauties were another story.
Starting with his first production, "Pleasure Garden", about two dancehall women pursuing love, Hitchcock showed an intense interest in the stories of empowered women, in supporting as well as lead roles. "Hitchcock Girls" often focused on romance but they ranged in profession from journalist to psychiatrist and spy and frequently defied authority and defended outcasts.
Many of the actresses that played these parts—Carole Lombard, Theresa Wright, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Karen Black, among others—had wonderful experiences on the Hitchcock set but others did not. As much as Hitchcock appeared to be a dedicated feminist and romantic on screen, he could be a rude prankster and even extreme misogynist during production and after hours.
By the time he had made “The Manxman” in 1929, “Hitchcock knew how to embarrass [the lead actress, Anny Ondra], to the point where she was driven to tears,” notes Donald Spoto, author of three important books on the director. Nevertheless, Hitch defended Ondra, who was Czechoslovakian, when the front office wanted her fired for her accent.
Tippi Hedren enduring her overly-life-like scene of being attacked by birds in 'The Birds'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockHitchcock reveled in teasing, mortifying or outright torturing many of his leading ladies, often singling them out, separating them from the rest of the cast and subjecting them to verbal or physical abuse, frequently couched in a prank, as occurred with the stars of “Rebecca”, “Notorious” and “Rope”.
Practical jokes often included handcuffing, a Hitchcockian theme right from “The Lodger” and continuing through at least a dozen other films, which bled into offscreen activities. During a break from the shooting of “39 Steps”, the two stars where handcuffed, the key was “lost” and much time transpired before they finally won release.
Humor could also take a scatalogical, schoolboy turn. Before a take, Hitchcock would sometimes lean in and whisper sexual innuendos; he once made crude remarks about an actress over the PA system; he regularly referred to toilet habits in "mixed" company.
He would direct wardrobe and make-up to lower their quality, notably with Vera Miles in “Psycho”. Indignities that were part of the script were often exaggerated, or extra takes were added for his benefit, as were the complex screen tests. Candidates were filmed in fully produced scenes, often taken verbatim from his other films, which he liked to screen privately.
A sexualized Sado-Masochism seemed evident from the start, “The Ring” (1927), which was his first original story, not only with female characters but male. Indication of the latter appears in many films from “The 39 Steps” and "Young and Innocent” to ”Topaz” and “Family Plot”—certainly, any one featuring a man in handcuffs.
A number of films have scenes where strong males stripped to the waist. As well as adding eye-candy, this seems to indicate an exhibitionist fetish by virtue of the contrast to his own portly figure, which was well known from his many cameos, especially after starting his television franchise in 1955.
Straight out Sadistic urges found voice through violence towards, or murder of, women. Such graphic displays or implications of brutality occurred in “The Lodger”, “The 39 Steps”, “Strangers on a Train”, “Psycho”, “The Birds”, “Marnie” and, most horribly, “Frenzy”.
Sexualized Sado-Masochism was already apparent in Hitchcock's early offering 'The Ring'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockThen there was the sexual degradation. Both “Notorious” and “North by Northwest” include "patriotic pimping," a woman forced to bed a foreign agent for intelligence, with "Notorious" adding the insult of having the boy friend, played by the fabulous but cool Cary Grant, making the arrangement for Ingrid Bergman's daughter of a Nazi (but still very lovable) character.
Conversely, Hitchcock usually ignored male actors, unless they were gay, in which case, he was fascinated, especially about any gossip or lifestyle revelations. Some observers noted Alfred and Alma seemed like two lesbians, albeit the big one femme and the small one, Alma, the butch, but Hitchcock was probably not queer—just very bi-curious.
At a party during the making of “I Confess”, Hitchcock furnished a dangerous amount of alcohol to the Montgomery Clift, a closeted gay, who eventually passed out, probably after passing Alfred some of his precious sexual secrets.
His most common method for inflicting actor discomfort was hydration, in the studio water tank or by hosing actors down, if the script indicated rain, lost-at-sea, etc. This occurred during the shooting of “I Confess”, “Lifeboat” and “Vertigo” with Kim Novak’s famous fall into the San Francisco Bay, which she had to repeat for numerous takes.
A few folks claim Hitchcock was a cinematic shaman, who tested and honed his acolyte actresses through surprise and subliminal sex to sharpen their skills, but pathology is probably the more precise term. Whatever it was, it came to a head with Tippi Hedren in the making of "The Birds" and "Marnie", as Spoto revealed to world in his 1983 bestseller, “The Dark Side of Genuis”.
For up to eight hours-a-day for an entire week, Hedren was trapped on a tiny shooting stage with live birds thrown at or tied to her, one dangerously pecking her eye. Having promised the shoot would involve mostly mechanical birds, Hitchcock and the crew tricked her, although, admittedly, it did increase verisimilitude and improve the picture.
Hedren also noted Hitchcock himself was petrified while shooting the bird attack scenes, given his fear of birds (previously indicated in "Pscho"), of what might happen to her—things could always go terribly wrong when you are a cutting-edge filmmaker doing horror—or of not getting the good shot.
Hitch directing Sean Connery to restrain Tippi Hedren's hands in 'Marnie'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockA better-known actress probably would not have endured such treatment but Hedren had been plucked from obscurity by Hitch, apparently for the precise purpose of being molded into a star while also being dominated.
As his fame accrued, Hitchcock felt it was he who made the actresses great. Given this, he attempted to manage their images, emotions and romantic relations, on top of utterly controlling their portrayal within the art of motion pictures.
For "Marnie", "He gave [the cinematographer] unusual instructions,” Spoto tells us. “(T)he camera was to come as close as possible, the lenses were to almost make love to [Hedren's character]. For a scene in which she is kissed by Sean Connery, the close-up in so tight... the tone is virtually pornographic.”
Sure Hitchcock could have enjoyed relations with any number of women, if he put his brilliant mind to it. But, working closely with stars, being a romantic, AND unabashedly trying to express all his fantasies in his films—under the thinnest veneer of metaphor—he evidently felt he deserved a goddess.
Of course, it was common for directors to romance their stars, from von Sternberg with Dietrich and Welles with Hayworth to Rosellini with one of Hitch’s biggest crushes, the “notorious” Bergman. Unfortunately, while brilliant and charming, Hitch could wax a bit snobby and eccentric, if not outright creepy.
In the late '50s, "(s)omething shifted in his personality from latency to actuality, from resentment of his own unrealized erotic longings to a fierce anger towards those who aroused those unrealizable longings," Spoto explains in "The Dark Side" (p. 414). "This was never articulated, of course..." except in his art.
“Marnie” became “the story of a director's desire for an inaccessible actress,” Spoto continues. “He sent champagne to her dressing room. And by November he was telling [Hedren] his recurring dream."
“You came right up to me and said, 'Hitch, I love you—I will always love you,' and we embraced,” Hitchcock blurted out, hoping Hedren would be inspired to reciprocate.
Hitchcock waxes Surrealist on the set of 'Marnie'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockA brilliant intellectual and over-the-top romantic in the body of a fat and shy schoolboy, who finds himself in a position of power, artistically as well as financially, Hitchcock could not stop himself from acting on old injuries or feelings of ugliness and awkwardness.
Add in his Victorian upbringing, staid manner, middle-class marriage and failure to pursue erotic adventure, and you have a perfect storm for a raging repression able to arouse potty mind or wet dreams. On top of it all, he probably fell in love with those he had no chance with to save himself from the reality of consummation with a flesh-and-blood woman not mention the reaction of his wife.
As these longings went unsatisfied for decades, he almost inevitably became bitter. But ever the artist, he explores these issues in film. “Vertigo” investigates romantic fixation, fantasy and gender projection; "The Birds" follows a prankster romantic, almost a female Hitchcock, as she struggles to find love against the forces of nature (birds, sex); while “Marnie” details outright his feelings for Hedren.
In that film, she plays a frigid and psychologically-injured woman who is also a brave thief, which captures the romantic imagination of Sean Connery's character. Since she's not interested, he blackmails her into marriage and rapes her, although their relationship improves as he tries to find the causes of her problems.
Despite such self-awareness, Hitchcock fell out of his mind in love with Hedren. During production, he stared at her endlessly, sent numerous gifts and increasingly revealing notes. When rebuffed, much like an evil character in one of his films, he demands she become his mistress or see her career destroyed and dependents stranded (Hedren is Melanie Griffith’s mom, as it happens).
"'I was agonizingly sorry for both of them,' [writer] Jay Presson Allen said of the final days of shooting 'Marnie'," (again from Spoto) by which point Hitchcock would only communicate through intermediaries .
“'It was an old man's cri de coeur… (e)veryone was telling her not to make Hitchcock unhappy. But she couldn't help but make him unhappy! By the end of the film he was very angry with her.'
Although he was able to hold these proclivities in check through his early career, after becoming rich and famous, and revealing his dreams to the world through narrative, both entitlement and fragility came to the fore. After some professional setbacks like losing his beloved Vera Miles and Grace Kelly, who were supposed to star in “Vertigo” and “Marnie” respectively, he began to disassemble.
He treated Hedren with more disrespect and cruelty than any other actress in his career and his behavior injured the completion of "Marnie" as well as Hedren. His next two outings, “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz”, were cold and inferior. Although “Frenzy”, which came next, was wellmade and popular, it did feature his most realistic and vile murder.
But his last film, “Family Plot”, was amazingly warm, charming and entertaining. Moreover, it meditated on many of his classical themes like the sexiness inherent in crime and romantic entanglements, explored through the interrelated stories of three couples led by a criminal mates, a facesaving conclusion to a stellar career which got mired in his injured romanticism.
Which brings us to Romanticism. If we agree that Hitchcock was a great artist, we can also extrapolate that he was very influenced by the romantic aspects of the artistic endeavor which start with sex and family building but involve aesthetics, narratives and culture itself.
Called Romanticism when it becomes a full art movement, men and women have always researched and reflected each other's longings and needs, the macho dominating through physical deeds, his male artist counterpart attracting mates through artistry and myth. While women can also dominate through deeds, as Hitchcock illustrated, they lead in morality, feelings and romance, as Hitchcock similarly emphasized, what can be called the matriarchal arts.
Hitchcock’s films are famous for their advanced interaction between women and men, in action, romantic and moral situations, suggesting he may have been trying to seduce all of his beloveds: audiences, actresses even the culture itself.
Perhaps his teasing and torturing were attempts to prod partners to join him at his heights or break them down to his lows. Whatever they were, they were an integral part of the living experiment this particular artist used to tease out complex narratives concerning women, relationships and romanticism.
If this is a rationalization for bad behavior, so be it, but in Hitchcock's case it didn't lead to any actual murders and the "tortured artist" did produce a plethora of great films.
Hitchcock often noted that he was a person prone to fear, hence well equipped to make horror films. The same can be said of love stories. His intense phobias, desires, repressions and dreams gave him a full palette with which to display some of the most dramatic extremes conceivable in the dance of the sexes.
Ultimately, the vast majority of his flicks end in love and his dramatization of difficulties by which the characters arrive at that point are what make them great.
Hitchcock-obsessed and head of SF's HitchCult, Davell Swan is a writer, filmmaker (anchor and coproducer of notorious public access program) and lead singer of indie band, residing in South of Market San Francisco, where he can be reached .
Posted on Dec 04, 2013 - 08:08 AM
by Davell Swan and Doniphan Blair
Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife, script consultant and early assistant director, as well as the only person he was actually scared of, works on with him 'Marnie', circa 1963. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcockboy.” He was the youngest of three children in a family dominated by his mother, Emma Jane Whelan (1863–1942), who was known as a willful woman. Perhaps it was from her he developed the double quality of declining to prove his manliness through "butch" behavior or physical daring but dominating intellectually.
After living at home way into his twenties, he married the similarly strong Alma Reville. A film editor, while he was a mere title designer, she was more advanced in her film career and became his life-long artistic partner.
From assistants and designers to writers and editors, he worked with many women and enjoyed the company of smart, strong women although headstrong beauties were another story.
Starting with his first production, "Pleasure Garden", about two dancehall women pursuing love, Hitchcock showed an intense interest in the stories of empowered women, in supporting as well as lead roles. "Hitchcock Girls" often focused on romance but they ranged in profession from journalist to psychiatrist and spy and frequently defied authority and defended outcasts.
Many of the actresses that played these parts—Carole Lombard, Theresa Wright, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Karen Black, among others—had wonderful experiences on the Hitchcock set but others did not. As much as Hitchcock appeared to be a dedicated feminist and romantic on screen, he could be a rude prankster and even extreme misogynist during production and after hours.
By the time he had made “The Manxman” in 1929, “Hitchcock knew how to embarrass [the lead actress, Anny Ondra], to the point where she was driven to tears,” notes Donald Spoto, author of three important books on the director. Nevertheless, Hitch defended Ondra, who was Czechoslovakian, when the front office wanted her fired for her accent.
Tippi Hedren enduring her overly-life-like scene of being attacked by birds in 'The Birds'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockPractical jokes often included handcuffing, a Hitchcockian theme right from “The Lodger” and continuing through at least a dozen other films, which bled into offscreen activities. During a break from the shooting of “39 Steps”, the two stars where handcuffed, the key was “lost” and much time transpired before they finally won release.
Humor could also take a scatalogical, schoolboy turn. Before a take, Hitchcock would sometimes lean in and whisper sexual innuendos; he once made crude remarks about an actress over the PA system; he regularly referred to toilet habits in "mixed" company.
He would direct wardrobe and make-up to lower their quality, notably with Vera Miles in “Psycho”. Indignities that were part of the script were often exaggerated, or extra takes were added for his benefit, as were the complex screen tests. Candidates were filmed in fully produced scenes, often taken verbatim from his other films, which he liked to screen privately.
A sexualized Sado-Masochism seemed evident from the start, “The Ring” (1927), which was his first original story, not only with female characters but male. Indication of the latter appears in many films from “The 39 Steps” and "Young and Innocent” to ”Topaz” and “Family Plot”—certainly, any one featuring a man in handcuffs.
A number of films have scenes where strong males stripped to the waist. As well as adding eye-candy, this seems to indicate an exhibitionist fetish by virtue of the contrast to his own portly figure, which was well known from his many cameos, especially after starting his television franchise in 1955.
Straight out Sadistic urges found voice through violence towards, or murder of, women. Such graphic displays or implications of brutality occurred in “The Lodger”, “The 39 Steps”, “Strangers on a Train”, “Psycho”, “The Birds”, “Marnie” and, most horribly, “Frenzy”.
Sexualized Sado-Masochism was already apparent in Hitchcock's early offering 'The Ring'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockConversely, Hitchcock usually ignored male actors, unless they were gay, in which case, he was fascinated, especially about any gossip or lifestyle revelations. Some observers noted Alfred and Alma seemed like two lesbians, albeit the big one femme and the small one, Alma, the butch, but Hitchcock was probably not queer—just very bi-curious.
At a party during the making of “I Confess”, Hitchcock furnished a dangerous amount of alcohol to the Montgomery Clift, a closeted gay, who eventually passed out, probably after passing Alfred some of his precious sexual secrets.
His most common method for inflicting actor discomfort was hydration, in the studio water tank or by hosing actors down, if the script indicated rain, lost-at-sea, etc. This occurred during the shooting of “I Confess”, “Lifeboat” and “Vertigo” with Kim Novak’s famous fall into the San Francisco Bay, which she had to repeat for numerous takes.
A few folks claim Hitchcock was a cinematic shaman, who tested and honed his acolyte actresses through surprise and subliminal sex to sharpen their skills, but pathology is probably the more precise term. Whatever it was, it came to a head with Tippi Hedren in the making of "The Birds" and "Marnie", as Spoto revealed to world in his 1983 bestseller, “The Dark Side of Genuis”.
For up to eight hours-a-day for an entire week, Hedren was trapped on a tiny shooting stage with live birds thrown at or tied to her, one dangerously pecking her eye. Having promised the shoot would involve mostly mechanical birds, Hitchcock and the crew tricked her, although, admittedly, it did increase verisimilitude and improve the picture.
Hedren also noted Hitchcock himself was petrified while shooting the bird attack scenes, given his fear of birds (previously indicated in "Pscho"), of what might happen to her—things could always go terribly wrong when you are a cutting-edge filmmaker doing horror—or of not getting the good shot.
Hitch directing Sean Connery to restrain Tippi Hedren's hands in 'Marnie'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockAs his fame accrued, Hitchcock felt it was he who made the actresses great. Given this, he attempted to manage their images, emotions and romantic relations, on top of utterly controlling their portrayal within the art of motion pictures.
For "Marnie", "He gave [the cinematographer] unusual instructions,” Spoto tells us. “(T)he camera was to come as close as possible, the lenses were to almost make love to [Hedren's character]. For a scene in which she is kissed by Sean Connery, the close-up in so tight... the tone is virtually pornographic.”
Sure Hitchcock could have enjoyed relations with any number of women, if he put his brilliant mind to it. But, working closely with stars, being a romantic, AND unabashedly trying to express all his fantasies in his films—under the thinnest veneer of metaphor—he evidently felt he deserved a goddess.
Of course, it was common for directors to romance their stars, from von Sternberg with Dietrich and Welles with Hayworth to Rosellini with one of Hitch’s biggest crushes, the “notorious” Bergman. Unfortunately, while brilliant and charming, Hitch could wax a bit snobby and eccentric, if not outright creepy.
In the late '50s, "(s)omething shifted in his personality from latency to actuality, from resentment of his own unrealized erotic longings to a fierce anger towards those who aroused those unrealizable longings," Spoto explains in "The Dark Side" (p. 414). "This was never articulated, of course..." except in his art.
“Marnie” became “the story of a director's desire for an inaccessible actress,” Spoto continues. “He sent champagne to her dressing room. And by November he was telling [Hedren] his recurring dream."
“You came right up to me and said, 'Hitch, I love you—I will always love you,' and we embraced,” Hitchcock blurted out, hoping Hedren would be inspired to reciprocate.
Hitchcock waxes Surrealist on the set of 'Marnie'. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockAdd in his Victorian upbringing, staid manner, middle-class marriage and failure to pursue erotic adventure, and you have a perfect storm for a raging repression able to arouse potty mind or wet dreams. On top of it all, he probably fell in love with those he had no chance with to save himself from the reality of consummation with a flesh-and-blood woman not mention the reaction of his wife.
As these longings went unsatisfied for decades, he almost inevitably became bitter. But ever the artist, he explores these issues in film. “Vertigo” investigates romantic fixation, fantasy and gender projection; "The Birds" follows a prankster romantic, almost a female Hitchcock, as she struggles to find love against the forces of nature (birds, sex); while “Marnie” details outright his feelings for Hedren.
In that film, she plays a frigid and psychologically-injured woman who is also a brave thief, which captures the romantic imagination of Sean Connery's character. Since she's not interested, he blackmails her into marriage and rapes her, although their relationship improves as he tries to find the causes of her problems.
Despite such self-awareness, Hitchcock fell out of his mind in love with Hedren. During production, he stared at her endlessly, sent numerous gifts and increasingly revealing notes. When rebuffed, much like an evil character in one of his films, he demands she become his mistress or see her career destroyed and dependents stranded (Hedren is Melanie Griffith’s mom, as it happens).
"'I was agonizingly sorry for both of them,' [writer] Jay Presson Allen said of the final days of shooting 'Marnie'," (again from Spoto) by which point Hitchcock would only communicate through intermediaries .
“'It was an old man's cri de coeur… (e)veryone was telling her not to make Hitchcock unhappy. But she couldn't help but make him unhappy! By the end of the film he was very angry with her.'
Although he was able to hold these proclivities in check through his early career, after becoming rich and famous, and revealing his dreams to the world through narrative, both entitlement and fragility came to the fore. After some professional setbacks like losing his beloved Vera Miles and Grace Kelly, who were supposed to star in “Vertigo” and “Marnie” respectively, he began to disassemble.
He treated Hedren with more disrespect and cruelty than any other actress in his career and his behavior injured the completion of "Marnie" as well as Hedren. His next two outings, “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz”, were cold and inferior. Although “Frenzy”, which came next, was wellmade and popular, it did feature his most realistic and vile murder.
But his last film, “Family Plot”, was amazingly warm, charming and entertaining. Moreover, it meditated on many of his classical themes like the sexiness inherent in crime and romantic entanglements, explored through the interrelated stories of three couples led by a criminal mates, a facesaving conclusion to a stellar career which got mired in his injured romanticism.
Which brings us to Romanticism. If we agree that Hitchcock was a great artist, we can also extrapolate that he was very influenced by the romantic aspects of the artistic endeavor which start with sex and family building but involve aesthetics, narratives and culture itself.
Called Romanticism when it becomes a full art movement, men and women have always researched and reflected each other's longings and needs, the macho dominating through physical deeds, his male artist counterpart attracting mates through artistry and myth. While women can also dominate through deeds, as Hitchcock illustrated, they lead in morality, feelings and romance, as Hitchcock similarly emphasized, what can be called the matriarchal arts.
Hitchcock’s films are famous for their advanced interaction between women and men, in action, romantic and moral situations, suggesting he may have been trying to seduce all of his beloveds: audiences, actresses even the culture itself.
Perhaps his teasing and torturing were attempts to prod partners to join him at his heights or break them down to his lows. Whatever they were, they were an integral part of the living experiment this particular artist used to tease out complex narratives concerning women, relationships and romanticism.
If this is a rationalization for bad behavior, so be it, but in Hitchcock's case it didn't lead to any actual murders and the "tortured artist" did produce a plethora of great films.
Hitchcock often noted that he was a person prone to fear, hence well equipped to make horror films. The same can be said of love stories. His intense phobias, desires, repressions and dreams gave him a full palette with which to display some of the most dramatic extremes conceivable in the dance of the sexes.
Ultimately, the vast majority of his flicks end in love and his dramatization of difficulties by which the characters arrive at that point are what make them great.
Hitchcock-obsessed and head of SF's HitchCult, Davell Swan is a writer, filmmaker (anchor and coproducer of notorious public access program) and lead singer of indie band, residing in South of Market San Francisco, where he can be reached .
Posted on Dec 04, 2013 - 08:08 AM
