The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (best finance books of all time TXT) 📕

Melanie Daniels and Marnie Edgar are two of Hitchcock’s most successful dandies—stylish, enigmatic, and as distant as the moon.

In violent, disturbing ways, Hedren’s emotionally frozen characters are thawed out, leading to their apparent salvation at the movies’ conclusion. The puzzle of how to make the emotionally unavailable available was a big part of Hitchcock’s films, especially those led by Cary Grant and James Stewart, each of whom represents a different part of Hitchcock’s idea of maleness, perhaps of himself. Grant is a fantasy of charm and sexual confidence; Stewart captures men as people struggling with fear, obsession, and guilt. Uniting them—with the exception of Stewart’s married character in The Man Who Knew Too Much—was their remote bachelordom, a dandy persona concealing the tender emotional self beneath. By the end of each of the Stewart and Grant films, that brittle exterior has been breached, for good or ill. This is a crucial point about Hitchcock’s portrayal of dandyism: it offers its own critique. Unlike masculine types of the same era played by Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne, for example, it’s not at all certain whether we’re meant to approve of Hitchcock’s dandies. He wants us to care about them, but we’re nudged to ask ourselves whether all this studied superficiality and hard-fought urbanity is really worth it.

It was a question Hitchcock asked of himself. Wouldn’t it be a happier life if he dropped the dandy act and opened himself up to others, even if in doing so he risked some form of self-diminishment? In private moments, he sometimes complained that on set he felt as though he were riding through a desert on top of a camel, unreachable and alone. Wasn’t it ridiculous, he asked, that people should always call him Mr. Hitchcock, almost in the same breath as insisting that standards be maintained? “One cannot become too familiar with the people with whom one has to work,” he remarked in his later years. “One can’t take the risk of exposing oneself as just an ordinary man.” John Landis was at the very start of his movie career in the 1970s when he met Hitchcock, and he described the experience as like encountering a mythological creature, such was his reputation and his bearing. Likewise, David Freeman thought meeting Hitchcock was akin to visiting the Eiffel Tower for the first time. “You hear about it all your life, and when you finally see the damn thing, it looks so much like the postcards that it’s difficult to see it afresh.” On occasion, some brave young soul insisted on treating Hitchcock like a regular person. Bruce Dern claims that on the first day of working on Family Plot he sat next to Hitchcock and said, “I don’t give a shit if you like this or not, but I’m sitting next to you for ten weeks.” Apparently, the brazenness went down well, and Dern believes Hitchcock felt hurt when he wasn’t approached on set, despite his tendency to surround himself with a huge invisible wall of unapproachability. He was torn between protecting his specialness and yearning to be one of the gang, something he never mastered. “A lot of people think I’m a monster,” he said. “I’ve had women say, ‘Oh, you’re nothing like I thought you were.’ I’d say, ‘What did you expect?’ They’d say, ‘Well, we thought you’d be very unpleasant and this and that’ . . . a complete misconception. . . . I’m just the opposite. I’m more scared than they are.” Being misunderstood is an occupational hazard of the career dandy, who must always remain the same on the outside, irrespective of what springs and swirls within.

The conversation between the seen and the unseen, the surface and the subterranean, is the core of Rope. The story of an audacious attempt at the perfect crime mirrors Hitchcock’s own impudence in attempting to make a movie that appears to be filmed in one continuous take, revolutionary at the time. Both schemes are exercises in exquisiteness achieved through hidden effort, in one case painstaking, in the other sadistic.

Seen but unseen—or, to be more accurate, unspoken—a gay subtext runs through the film. Loosely based on the real-life murderers Leopold and Loeb, the film’s central characters, Phillip and Brandon, are partners in an unspeakable crime, a nudge and a wink at their homosexual relationship, the joint enterprise that the censors of the time considered even more harmful to public morals than the annihilation of an innocent life. The code of their sexuality was in the casting: with glee and knowingness, Hitchcock arranged that the two leads were played by gay men: John Dall as the manipulative Brandon and Farley Granger as the easily led Phillip. The screenplay was written by Arthur Laurents. Barely in his thirties at the time, Laurents was as open about his gayness as one could safely be in the late 1940s, a time in which the harassment and criminalization of gay men was pursued with vigor, following years of relative tolerance between the world wars. As both men detail in their respective memoirs, Granger and Laurents were an item during the production of the film, a fact that Hitchcock knew but decided to keep silent about. Indeed, Granger, Laurents, and Dall were all certain that the gay theme of the story held a strong attraction for Hitchcock, who “built sexual ambiguity into his presentation of the material,” though he never spoke a word of it to any of them.

Screamingly obvious to modern audiences, but apparently not to those of 1948, the crude coding is most evident in the style of these young aesthetes’ lives, the way Brandon fusses over the placing of candlesticks, the extreme refinement of their manners, the intensity of their homosocial world, even the execution of their murder. As the camera enters their apartment, the screen is filled with the face of their victim, David, at the moment of his asphyxiation, a shot that evokes the opening shot of The Lodger. The sexual connotations of that