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

scene are obvious here, too; David’s face, and the breathlessness of his murderers, are unsubtle parallels with some other intense physical act, and Brandon can’t wait to light a cigarette the moment it’s all over. When David’s body is tossed into the chest, he lies there throughout the rest of the film—like the beating heart beneath the floorboards in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”—a suspenseful reminder of the secrets these gadflies have lurking in the private spaces of their home. The moment of murder isn’t seen—only heard—in Patrick Hamilton’s play on which the film is based, but Hitchcock insisted it be added to hammer home the disjuncture between Phillip and Brandon’s sophistication and brutality—the flimsiness of civilization that Hitchcock’s murderers always reveal.

Hitchcock and Laurents built the script with Cary Grant in mind as Rupert Cadell, Phillip and Brandon’s darkly witty former tutor who uncovers their crime and is horrified to discover that his ironic reproaches of conventional morality have been taken seriously by his young students, and inspired their crime. The inclusion of Grant would’ve made this the dandiest, and gayest, film Hitchcock ever made. But both he and Montgomery Clift, originally in line for the role of Brandon, passed on the opportunity. “According to Hitchcock,” wrote Laurents in his memoirs, “each felt his own sexuality made him too vulnerable to public attack.” Laurents was disappointed to hear of Grant’s refusal to participate, as he felt Grant was “always sexual” in his acting and would have added an extra dynamic between the characters. That mightn’t be quite the right judgment on what Grant offered. “Not once was Grant sexual on screen,” observes the critic David Thomson. “Instead, he knew that watching was erotic, that the glow of imagery was suggestive, but no one was actually going to do it.” Perfect for a Hitchcock film. Stewart’s interpretation lacks the sparkle and ambiguity that Grant surely would have brought to the role, the qualities he gave to all his best performances. Hitchcock recognized Grant’s capacity to simultaneously seduce and confuse an audience, apt for this film about forbidden male desire. As one of Grant’s biographers notes, when he soared to fame in the thirties and forties, the public asked itself questions about this exotic creature: was he “a new kind of man, or not a ‘man’ at all?”

Similar questions hang unanswered in several Hitchcock films. Handel Fane masquerades as a woman in Murder!, while the person imitating the cat burglar John Robie in To Catch a Thief turns out to be a teenage girl. In The Lodger and Downhill, Hitchcock had great fun toying with the ambiguity of Ivor Novello’s masculine identity. Novello was a pinup in Britain, Wales’s answer to Rudolph Valentino, but his homosexuality was an open secret in the entertainment world. “I’m glad he’s not keen on the girls,” says Novello’s love rival in the film, a reference to the misogyny of the woman-killing Avenger, as well as Novello’s sexual ambiguity. In one scene, Novello appears in a shot with a flowerpot in the background that seems to be resting on top of his head. “It was just too tempting,” said Hitchcock of his unsubtle joke. “Anyway, with that profile, why should Ivor mind having a flowerpot on his head once in a while.” The homosexual subtext of Strangers on a Train is also plain, as Farley Granger’s Guy is stalked by Robert Walker’s flamboyant Bruno, like a less-clever cousin of the boys in Rope. The screenplay for North by Northwest is fairly explicit in the homosexuality of Martin Landau’s character, Leonard—he of the sumptuous suit—who is described as having “a soft baby-face, large eyes and hair that falls down over his forehead. His attitudes are unmistakably effeminate.” Alarms rang when the censor read that. Hitchcock received a letter warning him that “if there is any inference whatever in your finished picture that this man is a homosexual, we will be unable to approve it under the requirements of the Production Code.” Yet Landau intentionally played Leonard as though he were in love with Vandamm and jealous of Eve Kendall, the woman with whom Vandamm is infatuated. All that, however, is conveyed through Hitchcock’s “negative acting,” in glances, gestures, and tone of voice. Landau had previously played characters full of machismo, and only in the theater, but Hitchcock was sure that he had the ability to play a complex, unspoken masculine otherness, assisted, of course, by the principles of negative acting and well-chosen clothes. “Martin,” he assured Landau, “you have a circus going on inside you. If you can play that in the theatre you can play this role.”

Hitchcock’s gay dandies suggest a narrow, stereotypical, and pretty bleak idea about gay lives. Almost all of them are marked by psychopathy, mental illness, loneliness, or misery. Perhaps, though, he used them to acknowledge and explore ambiguities of his own identity. His Brummellian style of dandyism—the detached, unemotional, precision of the cultivated English gentleman—lived next door to the more ostentatious Wildean tradition, which had queerness among its many layers. The membrane between the two can seem porous, and there has been speculation about Hitchcock’s sexual orientation. An “odd, weird, little faggish man” was how Samson Raphaelson summed up Hitchcock, a description he meant fondly. Others noted a decided effeminacy in his movements, a lightness of foot that was apparently unexpected because of his size and his reputation for unsmiling immobility. Rodney Ackland, a gay man who wrote Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen (1932) during his London period, claims Hitchcock once told him that had he not met Alma in the early 1920s, he might have “become a poof.” The phrasing is intriguing, as if Hitchcock conceived of gayness as a style that one could adopt, and one that was close to his own. There’s no evidence that he was attracted to men in the way he very obviously was to women; his interest in gayness was likely a manifestation of his masculinity, a feeling of estrangement from dominant ideas of what and who men