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

conscience starring Montgomery Clift. Then came Dial M for Murder. It was a hit, but, as Hitchcock admitted, he coasted through the production; it was only his third color movie, but was otherwise Hitchcock-by-the-numbers and took just thirty-six days to film—five of which were dedicated to the scene in which Grace Kelly is violently attacked in her nightgown, which left the actress bruised and sore. During production, two things kept Hitchcock buoyed: his ardor for Kelly, who he was directing for the first time, and the prospect of his next movie, for which he had the highest hopes.

This forthcoming picture was to be made for Paramount, with whom Hitchcock had recently signed a highly lucrative deal. Under the terms of the contract, he was obliged to make nine films, the rights to five of which would become his after eight years. The first of these films was Rear Window, for which he was having a marvelous set constructed: a block of thirty-one apartments, eight of them furnished and fitted with everything but running water. Not that the audience would ever enter any of them; all they’d get was a voyeuristic glimpse through the windows at the good and evil that thrives behind closed doors.

Though its plot is pure fiction, Rear Window could count as sensory memoir. A film about the nature of films, a festival of watching and projecting, it is the closest we will ever get to experiencing the world as Hitchcock saw it. Hitchcock was aware of the ethical murkiness of watching, but he never let that diminish the joy it gave him. He spent eighty years never being able to look away, his vision unobscured even when his eyes were closed.

From its inception, cinema has been bound to the act of looking at women’s bodies. In 1915, Audrey Munson became the first woman to appear fully nude in a mainstream American movie. The film was Inspiration, in which Munson played an impoverished New Yorker, rescued from her drudgery by a sculptor who makes her his muse. When she leaves him, he is crestfallen, and in a plotline that coincidentally foreshadows Scottie’s hunt for Madeleine in Vertigo more than forty years later, the artist wanders the streets in search of her perfect form among the city’s statuary. Despite its shots of nudity, Inspiration was unchallenged by the authorities because of its artistic theme, and because in real life Munson’s body had provided the template for dozens of statues around Manhattan, many of which survive to this day. She made three further films, but the public soon lost interest in looking at her. The work dried up, debts accumulated, followed by serious mental health problems. On her fortieth birthday she was committed to an insane asylum where she stayed, with hardly a visitor, until her death sixty-five years later.

Hitchcock was acutely aware of the centrality of the watched woman in the history of his medium. The very first shot in the Hitchcock canon is of the bare legs of a group of dancers running down a spiral staircase, evoking Duchamp’s seminal painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, which itself trailed a pioneering time-lapse photographic study of a naked woman walking down a flight of stairs that Eadweard Muybridge published in 1885. Of course, all these images fit into a far lengthier artistic tradition, stretching back centuries, in which Hitchcock was well versed. When Norman Bates has his “what the butler saw” moment, spying on Marion undressing in her motel room, his peephole is concealed beneath a framed print of Willem van Mieris’s painting Susannah and the Elders, an image of two men preying on a naked woman while she bathes. The pointed significance of the painting is underlined in the movie’s trailer when Hitchcock stops in front of it and says it is of “great significance,” before feigning discomfort and changing the subject. Is the painting significant purely because it reflects what Norman does to Marion? Or, do the dirty old men on the canvas signify the one behind the camera? Or, are we, in our enjoyment of looking, either at Psycho or at a Renaissance masterpiece, as guilty of voyeurism as any artist?

In conversation with Andy Warhol, another artist who spent a great deal of his career silently staring at bodies in intimate situations, Hitchcock claimed he had glimpsed pornographic films only once in his life, and that was after the age of sixty, and by way of happenstance. It occurred after a steak dinner during a publicity trip to Tokyo, he said, when he was led blithely “into this upper room and there they had a screen that showed these awful films,” the specifics of which he didn’t divulge. However, he daydreamed about including acts of sexual voyeurism in his films. The story of Adelaide and Edwin Bartlett, which Hitchcock frequently cited as his favorite true-crime tale, entailed the willing cuckoldry of Edwin by Adelaide and a young clergyman named George Dyson. In 1953, Hitchcock published a magazine piece about the case in which he explained—with, as the scholar Sidney Gottlieb has also identified, an intriguing but perhaps unintentional, parallel to his situation with Alma and Whitfield Cook—that the Bartletts’ marriage “had been entirely platonic. Except for one occasion which resulted in a stillborn child, they lived together as friends and nothing more. . . . He had encouraged her friendship with George Dyson, and he urged them to become affectionate. In effect, he had ‘given’ her to Mr. Dyson.” Later, Hitchcock imagined making a film about the case, and explained how he would shoot the scene of the parson “making violent love to the young woman while the husband, sitting in his rocking chair and smoking his pipe, looked on.” In the first drafts of The Trouble with Harry, Jennifer—Harry’s widow, played by Shirley MacLaine—confesses that her late husband insisted on hanging a photograph of his brother over their marital bed, to create the impression that he was watching them make love. That risqué element was