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

ultimately dropped, but approaching eighty and working on his final script, Hitchcock imagined a strange act of voyeurism that nobody had ever put in a Hollywood movie: a man and a woman exposing themselves to each other, a prelude to him combing her pubic hair.

Beyond the graphically or explicitly sexual, Hitchcock’s preoccupation with looking, its motivations, and its consequences, is one of the most fascinating aspects of his work and one that ensures its enduring relevance to our culture. It was three Hitchcock films—Rear Window, Vertigo, and Marnie—that formed the basis of Laura Mulvey’s argument that Hollywood movies display the world through the “male gaze,” favoring male desires and experiences, reinforcing the notion that women exist only to please men. Mulvey’s term, and its underlying concepts, have drifted into common parlance and, in certain quarters, have helped to solidify Hitchcock’s reputation as the supreme auteur of patriarchy. Doubtless, there is abundant evidence in Hitchcock to sustain Mulvey’s theory of the privileged male gaze, but it’s also true that Hitchcock’s male voyeurs are rarely gleeful in their obsessive looking. Often, their ogling causes them either guilt or regret, and hastens their downfall in some way. In that opening scene of The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock shows us the dancers hurrying their way to the stage before cutting to a panning shot across the front row of the audience, a line of supposed gentlemen leering at the women before them. We then see through the binoculars of one particularly lecherous fellow as he stares at Patsy, the film’s heroine. After the show, hoping to make a fantasy come true, he approaches Patsy, only to be mortified as she removes her blonde wig—she’s a natural brunette—and laughs in his face. Within the first five minutes of the first Hitchcock film, the male gaze is presented, critiqued, and ridiculed.

Unease with a compulsion to look is what makes Rear Window so compelling. Not since the experimental Rope seven years earlier had Hitchcock found a project that so enthused him; despite various claims to the contrary that have been made over the years, he was heavily involved in building the script from the template of its source material. As the historian Bill Krohn notes, the drafts of the scripts feature so many small touches evocative of earlier Hitchcock—“the little people who inhabit it, and the way the man at the rear window becomes involved in their lives”—that they surely came from him rather than from a writer. An initial treatment for the film by Joshua Logan—written before Hitchcock had bought the rights to the story—begins with the camera surveying the windows of the various apartments, not unlike the opening sequence of Rear Window. However, Hitchcock had already filmed something very similar more than twenty years earlier, a shot at the start of Murder! in which the camera pans down a row of houses, allowing us to peer inside at private lives as lights come on and people respond to a commotion outside.

Hitchcock on the set of To Catch a Thief.

Rear Window stars James Stewart as Jeff, a globe-trotting photojournalist, confined to his Greenwich Village apartment while he recuperates from a broken leg. Bored and frustrated by his incapacitation, Jeff begins to spy on his neighbors, one of whom, Lars Thorwald, he suspects of having killed his wife. Although disturbed by his voyeurism, Jeff’s physiotherapist, Stella, and his glamorous young girlfriend, Lisa, help him investigate the murder, eventually bringing Thorwald to justice. Jeff never leaves his apartment (apart from one brief moment of defenestration), and the camera stays with him throughout. Exhibiting Hitchcock’s love of the subjective camera, almost all the action is told from Jeff’s perspective. We receive clues, red herrings, and revelations along with him, save one scene in which we see Thorwald exit his apartment with a woman while Jeff dozes in his chair.* We see Jeff’s pleasure in spying on the woman he calls Miss Torso as she exercises in front of her window. But we also see his shame as he watches Miss Lonelyhearts being assaulted by a man she has invited into her home, and as she later contemplates suicide. When Thorwald discovers Lisa in his apartment—where she has been looking for incriminating evidence—Jeff is reduced to pathetic impotence, barely able to watch.

Rear Window is Hitchcock’s definitive film. It draws together various strands of the Hitchcock touch: ingenious production design; perfect casting; a taut, sparkling script; thrilling entertainment interwoven with dark, unsettling themes; beautifully judged use of colors and clothing. There’s also something inspired, in a gently subversive, Hitchcockian way, about the construction of the Greenwich Village apartments where the whole film takes place. In a period in which studios splashed vast sums creating epics such as Quo Vadis, The Robe, and Ben-Hur, Hitchcock persuaded Paramount to spend more than eighty thousand dollars—a vast sum in 1953—on a single studio set for a movie that takes place inside a nondescript apartment, where a middle-aged man sits in his pajamas, spying on the neighbors. Robert Burks, the film’s cinematographer, likened it to a DeMille production, though, as the historian John Belton points out, the themes of Rear Window hearken back to the earliest days of cinema when films were “more concerned with exhibition, presentation, and display, than with narration.” Hitchcock maintained that he was at his best when he adhered most strictly to the principles of silent filmmaking, as was the case with Rear Window. Ironically, the film also features some of the best dialogue of any Hitchcock movie. John Michael Hayes was chiefly responsible for that, but he conceded that in the process of writing the script, “Hitchcock taught me about how to tell a story with the camera and tell it silently.”

“Of all the films I have made,” reflected Hitchcock in 1968, “this to me is the most cinematic.” Today, the word “cinematic” is frequently used as a superlative, a synonym for something visually stunning. Hitchcock used it in its strictest sense, meaning the core principles and techniques