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

that differentiate cinema from other visual arts. This has relatively little to do with cinematography, and a lot to do with editing. “Galloping horses in Westerns are only photographs of action, photographs of content,” explained Hitchcock. “It’s the piecing together of the montage which makes what I call a pure film.” Hitchcock’s template was laid down by early pioneers, especially Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, the latter of whom conducted an experiment to demonstrate the almost magical properties of film assembly, which Hitchcock referenced in explaining his own technique. “Show a man looking at something,” he ventured, “say a baby. Then show him smiling. By placing these shots in sequence—man looking, object seen, reaction to object—the director characterizes the man as a kindly person.” But replace the shot of the baby with a girl in a bikini, and the sequence is transformed. “What is he now? He’s a dirty old man.” A sequence just like that appears in Rear Window as Jeff ogles Miss Torso, stretching and twirling in her kitchen. But elsewhere in the film, Hitchcock adds an extra element: the voyeur as unreliable witness. In Kuleshov’s experiment, our opinion of the man is manipulated by the nature of what he has seen; in Rear Window, Jeff thinks he’s witnessing a man getting away with murder—but he can’t be sure whether he’s being deceived by his own eyes.

It’s a feeling shared by Scottie in Vertigo, again played by Stewart, who is driven mad by silent watching and the obsessive pursuit that follows. If Cary Grant was Hitchcock’s favorite man of action, some heroic, imaginary version of himself, Stewart was surely his favorite man of reaction, expressing through his silent gaze unsettling things about being an ordinary man that Hitchcock felt but rarely articulated. Stewart explained that his role in Rear Window “largely consisted of reacting. First Hitchcock would show what I was seeing through my binoculars. Then he’d show my face, and I’d reflect what I saw. I spent an astonishing amount of time looking into the camera and being amused, afraid, worried, curious, embarrassed, bored.”

Hitchcock and the art of looking: James Stewart in Rear Window.

It is in their dumb staring that Jeff and Scottie are at their loudest. Hitchcock’s original ending for Vertigo, only restored on its re-release in the 1980s, was not the dynamic chase up the bell tower that ends with Judy’s fall, but its aftermath: Scottie sitting in a chair, mute, gazing into space. His voyeurism has led him to misery; the male gaze has become an ugly hall of mirrors.

Secrets and unspoken truths permeate Hitchcock’s work. Like Jeff and Scottie, Hitchcock was an assiduous observer of people, and he was convinced that everybody had something to hide. Tippi Hedren acknowledged that one of her debts to Hitchcock was the way he encouraged her to drink in her surroundings as a way of developing her craft. “I watch, I observe, I observe people in situations all the time, and I put things back in my memory and say, ‘Oh, that would be wonderful to do, to put into a character.’ And that I learned from Hitchcock.”

This was natural enough for the greatest maker of spy movies in history, especially one who spent the first forty years of his life immersed in a society that valued secrecy in the way that people of twenty-first-century America value disclosure. The profusion of British spy fiction in the early 1900s influenced Hitchcock profoundly and supplied him with much source material. It emanated from a period of rapid growth in state-sponsored espionage, which sat atop a pervasive culture of secrecy that one former cabinet minister called “the British disease.” Peter Hennessy, arguably the greatest living historian of the uses and abuses of Westminster power, believes that “secrecy is as much part of the English landscape as the Cotswolds. It goes with the grain of our society.” Hitchcock himself said that he “always felt that espionage stories are fairly tricky to do in America,” as its openness means it “carries no real menace with it. You always feel you can go to the nearest policeman and complain that the Communists are after you.”

Hitchcock adhered to the British code of secrecy, and he formed close personal and professional relationships with those who had extraordinary secrets of their own. His friend and collaborator Ivor Montagu was a Soviet double agent during World War II, while his brother, Ewen Montagu, masterminded Operation Mincemeat, a plot in which the British intelligence services invented an entirely fictitious Royal Marines officer to fool the Nazis into believing that the Allies’ plans to invade Sicily were fake. In 1953, Ewen Montagu wrote an account of the plot, The Man Who Never Was—a possible allusion to The Man Who Knew Too Much, on which his brother had worked with Hitchcock. The book was adapted for the screen three years later, directed by Ronald Neame, who had started his career on Hitchcock’s Blackmail. An innocent man mistaken for a nonexistent spy is, of course, the central premise of North by Northwest, and that idea was first floated to Hitchcock in the early 1950s by the journalist Otis Guernsey who had heard about a wartime tale, similar to Operation Mincemeat, in which the British invented “a fake masterspy” in the Middle East. Ernest Lehman was adamant that neither Neame’s film, nor any other real-life story, was in his mind when he scripted North by Northwest, but given the spiderweb of associations, it may well have been in Hitchcock’s.

Lore has it that not only did Hitchcock have an intense interest in looking and watching, he possessed remarkable powers of observation and foresight. Frequently, he cast actors and recruited writers based on his hunches, reading them over the course of a twenty-minute meeting, or a lunch during which they talked about everything but the film ahead of them. Some colleagues and associates told stories that suggested his abilities approached the preternatural. He could, apparently, grasp a person’s character and