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

film when Lisa has an indulgent meal of lobster and champagne delivered to Jeff’s ratty apartment from the 21 Club, Hitchcock insisted on sourcing a wine bucket, two dinner plates, and six napkins from the restaurant, as well as a waiter’s uniform to ensure that the fabulous implausibility of the scene was accurate in every material detail. It wasn’t only Hitchcock’s eyes that needed to be satisfied. The sounds of Greenwich Village traffic and street life had to be recorded, this before Hitchcock had taken the decision for the camera to remain within Jeff’s apartment for the entire film. The older Hitchcock got, the more interested he became in perfecting such details. A few years later, in the preproduction stage for Vertigo, that other exceptional film about obsessive watching, he had the film’s art director, Henry Bumstead, research the apartments of single, retired police officers in the San Francisco Bay Area to get an acceptable model for Scottie’s home. On Hitchcock’s instruction, Herbert Coleman commissioned the portrait of Carlotta Valdes, a prop used early in the film. Coleman had to engage artists in Italy, England, and the United States before he found one to meet the boss’s expectations. Coleman wrote to Paramount’s point man in Rome with very specific feedback on one iteration of the portrait, including the need to “eliminate the blemishes on the girl’s skin below the neck” as well as a vein that was visible on her wrist. The Hitchcockian attention to detail perhaps reached its peak during postproduction for Frenzy when the director requested that a member of his team take a trip to the Coburg Hotel, one of the film’s settings, and record the noise of its elevator in operation, lest any erroneous whirring and clunking make its way onto the soundtrack.

Hitchcock obsessed over such minutiae because it brought him sensory satisfaction, just as much as having the right colors and costumes. In this sense, his assertion that his films were made to please his audience was false; observing and capturing the facts of the world, then reordering them in a configuration of his choosing, was an ineffable pleasure of which he never tired.

A portion of Hitchcock’s audience, however, shares his obsessiveness. They pore over Hitchcock films in the way art historians look at Renaissance paintings, with the certainty that nothing incidental is contained within the frame. Writing in the Village Voice in 1960, Andrew Sarris recommended his readers watch Psycho three times: first, to be thrilled and shocked; second, to enjoy the humor; third, to drink in “the hidden meanings and symbols.” To Hitchcock watchers, as dedicated to his films as Jeff is to the tableaus of life beyond his apartment window, there is bounteous significance in everything: staircases, light bulbs, milk, glasses, parallel lines, eggs, birds, brandy, water, hats, basements, shoes, doors, hands, musical instruments. No other filmmaker receives quite such close viewing. Before he published his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock in 1976, Donald Spoto had watched Vertigo twenty-seven times—this when Hitchcock had removed the film from circulation and it was therefore exceedingly difficult to obtain—and still found he had more to learn about it. In 2005, the scholar Michael Walker published Hitchcock’s Motifs, an academic study of more than four hundred pages devoted to decoding the significance of objects, images, character types, and narrative patterns within the Hitchcock universe. The book has plentiful sharp insights and reminders that Hitchcock did indeed attach symbolic meaning to many details. But Walker advises caution. Paraphrasing Sigmund Freud, he concedes that “sometimes a corpse is just a corpse.”

D. A. Miller writes of his experiences watching Hitchcock films in the way others might of staring into the flames of a fire, high on peyote. After years of repeated and intense viewing of Hitchcock, Miller had an epiphany when he found himself watching Strangers on a Train very late at night in a “semi-unconscious mode of viewing,” seeing all sorts of hidden threads in Hitchcock’s tapestry. In this state, he stops paying attention to the foreground that usually grabs an audience’s attention, and instead fixates on background details, what we might label “deep Hitchcock.” Even continuity errors—a boom mic briefly in the corner of a shot, a coffee cup in a marginally altered position—seem rich in meaning; they form extra layers of “mistake, confusion, and nonsense that permeates Hitchcockian cinema.” This is what Miller calls being “the too-close viewer,” a phenomenon that fortifies the experience of watching Hitchcock but also leads one down a rabbit hole of obsession, confusion, and self-doubt of the type traveled by Jeff and Hitchcock’s other neurotic watchers. Like Iris in The Lady Vanishes, Miller sometimes asks himself, “Do I see what I think I see, what the others say isn’t there?”

Among the hidden minutiae that Miller upturned in his free-frame scouring are brief appearances that Hitchcock made in his films, other than the famous cameos. If one looks very closely at the early scenes of Strangers on a Train, one can see that Guy is reading a copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Fireside Book of Suspense; a few minutes later, Bruno’s feet can be seen resting on Suspense Stories, another of Hitchcock’s anthologies. It’s an eminently Hitchcockian touch: a tiny self-referential in-joke—but also a wink to future generations, like a wad of chewing gum left on the underside of a school desk, or graffiti scribbled beneath a layer of wallpaper.

Peter Bogdanovich believes the academic scrutiny of Hitchcock’s oeuvre “amused him, and delighted him in a certain way,” though it sometimes left him scratching his head. In the early 1970s, the eldest of Hitchcock’s three granddaughters, Mary, took a college class on his films in which the tutor stressed the vital importance of the number seven to the thematic coherence of Hitchcock, a notion that meant nothing to the filmmaker himself. Mary asked for her grandfather’s help on an assignment about the style and substance of his work. She got a C.

Hitchcock knew the power one could command by looking—and by denying