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

Paul Newman sent a long memo critiquing his scenes in Torn Curtain, he challenged the certainty Hitchcock needed to feel that the production was progressing according to his blueprint. Roy Thinnes sent Hitchcock a comparable—though far shorter and more diffident—note about his concerns regarding Family Plot, and it’s possible this played a part in Hitchcock’s decision to fire Thinnes, one of four leading actors in the film, very shortly after. Anthony Perkins found the experience of working with Hitchcock to be the most purely enjoyable and creatively rewarding experience of his life, gratified that Hitchcock was amenable to various suggestions about characterization. Yet Perkins’s ideas—such as having Norman Bates chew candy corn throughout the movie—fit in with Hitchcock’s preexisting notion of the character and what he hoped Perkins, the doe-eyed heartthrob, would bring to the role. When faced with an actor who had strong ideas about how to develop their character that deviated from his design, Hitchcock was less indulgent. William Devane, who replaced Thinnes in Family Plot, recalls Hitchcock’s reaction when Karen Black insisted on playing scenes in a way the director didn’t like, especially by improvising dialogue. “I’d look over at him,” Devane recalls, “and he’d raise his fingers like a pair of scissors. . . . That was the deal with him. You said your lines, you hit your marks . . . if he didn’t like something, he’d cut it.” To quote Hitchcock, “do what you want, there’s always the cutting room floor.”

“Hitchcock” is one of those rare words that have traveled from proper noun to adjective. Perhaps taking their cue from the ideas that the man himself pressed home in his innumerable interviews, most critics invoke Hitchcock’s name as shorthand for rising tension, slow but unyielding psychological torture, exquisitely unbearable suspense. Those things, of course, are vital to his work, but Hitchcock wouldn’t be Hitchcock if the brooding darkness weren’t undercut by humor. The Girl on the Train, Split, and Nocturnal Animals are among many films in recent times to have been labeled “Hitchcockian,” either by reviewers or by publicists, because of their noir qualities—yet there’s barely a laugh to be had in any of them. The undercurrent of humor in Gone Girl, directed by the Hitchcock aficionado David Fincher, is much closer to true Hitchcock territory. Although Jordan Peele’s comedic style and thematic concerns are a long way removed from Hitchcock’s, his balancing of the disturbing, the suspenseful, and the humorous puts Get Out in the Hitchcockian tradition, too. In Hitchcock’s mind, humor wasn’t simply a garnish of color or light relief; it was the silver thread that ran through most of his best work. “Next to reality,” he told an interviewer in 1936, “I put the accent on comedy, which, strangely enough, makes a film more dramatic.” In a self-authored exploration of his work published that same year, he suggested that he excelled as a writer and director of comedy: “I always look for a subject that has plenty of action. I introduce the comedy myself.”

Corroboration of that appears in the production files of numerous Hitchcock films. To pick just one example from dozens, the well-known moment in The Birds in which the camera cuts to the caged love birds on the back seat of Melanie’s car, swaying left and right on their perch as Melanie tears around corners was a touch Hitchcock added himself. Being tossed this way and that in a speeding car was something that tickled him, and it crops up as a moment of physical comedy in Notorious, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, and Family Plot.† In the latter two, he strung the joke out for so long that we seem to have left one film and entered another, as though the director had wanted to make a straight-up comedy all along. It is, though, a flourish entirely in keeping with Hitchcock, whose comedic sensibilities stayed conspicuously constant across six decades of filmmaking—in fact, it might be the most recurrent element of his artistic style, even more than the suspense on which his legend has been built.

Evidence of his early interest in comedy surfaces in several humorous pieces he wrote for the Henley Telegraph, published between 1919 and 1921. None evinces skilled comic writing. Yet it’s remarkable to see how much of Hitchcock’s core personality, his sense of humor, and the subjects of his interest were locked in at a young age. One piece was presented as a melodramatic scene of love and hate between a married couple, only for the twist at the end to reveal it to be a scene from a play, acted out before an audience. Another is a drawn-out joke about a man who unwittingly arranges for his friend to go to bed with his wife. His spoof essay “The History of Pea Eating” speaks of “a process by which a pipe was placed in the mouth and the peas drawn up by pneumatic means. But in the trials the inventor unfortunately turned on the power in the reverse direction, with the result that the victim’s tongue is now much longer than hitherto.” It’s a bit of absurdist drollery in the wry voice that evokes the style of Hitchcock’s television monologues forty years later.

Hitchcock’s sense of himself as funny was utterly crucial to his identity as a public and private person. Humor was his default means of communication. Shy, and awkward around strangers, he could appear pompous and disdainful to new acquaintances, something that happened regularly in his youth. Learning how to make others laugh offered him the opportunity of “fitting in.” Colleagues at Henley’s remembered him as what the English people of the day would have described as a “good sort,” always ready for joshing and “leg-pulling,” meaning teasing and hoaxing. At Gainsborough Pictures, too, where he worked for Balcon, he was valued for his good cheer as much as for his talent and uncontainable ambition. It was in this period that he began to compile the storehouse of ribald