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

jokes and stories from which he would draw for the rest of his life as a means of connecting with others. The bantering style of the young Hitchcock is even caught on camera. When Hitchcock set his mind to filming Blackmail as a sound movie, he had the problem of what to do about Anny Ondra, the film’s star and one of his favorite actresses, whose strong Czech accent was deemed inappropriate for a story about the travails of a typical girl-next-door Londoner. To test her voice, Hitchcock stood with her in front of a camera and recorded an exchange in which he teased Ondra into a fit of nervous laughter, asking her whether she has “slept with men.” As Ondra turns from the camera, giggling, Hitchcock tells her to “stand in your place, or it will not come out right—as the girl said to the soldier.” Thus, among the first dialogue Hitchcock ever recorded was him embarrassing a woman with a quip about her sex life, topped with a double entendre. He started as he meant to continue. Thirty years later he tried something similar with Tippi Hedren in her screen test, though Hedren navigated the joke without being thrown off track.

On film sets and at restaurant tables, Hitchcock liked to work out whether he could connect with someone based on their response to his scabrous jokes. His love of creating shock and playing with taboos played some part in this, but he also felt accepted by those who laughed at his gags, and trusted those who understood his sense of humor. When Peggy Robertson first worked with Hitchcock, as script supervisor on Under Capricorn, she felt entirely frozen out; he wouldn’t look at her, let alone speak to her. It wasn’t until she laughed at a dirty story he was telling the actress Margaret Leighton that his attitude changed. “From then on I was his pet,” and part of the inner circle, invited to the end-of-day cocktail sessions in Hitchcock’s office. Hitchcock even arranged for his car to pick her up on the way to collecting him from the Savoy. A quarter-century later, Bernard Cribbins broke through Hitchcock’s on-set formality by reciting limericks about “sex-starved gorillas” and the like.

Hitchcock’s urge to entertain through comedy was strong and self-evident. He had a catalog of party tricks, anecdotes, and rhymes. He was also very quick-witted, capable of sharp one-liners and bursts of physical comedy, impersonating people with his body and his voice. The film publicist Herb Steinberg remembered being at Chasen’s one evening when Hitchcock bounced to his feet to mimic a little girl in a ballet class, a sight Steinberg recalled as both uncannily accurate and unforgettably funny as Hitchcock did fumbling pliés and pirouettes on the restaurant floor.

Gags, however, are only one part of the sense of humor that colors Hitchcock’s films. Clive James once wrote that “common sense and a sense of humor are the same things moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.” That definition beautifully describes what humor typically provides in Hitchcock’s work: a perspective that shifts us one step from the world as we know it. There are laughs in most Hitchcock films, plenty of them, but more important, there are layers of irony, coincidence, and uncanniness. Even the most earnest of his films can be seen as bleak jokes played on the protagonist. The Wrong Man and Vertigo, for instance, torment their heroes with situations of role-playing and mistaken identity that could be taken from the text of an Elizabethan-era comedy, the audience watching as characters stumble through a maze that has sprung up around them, constructed of deceit, misunderstanding, and confusion.

Hitchcock as comedian.

Going back as far as The White Shadow (1924)—the recently rediscovered movie on which Hitchcock worked, about two twins who swap identities—teasing and deception, puzzles and games, feature prominently. Hitchcock’s role on that film was relatively minor, reminding us that those features of his work that seem most identifiable with him may also have been influenced and nurtured by those he was reticent to credit—producers, writers, other directors, and the conventions of the culture in which he lived and worked. These influences made themselves very apparent on the first films Hitchcock directed. His nine silent movies are of surprising variety, but the ironies of masquerade and performance are prominent in most of them. For example, central characters in Easy Virtue and Champagne are—in very different ways, for very different reasons—forced to change their identities, living lives that are not their own. In the Hitchcock universe, however, it is ultimately impossible to hide one’s real self, a truth that persists right up to Family Plot in 1976.

At times, audiences struggle to tell whether the implausible situations his characters get wrapped up in are meant to elicit gasps of horror or belly laughs. Hitchcock enjoyed perpetuating the ambiguity, even though he sometimes complained that people misconstrued his intention. When the reviews came out for North by Northwest, Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker declared it “the brilliant realization of a feat he [Hitchcock] has unintentionally been moving toward for more than a decade—a perfect parody of his own work.” Hitchcock liked the “brilliant” bit, but grumbled that there was nothing unintentional about it; the allusions to his previous work were all deliberately crafted in what was intended to be the “Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Rodney Ackland said that he and Hitchcock had done something similar in the 1930s with the film Number Seventeen, which they wanted to write “as a burlesque of all the thrillers . . . and do it so subtly that nobody at Elstree would realize the subject was being guyed.” When Mel Brooks made his film High Anxiety, an affectionate send-up of Hitchcockian thrillers, Hitchcock was so flattered that he sent Brooks a case of Château Haut-Brion. But as many reviewers pointed out at the time, it’s hard to parody something as knowing as Hitchcock, a