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New 2021 Book: "The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock"

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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So I was in a bookstore and I saw ol' Alfred on the cover of a new book, and as a lifetime Alfred Hitchcock fan, I had to smile.

It is called "The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock." Its new: 2021. The edginess of an addict came upon me: Would I be buying this book? Would I be able to stop myself from buying this book?

The truth of the matter is, I've bookstore browsed about three "new" books on Alfred Hitchcock in recent years, and I did NOT buy them. By in large, these were "opinion books" that took the usual existing stuff about Hitchcock and re-hashed it. And these books never had any "new" quotes(no matter how old they might be, I find that if somebody finds a great quote from or about Hitchcock say from 1954 that I've never read -- well, that's a new quote to me.)

I found some GOOD new quotes in The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock.

Here is one, from a letter written by arguably the greatest of mid-century middle-aged character actresses, Thelma Ritter, to her husband, about whether or not to play "Miss Gravely"(the Mildred Natwick part) in The Trouble With Harry:

"I must not have much vision, but this one scares me. Its lewd, immoral, and for anyone without a real nasty offbeat sense of humor, in poor taste."

END

How revelatory. Here's Ritter writing a "professional critique" to her HUSBAND(shades of Alfred and Alma) Here's Ritter revealing a certain sophistication of phrase that we didn't always hear from her characters.

Here's Ritter finding the movie "lewd." Well...indeed, young John Forsythe pursues young Shirley MacLaine with a lot of suggestive patter("I've like to paint you in the nude") but also Miss Gravely is discussed in sexual terms: "She's well preserved...all preserves must be opened eventually." So evidently Thelma Ritter wasn't up for playing a sex object.

Here's Ritter calling the movie "immoral" and "in very bad taste." For the sex? For the cavalier treatment of a dead body? I'm reminded of LA Times critic Philip Scheuer writing of Psycho: "Psycho is the most disagreeable Hitchcock picture since The Trouble With Harry...which was disagreeable in a different way."

Ritter did peg the movie's play to a "real nasty offbeat sense of humor." That is why it is loved today(along with the middle-aged sex stuff, I"d say) and..it was a flop then.

Sad: we were deprived of Thelma Ritter in another Hitchcock movie. That said, as with Tony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho...perhaps its just as well that she is only in a Hitchcock top level classic(Rear Window)...and playing a very moral character, which probably kept her comfortable.

---

Skipping forward 20 years to 1975 , here is a quote from Bruce Dern on his first day on the set of Family Plot. Dern says he told Hitchcock:

"I don't give a shit if you like this or not, but I'm sitting right next to you for the next ten weeks."

Dern evidently sensed that the elderly Hitchcock felt "left alone" by all the people who saw him as a "living cinema God" among them and wouldn't approach, and that he was just gonna sit there and be pals.

---

Another quote I never read before was from Hitchcock himself, about how Universal fretted over the type of movies he kept making for them(instead of a new North by Northwest):

(Hitchcock felt he had become)...."the questionable old man of the later movies, who occupied himself dispassionately with sex matters."

Did Hitchcock really SAY that? I checked the"Notes" pages and it claims Hitchcock WROTE that to John Russell Taylor, whose "Hitch" was a biography written while Hitch was still alive in 1978.

Think about that quote. "Sex matters" in Hitchcock were always there but I would say that , from Vertigo on , they really took the floor: Vertigo(Stewart/Bel Geddes/Novak); NXNW(Grant/Saint/Mason; Saint/Mason/Landau); Psycho(Sam and Marion; Norman and Marion; Norman and Mother); The Birds(not much, but Lydia and Annie complicate matters); Marnie(sold by Hitchcock as a "SEX MYSTERY"); Torn Curtain(Paul and Julie in bed at the beginning) Topaz(everybody's cheating on everybody); Frenzy(heroines have sex with both the anti-hero and the rapist who kills them --no consent there); Family Plot(two unmarried, sexually active couples in conflict.)

OK , Hitch...yeah. Never thought of that before.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The plethora of "new quotes" for my education helped push me to buy this book, but so did some of the opinions of the author( Edward White.)

Here is White "picking a small fight" about Psycho:

"One of the many half-truths of Psycho, perpetuated by Hitchcock himself, was that his decision to film the shower scene in black and white stemmed from his belief that the sight of Marion Crane's blood gurgling its way down the shower drain would have been distasteful in color. In fact, the decision was motivated by more practical concerns relating to budget.."

Hmm...how could he be so SURE? Why is this a "half truth"? Hitchcock's quote about not wanting red blood in the shower was repeated by Hitchcock a LOT of times, including while promoting Family Plot in 1976. The quote makes sense to me, given the Hays Code of 1960. I'd guess(because I don't KNOW) that budget mattered somewhat, but Hitchcock made The Trouble With Harry quite cheaply in color.

In any event, this author, Edward White, takes it upon himself in this book to offer many an opinion -- some rather David Thomson-like(an influence?) -- and where the book "wins" for me(another reason I bought it, and likely the reason White got it published) was his "12 Lives" approach to Hitchcock.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

According to author Edward White, these are the "12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock" -- twelve "sides" which allow White to study Hitchcock in a new way (at least some of the time) and White makes sure not to go in the usual "chronological order" with Hitchcock's movies and career.

The Twelve Lives:

The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up
The Murderer
The Auteur
The Womanizer
The Fat Man
The Dandy
The Family Man
The Voyeur
The Entertainer
The Pioneer
The Londoner
The Man of God

--

That's an interesting 12. Some, we've considered before -- The Auteur, The Voyeur. "The Dandy" is an interesting chapter because it brings in a discussion of Beau Brummel and Oscar Wilde AS dandies(but of different types) and then brings Hitchcock into their orbit. (Another way that this book avoids the usual Hitchcock book trap is to "go historical" on all sorts of other figures.) White makes the case that Young Hitchcock sought to dress as a dandy and -- immediately upon making good money in British movies, went to the best tailors on Savile Row. White also reveals that Hitchcock's famous "closet with 50 of the same suits" was NOT so uniform. They were cut to his fluctuating weight, some were blue, many were cut differently. But Hitchcock -- a rich man -- was as attuned to his tailoring for his body as Cary Grant was to HIS well-tailored thinner frame.

This allows White to segue into North by Northwest and Cary Grant's silver-gray suit as "the greatest man's suit in the history of motion pictures"(as voted in several polls.") That's the OTHER way White's book works -- he brings one or more Hitchcock movies into each chapter to discuss a theme begun with Hitchcock's own life. Thus: Hitchcock was a dandy; he got tailored suits; Cary Grant was a dandy, one of HIS tailored suits was the greatest suit in movies. Fun!

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

And then there is this chapter, which really does elect to linger on that which we often DON'T.

"The Fat Man."

So often here, I try to use other terms than fat for real people and movie characters. It is easy and alliterative for writers to call the Norman Bates of Robert Bloch's novel "fat and forty" -- but we prefer terms like "overweight," "obese," "heavyset," etc.

Still, when you say "fat," it means something.

And Edward White in his chapter on Hitchcock "The Fat Man' comes to remind us that while Hitchcock "captured and exploited" his own fatness (his caricature, his shadow on his TV show) ...it had to be of some pain to him.

Think of it: just how many fat film directors do we have nowadays? By the very nature of their energetic working methods and health regimes, folks from Spielberg and Scorsese to the Coens and any of the Andersons are not fat people. Michael Bay is a director, thin, fit...and evidently gets all the chicks he wants.

And even in Hitchcock's own era(eras), though a lot of directors weren't all that handsome(Lang, Ford, Lubitsch, Huston, Joe Mankiewicz) they weren't fat...that was Hitchcock's own cross to bear. The handsome Orson Welles GOT fat...and rather became Hitchcock's doppelganger accordingly in later years (from say, Touch of Evil, on), but a slender, handsome Welles starred and directed in Citizen Kane.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I"ve read some debate over the years as to how much of Hitchcock's size was due to eating versus how much was due to "a glandular condition." Proponents of the latter say that Hitchcock really wasn't much of an eater; it MUST have been glandular. Others spoke of Hitchcock eating "five steaks at one meal" in his younger years so maybe...

That said, Hitchcock definitely dieted himself down from the rather huge 300 pound man who made The 39 Steps and the movie White picks to discuss this is "Lifeboat" with its famous "Reduco" ad of fat and thinner Hitchcocks, side by side. (Evidently, a still slim Hitchcock put his profile in a neon Reduco ad for Rope, too.)

The "slimmed down" (193 pounds) Hitchcock of the forties could very likely had rumored brief romances with Ingrid Bergman and his assistant Joan Harrison , he certainly could have joined his fellow movie directors in affairs and casting couch adventures. (And even as "the fat man," he was propositioned by call girls at private parties -- once in FRONT of Alma.) Its a mystery exactly what Hitchcock did with his personal life in those thinner years.

Still, author Edward White in making one of Hitchcock's "12 Lives" the life of The Fat Man forces us to confront aspects of Hitchcock we didn't much think of(says I.) Perhaps Hitchcock made sure to hang out with Sydney Greenstreet and Laird Cregor in those days to feel better.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The final "Life" given to Hitchcock in this interesting book is "The Man of God," which at once allows author White to get "chronological"(he closes with the final years and months of Hitchcock til his death in 1980) , and to cover his two most religious(Catholic) movies: I Confess and The Wrong Man. (Interesting: despite the "Psycho" musical notes in Bernard Herrmann's Taxi Driver score and DeNiro's ties to Norman Bates; Scorsese says that The Wrong Man is the biggest influence on Taxi Driver.)

In "real life," the book presents an interesting vignette of Hitchcock -- asleep on a chair in black pajamas, that's cool -- being visited by Catholic priests at his home near his death and being given communion. One priest woke Hitchcock up and said "Hitch, this is Mark Henniger, a young priest from Cleveland." Looking up, a sleeping Hitchcock awoke and and said, "Cleveland? Disgraceful."

"The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock," to me, is a worthy addition to one's Hitchcock library, with a bunch of quotes I've never read before and an interesting review of things.

Oh, I forgot one GREAT new fact here: Hitchcock was paid $129,000 per episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents -- his base pay for MOVIES was $250,000 to direct something like North by Northwest. Thus, Hitchcock made more on two episodes of AHP than on his movie base pay(percentages and ownership made the difference on movie income, though.)

--

Fearing too much of an "immersion" in Hitchcock, I also bought one book about The Making of Chinatown("The Big Picture") -- with looks at Nicholson, Polanski, Robert Evans and screenwriter Robert Towne -- and one book about Mike Nichols. I guess I'll report at their pages but the books reveal that as Hitchcock's era gave way to the 70's and beyond, Hollywood became even more a place of sex and drugs. Why, Mike Nichols got hooked on crack!

Interesting business...