THE ENGLISHNESS OF
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
JOHN DOUGILL
Like Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is associated with Hollywood but was essentially English in both character and outlook. Before mov-ing to America in 1939, he had established himself as Britain's leadmov-ing director with a penchant for thrillers, and even after his move he continued to make films with British themes and his favourite actor was fellow expatriate, Cary Grant (born Archibald Leach in Bristol).
As with Chaplin, Hitchcock's upbringing is reflected in his works. It is curious in fact how much the pair had in common. Both grew up in the less fashionable parts of London. Both had a mother-complex which affected their treatment of women. Both left Britain at a time of war and were criticised for deserting their country (Chaplin in WW1 and
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Hitchcock in WW2). Both were associated with a particular genre, and both were perfectionists who demanded control over the films they made. Though both were admired as masters, neither won an Oscar for
direct-(2) ing.
Yet for all the similarities, the two men did not hit it off when they met. Chaplin was an artistic, party-going type. Hitchcock was more of a private person, who led a sedate life and attended church. Chaplin was serious about his comedies, whereas Hitchcock treated his thrillers as an
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extended joke. Chaplin's universe was a simple one in which kindness made a difference; Hitchcock's films spoke to the darker side of human nature.
As a child Hitchcock lived above his parents' greengrocery shop. He liked to relate how his father had once sent him with a note to a
man friend asking him to lock his son in a cell for a few minutes. It was meant light-heartedly but the experience petrified the young boy. It was symptomatic of Hitchcock's delicate nature. In the words of a biogra-pher, 'All his memories are of being alone (though by choice it seems), separated by age from his brother and sister, curiously distant from his parents because they, for all their evident concern over their youngest child, obviously had difficulty in expressing their emotions, frightened of
(.j) his teachers, the police, authority figures of all sorts.'
Hitchcock's parents were Catholics, and from nine to fourteen he attended a Jesuit boarding school. He later said that all he had learnt there was fear. But he also absorbed the notion that life is an illusion, guilt is pervasive, and there are things beyond understanding. This is reflected in his films where appearances deceive and innocent people are caught up in affairs they do not comprehend.
After leaving school at fourteen, Hitchcock did evening courses at London University in drawing and draughtsmanship. This gave him the skills to get a job writing title cards for silent movies. After being promoted he was sent to Germany where he learnt the techniques of Expressionism, before getting the chance to direct. His third film, The Lodger (1927), was a Jack-the-Ripper type story that proved a break-through success, and in 1929 he made the first British sound movie, Blackmail. Thereafter a succession of thrillers made him the most cele-brated director in the country. By the time he moved to Hollywood, lured by the money available for productions, the Hitchcock touch was already in place: sustained suspense; inventive editing; sexual suggestive-ness; and a taste for the macabre.
Cads and gentlemen
The two most famous films of Hitchcock's British period are The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). The former is a fast-moving chase around Britain; the latter is as much comedy as mystery. Both start with the hero acting like a cad, but proving himself a gentle-man by the end.
In The 39 Steps the Canadian Richard Hannay (played by English-man Robert Donat) is caught up in a conspiracy when a mysterious woman is killed in his flat. To escape he catches a train out of London, and when he sees his pursuers coming he dives into the carriage of a young woman called Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) and forcibly kisses her to escape discovery. Understandably, she is outraged.
In The Lady Vanishes the hero's behaviour is even more extraordi-nary. The film starts in a central European hotel where a young English woman, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), has the occupant of the room above hers thrown out for making too much noise. His name is Gilbert (Mi-chael Redgrave), and in retaliation he marches into her room and starts to undress with the intention of sharing her bed. She is horrified and his room is quickly returned to him.
In both films the man then has to establish his good character. Humour plays a vital part in this, for in the film world making one's partner laugh is the mark of true love. You can see its role in breaking down tension in the repartee of The Lady Vanishes where Gilbert jokes to Iris about his mother by playing on the secondary meaning of 'a lady in trouble' as being pregnant:
Gilbert Can I help?
Iris
Only by going away.Gilbert No, no, no, no. My father always taught me, never desert a lady in trouble. He even carried that as far as marrying Mother.
The sardonic humour for which Hitchcock is famous is also evident m The 39 Steps when the lead couple have to spend a night handcuffed together. It is a typical Hitchcock ploy, symbolic of being 'chained' to a partner. It brings up the delicate question of sex, the handling of which was a vital test of character for a gentleman. When the couple stop at a guesthouse for the night, Pamela is reluctant to even enter the bedroom, but Hannay forces her by sticking his pipe into her side in the pretence it is a gun. No doubt Hitchcock had in mind here a phallic reference to
male excitement.
Inside the room comes more suggestive interaction as Pamela is pressed by the landlady to remove her dress to dry it out and Hannay pretends to help by lifting it up above her knees. Then as they prepare for bed, she removes her stockings which means that Hannay's hand, cuffed to hers, has to travel up her leg. At this key moment, however, his hand goes limp and he looks away. It is barely noticeable in the flow of events yet it proves the turning point of the film for she recognises that he is not going to molest her - that he is in fact 'a gentleman'.
Male sexuality is a beast which even the most determined of ascetics have failed to tame, and Mahatma Gandhi once tested his ability to resist temptation by spending the night with a female follower. Hannay here undergoes a similar challenge. His restraint reassures Pamela and thereafter she becomes an ally in his search for truth. The thin line a gentleman had to walk in terms of sex meant that some chose to avoid it altogether. Pre-1960s films are full of bachelor types, unwilling or un-able to relate to the opposite sex. Some were no doubt closet homosex-uals, but others were simply afraid or inexperienced. This was not un-common among Britain's public-school elite, brought up in single-sex boarding schools.
In The Lady Vanishes there are two famous bachelors in Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne). These caricature Engli· shmen proved so popular that they featured in popular culture for the
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next fifty years. The pair are like overgrown schoolboys, and when the film begins they are concerned to get back to Britain as quickly as pos-sible, for it is 'a time of crisis' and 'England is in trouble'. What looks like a topical reference to Hitler turns out, however, to be an obsession with cricket and concern that the national team might lose. They are told to their horror that the only available room at their hotel belongs to a maid, and when she comes to collect her clothes they are paralysed with embarrassment. Hitchcock was here having great fun with the in-ability of public-school types to relate to women. The play 'No Sex
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please, We're British' might have been written explicitly for them.
-It's interesting in this respect that Cary Grant later became the director's favourite actor, for he was able to combine a British sensibility with an easy charm towards the opposite sex. As Gael McGear puts it, 'Trained as an acrobat, Grant uses his body and physical movement un-like the norm for the reserved and stiff upper-lip British stereotypical image. He mediated between an aestheticized English public-school sensi-bility and an American idiom, projecting 'gentlemanly' values but divest-ing them of what the mass audience might regard as too much elitist or
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homosexual implication.' In promoting Grant as his leading man, Hitch-cock was effectively promoting the gentleman ideal as a style of behav-iour befitting a classless everyman.
Acting the Gentleman
Another film to play with stereotypes was The Man Who Knew Too (8)
Much (1934). It was inspired by Hitchcock's honeymoon in St. Moritz where the director was intrigued by the idea of murder disturbing the smug sedateness of the elitish resort. For the lead he used Leslie Banks, a specialist in 'stiff upper lip' gentleman heroes, and had him do the part in a tongue-in-cheek version. The ironical pose was close to Hitchcock's heart, for he was an admirer of Bulldog Drummond, a gentleman agent who was involved in a 'jolly sporting way' with international intrigue. The director liked to play the part of the eccentric Englishman, for even in the Californian sunshine he dressed in suit and tie, making a point of taking afternoon tea. Rotund and besuited, he became known to millions the world over thanks to the popular television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62). 'He would remain inescapably the perfect English bourgeois to the end of his days,' writes John Russell Taylor in his book
(9) Hitch.
In 1972 the director returned to England to make a film called
Frenzy. Not one of his best, it is nonetheless noteworthy for being 'a gory autopsy of his childhood, his early career and the metropolis that
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spawned him'. Set around Covent Garden, it features Hitchcock's great passion in life - food. It's a farewell by the director to the city of his
youth, and it starts with the camera running lovingly over the east end of London and down to the Thames where a woman's naked body lies on the muddy shore. Ever the joker, Hitchcock was making ghoulish refer-ence to his grandfather who had been a fisherman on the the river.
The depiction of London reminds us that, as with Chaplin, there is much of Dickens to be sensed in Hitchcock. Indeed, for author Ken Mogg 'Dickens is Hitchcock's main artistic forebear'. As a schoolboy the direc-tor studied four of the Vicdirec-torian's novels, and Bleak House in particular left an enduring mark on him with its delving into the macabre and the grotesque. Bernard Hermann, a composer who collaborated closely with the director, wrote that, 'Hitch has his own world of film. He's created characters and places for it very much the way Dickens did ... And although many of the stories he has told are stories of our time, I believe the presentation and the motivating psychology is essentially the period
(11) of Dickens and the great Victorian writers.'
So it turns out that the Englishness of Alfred Hitchcock leads back to Victorian times. It is not too much to say that his mindset was shaped by the legacy of respectability which nineteenth-century Christians promoted as the basis of a civilised society. From this arose a desire to lift the lid on suburban lives to expose the secrets hidden behind lace curtains. When he moved to America, he transferred the trait to trans-atlantic settings. One thinks of Rear Window (1954), for instance, with its voyeuristic revelations. How strange to think that this classic of 1950s America was shaped by someone with such a Victorian sensibility!
(1) Hitchcock left Britain in 1939, the year of Gone with the Wind. Because
it was just before the outbreak of war, he was said by wits to have 'gone with the wind up'.
(2) Chaplin won an Oscar for the musical score of Limelight and was
award-ed an honorary Oscar in 1972. Hitchcock was nominataward-ed six times and though Rebecca (1940) won the Oscar for best picture, it went to David 0.
Selznick as producer.
(3) Alec McCowen, who played Inspector Oxford in Frenzy (1972), said of
talked in jokes. Making the film was a sort of joke.' See Jonathan Jones 'The Body in the River' Guardian Aug. 14, 1999, p.5
(4) John Russell Taylor Hitch NY: De Capo Press, 1996, p.31
(5) See Bruce Elder's notes for the Criterion re-release of The Lady Vanishes
(2007).
(6) A popular play written by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott staged in London's West End in 1971 which ran for nearly a decade.
(7) 'Gael McGear 'A Perfect English Gentleman: Cary Grant and David Niven in Hollywood' http:/ /members.aol.com/pollydact/grantnivenl.html (4. 1. 2007)
(8) Hitchcock later made an American version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day, which retains the basic idea though the details are changed. Made in colour with a much bigger budget, the remake is overlong and lacks the humour of the original. (9) John Russell Taylor Hitch NY: De Capo Press, 1996, p.194
(10) Jonathan Jones 'The body in the river' The Guardian Aug 14, 1999, p.5 (lU Quoted in Ken Mogg's 'Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Dickens' on the
MacGuffin Website www.labyrinth.net.av/ /wmuffin (4.1. 2007)
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