Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Did Not Love Women

Was Alfred Hitchcock a sadist? Yes, so now let's move on to the next question: What kind of sadist was he? Certainly not a sadist of the traditional British variety; otherwise we would have seen Bergman and Kelly in white knee socks and frilly knickers hauled over stern teachers' knees for firm, well-deserved spankings. No, Hitchcock camouflaged his fascination with seeing women suffer by channeling it into more conventional and acceptable sadomasochistic practices: butcher knives in the abdomen, school ties coiled around the neck. Had he gone in for canes or whips (he did have a bit of a thing with handcuffs) people would have said he was a trifle kinky. Butcher knives and neckties were more acceptable. Still are. And in a pinch, try seagulls.

We mustn't forget that Hitchcock choreographed his heroines' predicaments so as to suggest that the girls had brought some of their misfortune upon themselves. With the exception of the unnamed wimp in Rebecca, Hitchcock usually depicted his female victims as ladies of, if not the evening, certainly the late afternoon. In Notorious, Bergman is a party girl who has slept around while Dad was busy being a Nazi, and who is persuaded by secret agent Grant to sleep around some more, marrying the authentically creepy Claude Rains, also a Nazi. In Vertigo, Novak is a willing accomplice to a murder. Dial M for Murder opens with Kelly cheating on her husband with Robert Cummings. But the obsessive naughtiness of these dolls reaches its apogee in Psycho, where Leigh, who has embezzled $40,000 from her employer, atones for her fiscal indiscretions by having a transvestite fruitcake hack her to ribbons. The moral of all this is clear: Bad girls will be sent to their rooms. And the rooms will be at the Bates Motel.

Hitchcock's treatment of Kelly in Dial M for Murder gives the whole show away. The very idea of enlisting the audience in her murder (the camera approaches her neck from behind the murderer's shoulder, making the viewer a co-conspirator in the attack) is bad enough, but more to the point, what kind of audience really and truly wants to see Grace Kelly--the quintessence of 1950s quintessitude--with her eyes bulging out and her tongue turning purple? Probably the same folks who would like to see Shirley Temple boiled in pitch.

Strange as Dial M for Misogynist may be, Rear Window takes the cake for sexual perversity. This is the film in which Jimmy Stewart frankly admits that he doesn't want to marry Kelly because "she's too perfect." Yes, every man's nightmare. What Stewart does enjoy is checking out the derriere on the surprisingly full-figured ballerina across the courtyard, whose volatile wiggling as she peers into the refrigerator may have inspired the film's title. To ensure that Stewart cannot consummate his odd relationship with Kelly, Hitchcock has him start the movie with one broken leg and end the movie with two.

At the time of his death Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed a huge but curiously muddled reputation. To the American public he was the master of shock, a reputation that probably derived more from Psycho and his enduringly clever television programs--most of which he did not direct himself--than from the rest of his movies. To serious critics--no, not you, Roger and Gene--he was either an incomparable technician who failed to address truly important issues, or a vastly underrated genius. It should be noted, however, that Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol were the guys who got the Hitchcock-as-vastly-underrated-director bandwagon rolling, and Chabrol is and Truffaut was French. (French people, after all, think Jerry Lewis is a genius. French people hold Don Siegel film festivals. French people are very impressed by heartless technicians, which is why they produce gifted but sterile musicians like Claude Bolling and Jean-Pierre Rampal, but have never produced a single rock star of any consequence. French people think that anyone who pokes fun at policemen or the CIA is really a subversive at heart, because the French, subversives at heart, collaborated with the Nazis even though they really didn't like them, which made it okay. French people are very, very strange.)

Yet, the truth is, all of these people--the French, the public, the hard-core artsy types who never really liked Hitchcock--were on to something. He not only struck a nerve, but he kept on striking it for four decades until he burned out mid-way through The Birds. He knew that people lived in fear--of government, of each other, and of themselves--and he knew that no matter how many times he went to that same well, it would never run dry.

On the other hand, did he absolutely, positively have to keep on going to that same well? Wasn't he ever tempted to make a great movie about a broader theme: injustice, class warfare, anti-Semitism, the betrayal of one's youthful ideals, politics? Politics is an especially baffling one, because, although Hitchcock made a whole slew of films with some political component, the treatment is uniformly sophomoric. The Secret Agent, Sabotage, The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Saboteur, Torn Curtain, Foreign Correspondent, and yes, even the abysmal Topaz all deal with spies, but the political component is, without exception, merely a mechanism to get the manhunt underway. To make a real political film like The Conversation, Z, or The Conformist, you have to have genuine political beliefs, to believe that the Right is bad and the Left good, or vice versa. Hitchcock had no such beliefs. The closest he ever came to making a political movie was Lifeboat, in which he seemed to admire the Nazis because they made the boats run on time. This was one odd chap.

On the other hand, so were Pasolini, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Roman Polanski, Georges Simenon, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, the artists Hitchcock most resembles. To a man, these were strange guys with a highly personal, idiosyncratic view of the world, artists who were largely contemptuous of conventional, bourgeois values. "There's nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh," Hitchcock has Bergman say in Notorious. Frank Capra he wasn't.

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