When he wasn't rooting out Communists, cracking down on the mob and spying on civil rights leaders, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover toiled as a one-man culture warrior battling Hollywood decadence. He prevented Charlie Chaplin from reentering the U.S. because of his leftist political views, and he condemned Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life for its “rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.” So what did he have to say about Alfred Hitchcock, who gave American moviegoers new and strange things to fear? Not a bad word.
The only questions anyone's asking about Hitchcock these days are just how much and what kind of a creeper was he? The famed director’s wandering eye, his sexual obsessions, and less-than-decorous urges roil at the center of Hitchcock, the just-released biopic starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, as well as last month’s The Girl, the HBO film with Toby Jones and Naomi Watts.
As The Birds actress Tippi Hedren claimed earlier this fall, the Master of Suspense could be masterfully cruel and unforgiving. But as far as his popular image as an artiste-provocateur goes, there’s probably more than a little self-mythologizing — or branding, if you’d prefer — in that ironic Englishman persona, the casually sadistic remarks about actors, the pretensions to finding truth in nightmares.
It’s that last detail that fuels Hitchcock, a tempting portrait of “Hitch” as a crowd-pleasing, truth-telling anti-hero — not unlike Howard Stern and Larry Flynt in their respective biopics — who shows moviegoers the dark things they didn’t know they wanted to see. But was his threat to the American psyche all smoke and mirrors? That’s certainly what Hitchcock’s FBI file, obtained via MuckRock.com, suggests.
Hitchcock’s file doesn’t begin until October of 1960, four months after the successful release of Psycho, which casts serious doubt on Hitch’s claim that the FBI followed him for three months in 1945 after he discussed uranium with a Caltech professor as research for his next film, Notorious. (Donald Spoto, a four-time biographer of Hitchcock, also concluded in The Dark Side of Genius that the FBI investigation was likely apocryphal, declaring that the “extremely sensitive” director would have been “emotionally incapable” of making a film under government surveillance.)
In fact, the contents of the FBI file have much more to do with Hoover’s obsessions than with Hitchcock’s. Whatever paranoia and “extreme sensitivities” Hitchcock suffered, Hoover suffered doubly so. The bulk of the file has to do with a seven-month surveillance on a single episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that illustrates the acute obsessiveness of the FBI’s fearsome but fearful director. Through unrelenting pressure and undeserved authority, the Bureau convinced Revue Studios, which produced A.H. Presents, to eliminate a minor character, an FBI agent who instructs a would-be kidnapper that abduction is illegal, from the episode “Coming, Mama.”
The Bureau first learned of the FBI character through a mole at Revue Studios, whose intel about the “improper portrayal of an FBI agent” was delivered directly to the Director’s office. Hoover wrote back a few days later requesting that the tattler at Revue be “contacted on at least a monthly basis” until the G-Man character was eliminated or the script out of production.
When the Bureau learned several months later that the FBI character had indeed been eliminated, officials there were upset anew by one apparently inflammatory line in the script: that a private detective “used to work with the FBI and still keeps in touch with that agency.” The Bureau applied pressure again to have this piece of dialogue eliminated, this time to no avail. After seven months, the FBI concluded its surveillance with a promise: “The show will be monitored.”
Two years later, the producers of Alfred Hitchcock Presents were careful not to ruffle the Bureau’s feathers again. Revue phoned the L.A. office to request clearance for a name to be used for their FBI agent character in the episode “Run for Doom.” (That character’s name, David Carson, is still redacted in the FBI file.) The agency once again tried to persuade the studio to drop all references to the Bureau.
Producers refused, and Hoover himself approved the name three days later, confirming that “No past or present Bureau employee [exists] with similar name.” In his indefatigably paranoid fashion, the Director advised the LA office, "You should follow matter closely to make certain proposed part of FBI agent is not enlarged or presented in such a manner as to be harmful to Bureau's reputation." Hoover was assured that the script for the show would be “closely followed.”
Hitchcock is personally referenced only once in the file: His reputation was apparently in such good order that he was under consideration to participate in President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 inauguration, and the FBI endorsed Hitchcock to the White House.
Through the success of his inventive filmmaking and careful self-invention, Hitchcock now enjoys a legacy as a cultural icon though hardly a countercultural one. In all likelihood, the director was too apprehensive a man to dare incur the neurotic wrath of the other Director. Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense, but Hoover knew how to instill fear across a nation — and for a lot longer than two hours at a time.
[Muckrock]
Inkoo Kang is a Boston-based film journalist and regular contributor to BoxOffice Magazine whose work has appeared in Pop Matters and Screen Junkies. She reviews stuff she hates, likes, and hate-likes on her blog THINK-O-VISION.