A new book examines why the director was so strict with—and sometimes even sadistic—with his female leads.
…
Anyone who has ever watched an Alfred Hitchcock film—watching Tippi Hedren being torn to pieces by dozens of seagulls and crows, or Janet Leigh getting stabbed repeatedly in the shower—should wonder about the director's attitude toward women. When it came to his leading actresses, he was known to walk a fine line between strictness and pure sadism. And yet the particular nature of Hitchcock's collaborations with these women continues to serve as fodder for study and debate, despite the fact that the details of these relationships are more or less indisputable: With Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint , Kim Novak, and Leigh, the director vacillated between sultry and crude, one moment inviting them to dinner with his wife at his Bel Air home, the next filling them in on the dirty jokes in his trailer. And at least one allegation suggests his behavior may have shifted from the volatility long associated with Hollywood directors to what we would today call abuse. In a 2016 memoir, Hedren says that Hitchcock sexually assaulted her twice while working on the The Birds and to Marnie , and that she experienced retaliation from him on set after she rejected him.
Hitchcock's dynamic with women has been heavily explored in his multiple biographies. The director combined paternalism and cruelty as he tried to shape the appearance and performance of his protagonists and subjected their characters to varying but always intense degrees of psychosexual suffering. During his filming The 39 Steps , for example, handcuffed its two leads, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, and refused to let them go between takes when Carroll needed to use the bathroom. Before he came back the Vertigo , invited Novak to dinner, where he proceeded to humiliate her by talking incessantly about fine art and wine, knowing full well that she might feel uncomfortable because of her working-class background. These were techniques to get what he wanted to see on screen, showing seemingly little regard for how the actors would be affected.
The Hitchcock's Blondes by Laurence Lemer therefore comes to answer a question that remains unanswered—why did Hitchcock insist on torturing his women?—while inviting the reader to view his films through the lens of these relationships.
Leamer's new book follows the hugely successful and enjoyable Capote's Women by the author, which traces Truman Capote's complicated and often acrimonious relationships with a series of high-society women whom Capote called his "swans." In a sense, Leamer, a journalist who has written persuasively on subjects as diverse as Johnny Carson and the rise of the underground press in the 1960s, seems a perfect fit for this subject. Despite a title that might not seem objective, Leamer's book is in many ways empathetic and thoughtful, and seems poised to generously educate these actresses, to lift them out of Hitchcock's shadow without pushing the director under her wheels his limousine. The Hitchcock depicted in these pages is lonely and aloof, but also manipulative and often vicious, at once fearful and fixated on sex, a devoted carer of his wife during his later years and, as Leamer is not the first to speculate , possibly undiagnosed with Asperger syndrome. The intention here is not so much to redefine our understanding of Hitchcock as to shift the emphasis altogether: to provide a new picture, or rather a series of pictures, of actors whose lives and careers are too often viewed in relation to of the director.
The problem is that Leamer doesn't bring enough to the table. It doesn't have much in the way of new information, and as politely as it tries to foreground the women in Hitchcock's orbit, the book only comes to life when the director emerges from the background to reclaim the stage. Leamer's attention to the details of the actors' love lives can also smack of misogyny. In between, the reader is treated to a competent but not particularly enlightening account of how Hitchcock shifted his focus from one leading actress to another, from Bergman (who, Lemer says, set the standard for future leads with her mixture of coldness and overt sexuality) to Kelly (with whom the director rebounds after Bergman's retreat to Italy to work with Roberto Rossellini) to Novak (who escaped her unhappy contract at Columbia Pictures to give her brilliant, career-defining performance in Vertigo) and so on. This approach starts off fairly solid, but as Leamer follows each figure through the contours of her upbringing, early career, work with Hitchcock (dutifully recapping the plot of each film along the way), and subsequent events, before returning on the next film of the director and the next star, one's attention begins to slip.
A problem that initially seems merely structural gets worse as the book progresses without offering any deeper insight into the creative struggles of the actors in question, whose work deserves more attention, or Hitchcock and his films, which Leamer ably examines but without much penetration or flame. Perhaps if the director himself were better illuminated by these micro-biographies or by the analysis of his films, the book could gain momentum, but it appears here in its familiar austere and emotionally impenetrable guise. However, there are moments when Leamer's writing spreads toward the light—the image of Eva Marie Saint, who starred in North by Northwest , alone in her apartment on Wilshire Boulevard with only the sound of the gardeners working outside for company evokes a world of loneliness; the silence that remains when fame fades.
In another scene, Leamer writes wistfully of Hitchcock emerging from his late-life, alcohol-fuelled seclusion and reuniting with his leading actors to receive a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1979. Of Hitchcock's ghost acceptance speech, Leamer writes, “The fault was not with the writer (of the speech), but with the director himself. His art was often brilliant and always restrained. He rarely approached tragedy or deep love, passionate, unique feelings. He didn't touch that in his art or in his personal life, and he wasn't going to expose his feelings in that public space." A similar fault can be found in Leamer's book, which, without critical depth or a passionate, persuasive argument, arrives instead at a somewhat bland middle ground.
Of course, Hitchcock's work may be "limited," at least in its emotional expressiveness, but it is also, at best, inexhaustible, as rich in its interpretive range as the writings of Henry James. After French actress Brigitte Aubert rejected Hitchcock when he forced a kiss on her, a few years after he appeared in To Catch a Thief of 1955, remarked: “It's hard when someone is as ugly as he is. That turned lower lip. When someone is ugly, it's not their fault. The poor cabbage had a wonderful soul, I know it.' I like to imagine this wonderful not in a philanthropic sense (it's hard to imagine Hitchcock as an exemplary soul) but in the ambiguous one, in which James himself often used the term to also mean its opposite. This very duality is the theme, ultimately, that gives Hitchcock's best work its charge, that gives the Vertigo the tide of tragedy while also flooding it with the most delicious stream of irony. It's not that his people aren't just criminals or voyeurs or monsters, it's that they're just downright pathetic. Hitchcock's perception of himself, the unattractive child of emotionally restrained parents, as a monster, and fighting for revenge against the kind of exquisite beauties who might have rejected him in real life. But his ability to turn, say, James Stewart, his All-American star It's a Wonderful Life and his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , in his emotionally warped Quasimodo Vertigo and in the obsessive character of his Ahab Rear Window —to accept this monstrous dimension and invite the audience to identify with it—is partly what gives his films psychological depth.
One wishes Hitchcock's Blondes had a trace more venom in them, or some of the spirit with which the director approached his own subjects. As it stands, Leamer's attempts to paint the actresses in Hitchcock's films in all their complexity (Kelly's exuberant sensuality, Novak's class insecurities, what he calls Hedren's "narcissism") backfire, flattening the women. until each seems strangely diminished. Although the Hitchcock's Blondes is quite an interesting guide to accompany his films, I can't help but think that instead of taking the time to read it, it might be better to rewatch Psycho or the Strangers on a Train . Hitchcock's relationship with the actresses in his films may have been complicated, but the characters they played never fell into easy categories: For every hapless and miserable figure like Barbara Bel Geddes' Midge in Vertigo, there's a confident and capable one like her by Teresa's Charlie Newton Wright in the Shadow of a Doubt. It is precisely this richness that helps make Hitchcock's work inscrutable, indeed inexhaustible.
Source: theatlantic