In his own image

The Brattle celebrates Hitchcock's first 100 years

by Peter Keough

"HITCHCOCK CENTENNIAL: A HUNDRED YEARS OF HITCHCOCK," At the Brattle Theatre, July 2 through August 14.

His 100th birthday on August 13 just beats out the centennial of the medium he embodies, and it's perhaps one of the more ominous milestones of the millennium to come. His death in 1980 coincided with the downfall of the auteur movement his work and reputation helped spawn. Ask people to name a famous director and chances are, if they haven't been corrupted by the age of Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron, they'll come up with Alfred Hitchcock. A master of self-promotion as well as suspense, the director made his portly profile as immediately identifiable as his pared-down style. Gracious, refined, Olympian, and sinister, the creator of elegant surfaces and unspeakable nightmares, an obsessive controller controlled by obsessions that have been immortalized in cinema's most popular and influential body of work, his images and image define film in this century.

To celebrate the occasion the Brattle Theatre is offering some variations on the usual suspects from this oft-retrospected director's career. There's a sneak preview of the PBS documentary American Masters: Hitchcock, Selznick & the End of Hollywood (1999; July 2 and 3), which is scheduled to air in November. Crisp and incisive, it argues that David O. Selznick, the rising young mogul about to set the world on fire with Gone with the Wind, built his and Hollywood's own funeral pyre when he invited the star of the British film industry to work for his studio in 1938. The ensuing battle between the two for domination of the screen that resulted in such masterpieces as Rebecca (1940; July 3) and Spellbound (1945; July 16 and 17) would end 10 years later with Selznick a broken man and Hitchcock an icon; the studio had fallen, the director would be king.

Which in fact he already was in the smaller realm of British cinema. The Brattle series screens a generous selection of Hitchcock's pre-Hollywood output, beginning with his first sound film, the blithe, gritty, sometimes surreal thriller Blackmail (1929; July 9). Originally filmed as a silent, it was reshot for sound when the new technology became available, and it shows Hitchcock to be a natural. The most striking moments on the soundtrack include a scream, birds singing, and the repeated word "knife."

The latter has been wielded by young Alice White (Anny Ondra), who makes the mistake of not going to a movie with her detective boyfriend Frank (John Longden), with whom she's squabbled. Instead she follows an artist (Cyril Ritchard) up to his apartment, where she stabs him to death when he tries to rape her. Frank is assigned to the case, and his attempt to cover up her crime goes awry when a witness blackmails them.

This simple penny-dreadful of a plot is complicated by the self-reflexivity Hitchcock indulged in even this early in his career. He had already begun making his trademark cameos with his third picture, the silent The Lodger (1927), and in Blackmail he appears as a passenger on the subway tormented by a child. But he also establishes his presence with a stand-in for the director -- in this case, the murder victim, who, before his demise, poses Anna before his easel in a tutu before making his move.

How Hitchcock himself manipulated his actresses can be seen in one of American Masters' more revealing moments, a behind-the-scenes segment shot during the making of Blackmail in which he flusters the Czech actress Anny Ondra -- whose dialogue had to be dubbed because of her accent -- with what would now be described as sexual abuse. Thus was established the Pygmalion-like shaping of a woman into a beloved image, often through sadistic abuse, that would persist through his films.

That's the case in Murder! (1930; screens July 9), where an actress (Norah Baring) in a touring group is accused of the title crime. Amnesiac, she acquiesces to her guilt, but renowned thespian Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), who had served on her jury and reluctantly voted to convict, is smitten by the girl's catatonic malleability. He believes she is innocent, investigates on his own, and traps the actual killer by rewriting the scenario of the actual crime as a play and having him audition for it.

Although not a woman, the culprit is ambiguous -- not only is he a "half-caste," but he is also a cross-dresser who impersonates policemen. Such ambiguity figures also in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934; July 9) -- pallidly remade in 1956 (July 30) with James Stewart and Doris Day -- though with the locus of power reversed, as epicene enemy agent Peter Lorre orchestrates an assassination by including a gunshot as part of the score in a concert at Albert Hall.

In other films the dynamics are overtly homoerotic, as thrill killers John Dall and Farley Granger play games with dinner guests -- though less successfully with Nietzschean mentor James Stewart -- in Rope (1948; July 24). Granger returns as another feckless, this time unwitting accomplice in the brilliant Strangers on a Train (1951; July 24), in which psychopath and alter ego Robert Walker forces him to play his murderous game.

Sometimes, too, Hitchcock will let women take charge and mold their damaged, bewildered, or idle male counterparts in their image. In The 39 Steps (1935; July 2), stranger Madeleine Carroll rebuffs fugitive Robert Donat's attempt to implicate her in his flight, and she later tips off police when he tries to disguise himself as a speaker at a political rally (one of Hitchcock's most inspired comic moments). Although handcuffed to him and forced to play the role of his "runaway lover," she finally breaks free, learns the truth, and sets the stage for the final unmasking.

A similar pattern unfolds in Young and Innocent (1938; July 23), which true to its title is one of the director's sunniest and most ingenuous works -- one need only compare it with another Hitchcock version of resourceful female adolescence, Shadow of a Doubt (1943; July 10). In Young and Innocent the daughter of a constable (Nova Pilbeam, the kidnapped daughter in The Man Who Knew Too Much now grown up) defies her father to prove the innocence of a young scriptwriter accused of murder whom she meets when she revives him after he's fainted. Later, she will discover the real killer through the same charitable act, but in the meantime she must disguise the accused as her beau -- a scene where they're trapped in a children's birthday party prefigures a far less innocent moment in The Birds. One truth their play-acting uncovers is that they love each other.

In The Lady Vanishes (1938; July 10), the woman who exerts control is more mother than daughter, and she does so not through seeking but by disappearing. Dame May Whitty is kidnapped by foreign agents on a train, and her absence at first alienates, then rallies her fellow English passengers, reforming flighty boor Michael Redgrave and uniting him with spunky heroine Margaret Lockwood. Although the vanished lady's influence is less baleful, she is a precursor of the absent maternal figure looming over Psycho (1960; August 13 and 14).

In Spellbound (1945; July 16 and 17), however, it's the male character who vanishes. His identity, at any rate, for, in a bout of amnesia common in Hitchcock, he's forgotten it. Gregory Peck is discovered to be an impostor pretending to be the new head of the asylum where Bergman practices. She treats him by analyzing his nightmares (designed ostentatiously by Salvador Dalí, who seems to have lost touch with the subconscious since collaborating with Luis Buñuel), re-creating scenes from his past, and falling in love. He proves to be the man of her -- if not his -- dreams.

With Spellbound, the Pygmalion role is nearly reversed. That might have been due, as the American Masters documentary suggests, to the influence of Selznick, whose studio produced it (his therapist, May E. Romm, was a consultant). More typical of Hitchcock is Bergman's role in the troubled masterpiece Notorious (1946; July 16 and 17): she plays the daughter of a Nazi war criminal who must undo her past by playing the part of a whore under the direction of agent Cary Grant. They fall in love, and the resolution is rousing, if soiled.

She fares better than Kim Novak in the equally accomplished and more profound and perverse Vertigo (1958; August 6 and 7). The very image of the woman whom detective James Stewart had failed to save from death, Novak becomes a mannequin whom he dresses up and disposes like the original. She also represents the director's own obsessive efforts to shape nature -- if only in the form of a single actress -- into an aesthetic object of desire that he can control and gaze upon.

In a previous incarnation that actress had been Grace Kelly, represented in this series in the slighter films Dial M for Murder (1954; July 30 and 31) and To Catch a Thief (1955; July 31) but not in the consummate Rear Window (1954). In later years the victim of Hitchcock's attention was Tippi Hedren. As described in Donald Spoto's biography The Dark Side of Genius, the aging Hitchcock crossed the line between real life and make-believe in his relationship with the actress during the making of Marnie (1964; August 6 and 7), his last really serious work (he'd make four more movies, none of which is in this series). Here Hedren plays a kleptomaniac with a repressed past who marries publisher Sean Connery -- a role that in a way combines that of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious and Gregory Peck in Spellbound. It is far inferior to both; when Hedren spurned his advances, Hitchcock spurned the movie.

A more haunting legacy is The Birds (1963; August 13 and 14). Here Hedren is not an image contained and controlled by the director but a talisman invoking the wrath of all that's beyond control -- nature, death, desire -- unleashed by the birds long ago prettily caged by the murderess in Blackmail. Tragedy has given way to disaster and spectacle, the realm of special-effects masters like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron (ironically, the first Hollywood film Selznick considered for Hitchcock was called Titanic, but it was abandoned as too expensive). The film's final image is among Hitchcock's most terrifying -- a silent landscape, darkened by the waiting birds, into which the small knot of humanity vanishes.