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In Brief—Hitchcock's Cameos

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In Brief—Hitchcock's Cameos A p p e n d i x In Brief—Hitchcock’s Cameos H itchcock visibly inscribed his presence in his work via more than three dozen cameo appearances, a signature practice that began with The Lodger , by his own account “the first true ‘Hitchcock movie’” (Truffaut 43), and concluded with his final feature, Family Plot . The director’s proliferant cameos demarcated his posi- tion, amplified his renown by mass distributing his literal image, and eventually achieved public notoriety as discernible “Hitchcock touches,” an invitation to non- critical popular scrutiny of his work. Hitchcock thereby constructed himself as a desired figure of authorship on the part of the audience. Yet, in registering his presence, the director’s cameos dually complicate his agency. If the cameos not only constitute visual signatures but entice the audience to search for Hitchcock’s manifestation in his cinema, 1 the director locates himself as a figure of transitory, marginal, and bypassed inhabitance, one associated with mechanisms and processes of fabricated motion, yet whose diegetic function is marked by limitation. Hitchcock’s cameos are often moments in which he is affiliated with apparatuses and operations of mobilization. He is allied with buses in North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief ; the London Underground in Blackmail ; railway stations and trains in The Lady Vanishes , Shadow of a Doubt , and Strangers on a Train ; an eleva- tor in Spellbound ; a wheelchair in Topaz ; a timepiece in Rear Window (Hitchcock literally mobilizes time by winding a clock in the songwriter’s apartment); and a newsroom in the throes of constructing and disseminating a crime story in The Lodger . Yet, his association with these mechanisms often signal the limitations of his agency. Hitchcock unsuccessfully attempts to board a bus in North by Northwest and appears in vehicles (and other devices of locomotion) driven by others in Blackmail , To Catch a Thief , Shadow of a Doubt , and Topaz . In Blackmail , albeit allied with the literal mobilization of the written text as a book-reading passenger on the London Underground, his focusing abilities are continually undermined by a distracting young passenger. Whereas in The Lodger Hitchcock initially appears as a figure of mass media production – apparently a newsroom editor (with his back to the camera) on the telephone, instrumental in bringing the crime story to the public – near the film’s end he (or an individual who resembles Hitchcock) reemerges 234 Appendix as a figure in the crowd watching from above as the handcuffed lodger dangles from a fence, thereby witnessing the malevolent force of mass reception in the form of a mob whose bloodlust nearly brings a malignant, wrong-minded conclusion to the drama of an innocent man pursuing a serial killer. In Shadow of a Doubt and Topaz , Hitchcock is specifically allied with mobi- lized fabrications of fiction—appearances that, albeit distinctly ludic, as Thomas Leitch observes of Hitchcock’s cameos (“Find” 10), and denoting “that we are being manipulated” as per Maurice Yacowar’s commentary (270)—are indicative of infirmity. 2 On a moving train in Shadow of a Doubt , he holds all the spades in a fully suited bridge hand, foregrounding his dominant position as a creator of fakery that becomes associated with personal disorder when the physician with whom he is playing observes that he suffers from a malady. Yacowar suggests that Hitchcock’s cameo in Topaz “obviously replies to his critics. He has himself wheeled into a lobby by a nurse, the image of the helpless old man that the reviewers considered him. Then he blithely rises and walks off on his own” (276).3 Yet, the poorly produced and in general widely criticized film did in fact evince a still ambulatory yet hobbled Hitchcock. In other cameos, Hitchcock bears instruments of artistry that are nonetheless nonoperating. He carries a cased cello, double bass, and bugle in The Paradine Case , Strangers on a Train , and Vertigo , respectively, and a camera held but not used outside the courthouse in Young and Innocent . These instruments—as well as his literal enunciative powers in Young and Innocent , Blackmail , Rear Window , Topaz , and Family Plot , wherein ambient sound subsumes his remarks or Hitchcock is viewed mouthing words from too far away to register—are silenced. 4 In conjunction with motion, Hitchcock’s appearances are often associated with apertures: windows and opening, closing, ajar, or shut doors—of a bus, businesses, elevator, train, hotel rooms—through which he enters (or attempts to do so) and exits in North by Northwest , Spellbound , The Birds , Marnie , and nearby or behind which he is positioned in Psycho , Torn Curtain , and Family Plot . Among the glass apertures in back of which he stands (from the camera’s point of view) are the door of the real estate brokerage through which Marion enters in Psycho and the opaque window of a shut door of the “Registrar of Births and Deaths” where, in Family Plot , he delivers a silent screen performance as a figure gesturing to a clerk, the director already a shadow in his final cameo. Even when he is still, the motion pic- ture (through window-framed moving images by his head in The Lodger , Blackmail , Shadow of a Doubt , and To Catch a Thief ) is figuratively always in mind. Much as such moments visibly inscribe Hitchcock in his cinema, the nature of his self-display, rather than serially occurring during what Raymond Bellour delin- eates as “that point in the chain of events where what could be called the film-wish is condensed . the logical unfolding of the fantasy originating in the conditions of enunciation” (225), or, according to Michael Walker, “mark[ing] a—distinctly Hitchcockian—turning point . [wherein] the protagonist will be precipitated into the chaos world . as a mark of Hitchcock’s self-conscious control over the narra- tive” (91–2), instead complicates the nature of his presence. What Walker describes as Hitchcock’s appearances at junctures of transition for the characters in such films as Psycho , standing outside the office when Marion hurries back to her job, shortly thereafter to be enticed into theft by a client’s stack of cash, and Vertigo , ambling down the sidewalk when Scottie initially arrives as Elster’s ship- and plot-building Appendix 235 establishment, are also moments when the director is not only, as Walker suggests, a passerby. During such junctures, Hitchcock is a variously static and perambulatory figure bypassed by the characters in his cinema. 5 In Murder! , The 39 Steps , The Lady Vanishes , Stage Fright , I Confess , and Vertigo he walks across the screen as a notably marginalized figure. Huntley Haverstock, Eve Gill, Guy Haines, Scottie Ferguson, Marion Crane, Melanie Daniels, and Marnie Edgar are among those who ignore him in the throes of exerting their own diegetic agency, even if Hitchcock pauses to observe them, as he does Eve and Marnie. In these moments of crossover (cross- ing paths), Hitchcock exhibits himself as literally passing away, out of the frame, or bluntly cut from the film. In the single feature where he wields diegetic agency, Notorious —in accordance with Leitch’s observation that Hitchcock’s cameos are devices “reminding the audience of the filmmaker’s power” (“Find” 6)—the direc- tor also depicts himself as a transient presence, moving offscreen. In his Notorious cameo at Alex Sebastian’s party, Hitchcock increases multiple tensions and pre- cipitates additional plots by drinking a glass of champagne. The act contributes to depleting the supply on ice, actualizing Alicia and Devlin’s fears that Sebastian will descend to the wine cellar, whereupon he discovers the two agents, who stage a romantic scene to disguise their espionage. The incident leads Sebastian to realize that his romance has been a failure and he has been subject to a spy plot, one that he subsequently attempts to thwart by poisoning Alicia, his wife. In the cameo, upon registering his agency, Hitchcock sets down his empty glass and immediately vacates the frame to make way for the diegetic director-figure, Devlin, and role player, Alicia, who take over the scene, playing out the suspense with a potency they alone possess. In Hitchcock’s cameos, his act of exiting is both formal and symbolic; for the sake of his work’s power he must vacate his own cinema. His momentary presence thereby marks his necessary absence. Even his unique mid-Atlantic cameo in Lifeboat , pic- tured in a newspaper ad for the diet product Reduco, through before-and-after shots places the director in a twice-diminished position. Not only is Hitchcock minia- turized and statically confined within the small frame of a newspaper ad (a figure decreased to the extent that his association with his cinema has become confined to commercial exploitation in print advertisements), but the “after” photo displays his further reduced presence. In Dial M for Murder , he appears as a small figure in a still photograph sitting across from the diegetic plotter, Tony Wendice, and his college acquaintance, Swann, who Wendice employs to execute the carefully scripted mur- der of his wife.6 Hitchcock’s marginalized authorial position is directly demarcated in his cameo presences as a bystander to his own spectacles in Young and Innocent , Under Capricorn , The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Frenzy . Ultimately, Hitchcock’s cameos became, for the director, moments marking the audience’s jurisdiction over his cinema. Hitchcock explained to Truffaut that the cameo eventually alchemized into practice determined by audience expectation: “Now it’s a rather troublesome gag, and I’m very careful to show up in the first five minutes so as to let the people look at the rest of the movie with no further distrac- tion” (49).
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