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Alfred Hitchcock: the Legacy of Victorianism University of Kentucky UKnowledge Film and Media Studies Arts and Humanities 1995 Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism Paula Marantz Cohen Drexel University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Cohen, Paula Marantz, "Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism" (1995). Film and Media Studies. 11. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/11 Alfred Hitchcock The Legacy of Victorianism Alfred Hitchcock The Legacy of Victorianism Paula Marantz Cohen THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1995 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 http://www.kentuckypress.com 08 07 06 05 04 6 5 4 3 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohen, Paula Marantz 1953- Alfred Hitchcock : the legacy of Victorianism / Paula Marantz Cohen p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-1930-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8131-0850-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899-1980—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.H58M27 1995 791.43'0223'092—dc20 95-2325 WAyÂ} • Wi Member of the Association of mmk^ H American University Presses Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 The Rise of Narrative Film 10 2 Novel into Film: Sabotage 29 3 Psychoanalysis versus Surrealism: Spellbound 50 4 The Father-Daughter Plot: Shadow of a Doubt, Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train 67 5 Digression: Rope, I Confess 86 6 The Daughter's Effect: Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much 99 7 Transition: The Wrong Man, Vertigo 124 8 The Emergence of Mother: Psycho 142 9 Beyond the Family Nexus: Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot 151 10 After Hitchcock 165 Notes 169 Index 189 Illustrations follow page 88 •Hi Acknowledgments 1 he first and most fundamental influence on this book comes from my parents, Murray and Ruth Marantz Cohen. Their talk, some- times at cross-purposes, always invigorating, lies at the heart of my method. I would also like to thank my sister, Rosetta Marantz Cohen, whose critical spirit and humor have kept me honest; my husband, Alan S. Penziner, who acted as a trusted reader and beloved movie companion; and my colleague, D.B. Jones, with whom I taught the Hitchcock course that served as the inspiration for this book. I would also like to thank a number of colleagues and friends whose insights on Hitchcock and related matters have helped me generate new ideas and revise old ones: Rosemary and Fred Abbate, David Plaut, Mark Greenberg, Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Frank Nesko, Gertrude Penziner, and Samuel Scheer. This book was written during a sabbatical leave granted by Drexel University. Photo stills were provided by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared under the title "The Ideological Transformation of Conrad's The Secret Agent into Hitchcock's Sabotage" in Literature/Film Quarterly 22, 3(1994), and is reprinted by permission. H^B Introduction Alfred Hitchcock's career spans the greater part of the twentieth century. He made his directorial debut in 1922, his last film in 1975, and he was still trying to shape a new project at his death in 1980. His work is a mirror of cinematic development: from silent to sound, from black and white to color, from the shoestring productions of his early London years to the expensive vehicles of his Hollywood period. In the process, he dabbled in technical innovations such as 3-D and Vista Vision, experimented in special effects and editing techniques, and developed an extensive repertoire of original camera setups and shots. He evolved with the times in other respects as well. He treated sex and violence first indirectly, then in stylized repre- sentation, and finally with graphic directness. He employed actors who epito- mized the taste of each period in which he worked: Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll during his British period, and Ingrid Bergman, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Cary Grant during his most successful Hollywood years. In his last films—Frenzy and Family Plot—he chose to employ British repertory performers in one case and Hollywood newcomers in the other, reflecting the emerging public taste for the quirky, nonstellar cast. Yet for all his uncanny ability to reflect evolving fads and trends, Hitchcock was also doggedly unstylish. He presented himself as a bourgeois family man, seemingly indifferent to the glamorous hedonism of Holly- wood. His highly mannered, uninflected speech and his bulky, inert figure suggested the Victorian gentleman stranded in a more frivolous age. Indeed, 2 ALFRED HITCHCOCK: THE LEGACY OF VICTORIANISM he seemed to relish the image of himself as a physical anachronism, and he capitalized upon the marketability of this image, even to the point of appear- ing as a corporeal signature in most of his films. Hitchcock's choice of the formal Victorian persona on the one hand and his drive to satirize and commercialize that persona on the other describe the underlying dynamic of his career. He was the son of small London tradespeo- ple—uneducated, modest in their means, churchgoing, and scrupulously con- ventional. His parents were Victorians, citizens of a still complacent Britain, in whom attitudes regarding the individual, the family, and the moral life were deeply inculcated. Hitchcock did not repudiate the Victorian world into which he was born. Instead, he carried the values of his childhood into cinema, transformed them in the process, and then proceeded to transform cinema through the continued infusion of these values. Critical approaches to Hitchcock have occupied two extremes. One, associated with the auteur theory of the 1960s and early 1970s, has tended to ignore context and examine the films as the unique expression of a gifted personality. The other, more recently promulgated by feminist and deconstructionist critics, has "read" Hitchcock's films as social texts—powerful reflectors and enforcers of ideology. My approach bridges these two extremes or, rather, finds them not to be mutually exclusive. Hitchcock's films are certainly ideological artifacts and not without their propagandistic function, yet they also exhibit a distinct- iveness and a developmental continuity that demonstrate their passage through a singular, if ever-changing, filter. This filter is the person of the filmmaker.1 I conceive of Hitchcock's career as falling into three phases, each of which reflects the convergence of his personal experience with trends in cinematic development and more general trends in culture. The firstphas e marks Hitchcock's initiation into the technical and thematic conventions of his craft and spans the more than fifteen years in which he directed films in Britain. While his technical acumen and stylistic originality became apparent very early, these films nonetheless conform to a general tendency within the nascent genre of narrative film to oppose the kind of complex characterizations associated with nineteenth-century novels. These films also encode conventional gender and familial relationships that corre- spond to the form of Hitchcock's own newly created family during this period. The second phase of Hitchcock's career extends from 1939, when he came to America to work for David O. Selznick, to the early 1960s, when he had reached the end of his most commercially successful period. The films of this phase are characterized by a drive to reclaim, for cinematic use, the novelistic concept of character that narrative film—and his own British films—had initially sought to suppress. This drive is informed not only by the Introduction 3 influences and opportunities offered by Hollywood but also by changes in the structure of his own family—in particular, his more evolved relationship with his daughter, Patricia, who would appear in three films of this period. The last phase of Hitchcock's career overlaps with the second and can be described as a gradual process of detachment from former influences. This phase begins as a shift in emphasis in his films of the late 1950s and 1960s and reaches its apotheosis in his last three films, made between 1968 and 1975. These last films cease to refer to a novelistic tradition or a family nexus. They no longer support consistent norms or encourage emotional investment but operate, rather, as exercises in design and purveyors of sensation. The films of Hitchcock's old age coincide with the old age of Western culture and express what has come to be referred to as a "postmodern condition." Let me use this introduction to sketch in some of the issues and assump- tions that inform this developmental perspective on Hitchcock. As I discuss more fully in chapter 1, entertainment film developed as it did in part as a reaction to the influence novels had come to exert in Western culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, novels had become an important means of relaying affective and expressive values associated with women. As a result, they posed a threat to the more codified, literalistic values associated with men. Early feature films, with their simplicity of theme and image, were able to recapture the cultural outposts that had come under the sway of the female sensibility and to reassert a hierarchy in which plot and action took precedence over feeling and relationship.
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