In Love with Fear the Critics

80 THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE make it ring true: movies were all he had. 6 The most suggestive commemoration I have found is the Hitchcock show at the IN LOVE WITH FEAR Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, En- gland. This includes a mockup of James How the master of suspense made fetishists of us all. Stewart’s bedroom in “Vertigo”; a rear- BY ANTHONY LANE projected, frame-by-frame screening of “Psycho”; and a beguiling series of looped montages by Christoph Girardet and HUNDRED years ago, on Au- us except our need to give him money Matthias Müller, entitled “The Phoenix gust 13, 1899, a boy was born. in return for the promise of temporary Tapes.” These are scraps of Hitchcock A He was the son of a greengrocer distress? The outward refinements of a crammed with objects and actions that we from Leytonstone, a small town in Essex, Hitchcock picture may be a delight, but have come to recognize as his imagina- which has since been swallowed by the they are frayed by emotional wear and tive property. One loop rifles through the sprawl of East London. Ten years earlier, tear; when Grace Kelly, in “Rear Win- following images: name cards, tiepins, another London boy was born; both dow,” is hunting for clues inside Ray- monograms, letters, keys, locks, drains, would migrate, both would end up as mond Burr’s apartment, and Burr appears the color red, spots, basins, washing, hair- knights of the realm they had vacated, in the corridor outside, James Stewart, cutting, hair-burning, fires, matchbooks, and both would grow wealthy in the plea- watching from across the courtyard, looks race cards, addresses, newspapers, music surable purveying of their obsessions. genuinely aghast, and for a minute we scores, telephone directories, phones, pa- Strangest of all, these two Englishmen forget the harmless pleasure of watching pers against a door, doorknobs, hands, would become the most recognized Grace Kelly in a summer frock. Indeed, cups, breakages, spills, rings on fingers, ro- shapes in the history of cinema. The it is a rule of Hitchcock’s cautionary tales saries, handcuffs, bags, purses, guns, draw- Essex boy would ripen swiftly in Fal- that no pleasure can be wholly harmless— ers, knives, forks, and back to name cards. staffian directions; the other would stay as that the more needling the harm, the What struck me about these visual trim and proud as a penguin. It is one more pointedly the pleasure will be quotations is how much they reveal not thing to have your name known around pricked into a thrill. about Hitchcock but about us; whatever the world, but to be identified by nothing The Hitchcock centenary has been the source of his undoubted fetishism, the more than your silhouette—well, that is greeted with appropriate ceremony. Books more compelling fact is that he ended up an honor accorded to very few. If Alfred such as “Hitchcock’s Notebooks” (Spike; making fetishists of us all. We come out of Hitchcock and Charles Chaplin have any $30) and “Hitchcock’s America” (Ox- movies saying, “I liked that bit where . .,” peer in this regard, it is Mickey Mouse, ford; $17 in paper) have directed our and Hitchcock’s bits were simply neater who was hailed by Hitchcock as the most gaze to unconsidered corners of his than anyone else’s. Moviegoers like that pliable of performers. “Mr. Disney has the work, while the Museum of Modern bit in “Notorious” where the camera right idea,” he once said. “If he doesn’t Art organized a complete retrospective glides down, as if in annunciation, to dis- like them, he tears them up.” of his movies (fifty-three are extant), cover a stolen key in Ingrid Bergman’s That is the chord that Hitchcock liked together with an exhibit of Hitchcock- fist; I really like the bit just before that, to strike, and one that his admirers—es- iana, which shows until August 17th. when Claude Rains tries to kiss that pecially those who watched him fronting Among the highlights is a 1962 writ- hand, and she, thinking smartly, throws TV dramas in the fifties and sixties— ten exchange between the director and her arms around his neck, drops the key came to expect: an easy fusion of the Grace Kelly, whom Hitchcock wanted on the rug, and slides it aside with her sadistic and the sardonic, delivered with for the title role in “Marnie.” In the event, foot. Critics like to damn the frenzied such dead-eyed relish that, like an outra- it was decided that a European princess editing practices of current cinema, but geous con trick, it could somehow be con- was not quite right for the part of a fri- Hitchcock reminds us that rapid cutting strued as benevolent. How on earth did gid kleptomaniac. Hitch was unmoved. is not in itself a sin. There is a serenity in we come to worship this portly and para- “Yes, it was sad, wasn’t it?” he noted. his speed; he is driving the action forward noid figure, this anti-Santa with his fu- “After all, it was only a movie.” That with such confidence that the emotional nereal suit and tie and his sack of vicious shrugging dismissal is one that he tried burden of the moment—which in Berg- toys, who liked almost nothing about on several occasions, but he could never man’s case could not be more fraught— INC. ©1948 (RENEWED 1976) BY THE CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS, Hitchcock, photographed by Irving Penn in 1947. For all the darkness, comedy is the natural blush under his thrills. 82 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 16, 1999 comes to feel almost weightless. Only a brake cables comically snipped in “Family torture so plainly in 1973, sixty years man who took no exercise whatsoever, Plot,” with unstoppable consequences; after the event, suggests that the pain and who once ate three steaks in a sin- and, best of all, in “To Catch a Thief ” he of indecision was undimmed. Hitch- gle sitting at “21,” could derive such bliss had Grace Kelly drive Cary Grant around cock commentators have traditionally from the athletic possibilities of his art. the bends until Grant was clutching his made merry over the fact that young Al- It is impossible to tell, with Hitch- knees. Hitchcock’s pleasure was to dip his fred was a scion of the Catholic lower cock, where fear ends and fantasy begins; performers into precisely the type of middle class and, as one schoolmate indeed, the two are twisted together for quicksand in which he himself would described him, “a lonely fat boy who strength, like the cords of a rope. His cin- have sunk without a trace; the ingenious smiled and looked at you as if he could ema is one of compulsive repetition; from bravado with which they hauled them- see straight through you.” On the other film to film, his characters are initiated selves free not only tickled him, as it did hand, we should beware the temptation afresh into rituals that Hitchcock alone his audiences, but offered the comforting to post-rationalize. The majority of boys can comprehend. If this was designed as thought that our treacherous world could who undergo a Jesuit education grow up a purgation, it failed beautifully; far from sometimes, by a whisker, be put to rights. as useful members of society, largely un- being broken, the spell of unease merely troubled by the urgent desire to watch tightened its grip, as if the director were T is the whisker, the humming wire of blond women in handcuffs. In tracing half in love not just with his actresses I suspense, for which Hitchcock is still the trouble with Alfred, we require fur- but with the perils they faced. He liked most highly honored. When Martin Bal- ther particulars. to claim, for instance, that he never drove sam climbs the stairs in “Psycho,” we want We know, for example, that as a boy, a car—untrue, of course, like many of the bedroom door to open, but only by a and even as a young man with a full- his claims, although he did employ a couple of inches; the waiting spices the time job, Hitchcock would be sum- chauffeur in Hollywood. “If you don’t agony. This practice of procrastination moned by his mother, Emma, to the foot drive a car, you can’t get a ticket,” he ex- began early, one gathers, and it was indi- of her bed and pressed for a litany of the plained, and a ticket—the stub of author- visible from crime. At Hitchcock’s school, day’s events. “It was a ritual. I always re- ity, stamped with trouble—was what St. Ignatius College, in Stamford Hill, member the evening confession,” he ad- Hitchcock dreaded most. And how did mitted to Tippi Hedren, who passed the The form master would tell the pupil of his he mold and decorate his dread? He lin- wrongdoing and the pupil would have to information on to one of his biographers, gered on the tight-gloved hands of Tippi go before the disciplining priest. It was left Donald Spoto. According to Spoto, such Hedren as she rested them lightly on to the pupil to decide when he would go maternal interest “inculcates guilt of a for the punishment, and of course he would the steering wheel, in “The Birds,” and keep putting it off. scrupulous and neurotic type.” Hitch- gunned her green Aston Martin up to cock fans have learned to be cautious of Bodega Bay; he had Barbara Harris’s That Hitchcock could recollect this Spoto, who is always ready to pass briskly over the fruits of Hitchcock’s tal- ent if there is a chance to check out the undergrowth; still, staring at the swarm of fearsome matriarchs who invade the Hitchcock corpus, you do wonder.

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