00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page i An Eye for Hitchcock G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page ii An Eye for G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page iii Murray Pomerance Hitchcock Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pomerance, Murray, 1946– An eye for Hitchcock / Murray Pomerance. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8135-3394-5 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8135-3395-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899— Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.H58P66 2004 791.43Ј0233Ј092—dc21 2003014221 British Cataloging-in-Publication information for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2004 by Murray Pomerance All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854 –8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Design by Karolina Harris Photograph of Alfred Hitchcock on p. 260 courtesy Photofest Film Archive. Manufactured in the United States of America G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page v To Nellie, night and day G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page vi G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: His Master’s Voice 3 A Great Fall: Action North by Sincerity Northwest 14 A Bromide for Ballantine: Spellbound, Psychoanalysis, Light 58 The Tear in the Curtain: I forbid you to leave this room 92 Once in Love with Marnie 130 I Confess and the Men Inside 170 Gabriel’s Horn: Vertigo and the Golden Passage 214 Notes 261 Index 295 G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page viii G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page ix Acknowledgments I am grateful to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for entertaining readings of early drafts of some material contained here, and to Wheeler Winston Dixon, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Jon Lewis, and John Sakeris, who were responsible for the publication of small excerpts from the essays on North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Torn Curtain in a different form. One accepts a great deal of help in writing a book such as this. I would like to express thanks to my students, who always permitted me to spiel; and to my friends and colleagues, especially Jean-Paul Chavy, Toronto; James Clark Jr., Ottawa; Saul Cooper, Santa Barbara; Barbara D’Arcy, San Fran- cisco; Michael DeAngelis, Austin and Chicago; David Desser, Champaign, Hong Kong, and Ann Arbor; Rufus Dickinson, Santa Barbara and Toronto; Wheeler Winston Dixon, Lincoln; Ann Dooley, Toronto; Louis Feldham- mer, Toronto; Blake Fitzpatrick, Peterborough; Mike Frank, Boston; Lester Friedman, Chicago; Andrew Furman, Toronto; Krin Gabbard, New York; Frances Gateward, Champaign and Ann Arbor; C. T. Gillin, Toronto; Peter Glassgold, Brooklyn and Pleasant Valley; Jay Glickman, Silver City, New Mexico; C. Keith Hampson, Toronto; Robert Harlow, Toronto; Jane Hoehner, Detroit; Norman Holland, Gainesville; Nathan Holmes, Toronto; Andrew Hunter, Toronto; Garth Jowett, Houston; Kathleen Kellett-Betsos, Toronto; the late Nina Leibman, Santa Clara; Nick Lopez-Aragon, Toronto; Jim MacLachlan, Toronto; Curtis Maloley, Toronto; Marianne McKenna, Toronto; Douglas Messerli, Los Angeles; Ken Mogg, Victoria, Australia; Doug Nicholson, Toronto; Charles Oberdorf, Toronto; Christopher Olsen, Orange County; Stephen Paul, New York; William Rothman, Miami; Skip Schwartz, Toronto; Jane Sloan, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Shaun Smith, Toronto; Eric Smoodin, Oakland; Jonathan and Rolf Soja, Toronto and Bracebridge; Brad Spurgeon, Asnières-sur-Seine; David Sterritt, New York; Lorne Tepperman, Toronto; John Turtle, Toronto; Sean Valentini, Toronto; Eugene Weiner, Haifa and Moscow; and Eric Zinner, New York. G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page x x Acknowledgments Particular kindnesses and illuminations were offered by Lewis M. Allen and Jay Presson Allen, New York, whose generosity and lively spirit helped me travel back to the 1960s while living in the 1990s, no easy task. I am grate- ful, too, to Ted Anthony; David S. Azzolina and Dan Traister, Franklin Li- brary of the University of Pennsylvania; the late Wayne Barker, Amagansett; Larry Billman, Los Angeles; Peter Bogdanovich, Beverly Hills; Susanna Bonetti, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute Library; Bob Boyle, Los An- geles; Henry Bumstead, San Marino; Fred Burchsted, Harvard College Li- brary; Michel Chion, Paris; James Clark, Ottawa; the late Herbert Coleman, Los Angeles; C. O. “Doc” Erickson, Los Angeles; Ann Kaplan, New York; Kristine Kreuger, The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills; Meghann Matwichuk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library; Uday Mohan, Washington, D.C.; El- lie Peck, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Cen- ter, New York; Debbie Randorf, the New-York Historical Society; Suzanne Meyers Sawa, Edward Johnson Music Library, the University of Toronto; Jennifer Sayre, Northwest Airlines, Minneapolis–St. Paul; Rosemary Ullyot, Cinémathèque Ontario, Toronto; Elisabeth Weis, New York; Mark J. Wolf, Mequon, Wisconsin; Susanna Woods, the Free Library of Philadelphia; and Carolyn Zeifman, Toronto. I am thankful for support from the Office of Research Services at Ryerson University, especially Robert Dirstein, Mary Jane Curtis, and Rose Jackson. Three colleagues have championed my efforts here, and in so doing have given me to feel the warmth of shelter against what has often felt like a storm: Barry Keith Grant, St. Catharines; William Rothman, Miami; and Vivian Sobchack, Los Angeles. To express encouragement is always a virtue, I be- lieve, but these three have gone beyond virtue into amity. To my compadres at Rutgers University Press, Leslie Mitchner, Molly Baab, Anne Hegeman, Marilyn Campbell, and Eric Schramm, I extend my warmest salute and gratitude for their energy, their excitement, and their genuine stewardship. My parents, Mike and Syd Pomerance, may they rest in peace, brought me first to Hitchcock, specifically to The Man Who Knew Too Much, when I was 10. I wonder whether they imagined what effect that would have one day. One of my regrets is that while they were alive I never said thank you in the proper way for the movies they gave me unstintingly as part of my birthright. My friend Paul Levy pointed me to Vertigo in the early 1960s: much, much, much, much, much later I finally recognized what he had been trying to do. Reginald Bedford and Evelyn Eby taught me to hear, Dave Heath to trust my G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page xi Acknowledgments xi eyes. And in more ways than he knows I have benefited from the extreme gen- erosity and warmheartedness of Steven Alan Carr. Last, but most profoundly, I thank my companion, teacher, and wisest friend Nellie Perret, who has endured my wanderings through Hitchcock with an astute humor, a sharp eye, and a caring heart. And a continuing in- spiration have been the astute curiosity and quick wit of my son, Ariel, for whom the world of film is a marvel, too. G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page xii G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page 1 An Eye for Hitchcock G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-R2923-FM 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page 2 After a certain measure of recognized achievement... all subsequent artistic work by the same author should enjoy the benefit of the doubt, even, where necessary, to the point of a suspension of judgement, provisionally considering apparent defects as virtues that we do not yet know how to appreciate. Pere Gimferrer, Giorgio de Chirico I think that I know how to look, if it’s something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity, because it’s that which expels us furthest outside ourselves, without the least guarantee. Julio Cortázar, “Blow-Up” G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00A-R2923-INT 1/9/04 11:37 AM Page 3 Introduction: His Master’s Voice In this book of meditations upon six very great symphonic works of a very great composer, I am surely, as Norman O. Brown once put it, “turning and turning in the animal belly, the mineral belly, the belly of time. To find the way out: the poem.” 1 Hitchcock’s films, too, are turning and turning. They continue to delight and profoundly intrigue the patient viewer, like all classical works that speak beyond the boundaries of their time and place. Inquiry, not statement, moti- vates me. The form of my action is play, not analysis. My question, if you like, is the pleasure of the Hitchcockian moment. I have been privileged to speak with a number of generous people who helped Alfred Hitchcock make some of the films I write about in this book, to hear them, who knew him from such proximity, say his name. One of these, a writer of great charm, gently chided me for an observation I had made about her screenplay, and that tickled her, and brought as well a chill of self-doubt and self-recognition to my spine: “It doesn’t connect with anything, darling, truly! Don’t be such an academic.” All my life I have struggled to balance a re- vealing discourse with an understanding of what artists do, a conundrum that has been my curse.