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| Alfred Hitchcock. |
Sacha Gervasi’s attempt at a biopic of the life of the
Leytonstone’s best-known son Hitchcock (2012) can be seen from
two perspectives. Firstly a movie about movie making in Hollywood in the late
1950’s and early 1960’s at a transitional time in the studio’s history and to a
certain extent this succeeds. Secondly, as a study of a perverted weirdo, which
the film hints at, but generally glosses over. The plot is partly based on
Stephen Rebello’s non-fiction book Alfred
Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. The movie covers the making of this
1960’s film from when Hitchcock acquired the rights to Robert Bloch’s gothic
horror novel about the true-life killer and grave robber Ed Gein, up until the
films release and non-critical success. It exposes that while Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) Stage Fright
(1950) and Strangers on the Train
(1951).
is lusting
after his latest blonde actress, Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) his wife Alma
Reville (Helen Mirren) is engaged in a flirtatious relationship with a younger
man, the writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) who had worked on two of
Hitchcock’s previous scripts
Hitchcock gambled his reputation and re mortgaged his home
to make Psycho and he no doubt made
stars of some of his leading actresses but at what cost to their integrity?
Gervasi’s film only hints at his perversity where we see Hitchcock spying on
Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) via a peephole cut through the wall into her dressing
room, dictating what clothes each actress should wear and the hair styles they
should have not just on the set but at any time while under contract and God forbid
if they get pregnant.
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| Janet Leigh. |
I do agree with film critic Peter Bradshaw that this
Hollywood movie was completely upstaged by the BBC/HBO TV play The
Girl (2012) shown just before last Christmas. This was based on a 1983
book written by Donald Spoto about Tippi Hedren’s revelations that she was
sexually harassed and abused when she worked under Hitchcock’s direction on two
films, The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). The play also provides superior
performances from its lead actors namely Toby Jones as Hitchcock and Imelda
Staunton as Alma, better suited to the role than Helen Mirren. Sienna Miller
gives a very satisfying performance as Hedren.
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| The out of favour Vera Miles. |
The Girl’s most dramatics
scene has Tippi Hedren cowing on an attic set while live birds are thrown at
her ‘shitting and pecking’. The
scene, which only lasts two minutes in the finished movie, was supposed to be
filmed in one day with mechanical birds. Instead it took five days with live
birds until one of them pecked Hedren’s left eye leaving a deep cut on the
lower lid and she broke down and had to be taken home under sedation to receive
medical care. Another example of the sadistic and cruel treatment of women from
a man who said ‘Blondes make the best
victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints’.
Hedren was quoted as saying ‘I had always
heard that his idea was to take a women, usually a blonde and break her apart’.
During Marnie he actually asked her
for sexual favours telling her she would never work in the film industry again
if she did not grant his disgusting wishes, which obviously she did not.
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| Tippi Hedren with Hitchcock. |
Our culture has a history of excusing or ignoring the
excesses of famous men for example Jimmy Saville whose abuse, both mental and
physical, of young girls over many years was allegedly ignored by the BBC. Hitchcock
hints that he was incapable of sex, admitting that ‘he could not get it up’ which begs the question was his attraction
to blonde leading ladies a sick fantasist dream? This ‘walrus
dressed like a man’, his words not mine, makes your skin crawl. A bully who
quoted indecent sexual rhymes that passed as humour, who was happy to punish
his actresses if they did not curtail to his wishes and each of them treated
like his own personnel possession. Not the most pleasant man to work with.
Jessie
Matthews appeared in the only musical Hitchcock directed,
Waltzes from Vienna (1934), and we are
told in Michael Thornton’s biography
Jessie
Matthews that even at this early stage of Hitchcocks career he was one of
highest paid directors in British films and was already accustomed to being the
‘star of the show’ and could not stand competition especially from the films
young star who was at that stage ‘Britain’s first film goddess’. He was taken
to task at the time by
The Times
newspaper for treating Jessie as
‘a not
too important part of the films design’ She summed him up as a domineering
young man who knew nothing about musicals and said that she and her female
co-star Fay Compton, were unnerved by him because of his sarcasm and his well
known reputation as a practical joker. Due to Hitchcock’s lack lustre direction
and his famous distrust of actors the film was a flop, panned by the critics
and has since become regarded as the worst film in his career.
As I said previously not the most pleasant man to work with.
