The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Edward White (best way to read e books .TXT) 📖

Pageant he was photographed in various poses, as he acted out Bergman’s part in Notorious, curled up coquettishly in a chair, crossing his legs in as ladylike a fashion as he could muster.

That particular piece of horseplay was self-deprecating in a way, mocking himself as a gargoyle compared to the divine Bergman. But it also poked fun at actors, the preening peacocks who Hitchcock insisted—only half-jokingly—were the bane of his professional life and whose craft he seemed genuinely ambivalent about as a form of creative endeavor. In the first couple of decades of his directing career, Hitchcock could feel threatened by big-name actors and had testy relationships with them on set. Both John Gielgud and Michael Redgrave were luminaries of the London stage when they took starring roles in Hitchcock films, Gielgud in Secret Agent (1936), Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes (1938). Both always insisted they were cinephiles. Indeed, Gielgud had first become aware of Hitchcock through London Film Society screenings of European movies, and Redgrave shared Hitchcock’s love of German cinema, having spent time in Heidelberg during his youth. Films made in London, however, were a different matter. “British films before 1939 were regarded as something of a laughing-stock,” explained Redgrave, and actors of his background considered movie work lucrative enough to take, but not legitimate enough to take seriously. “You sell to the cinema what you’ve learned in the theatre,” was Ralph Richardson’s dictum.

Hitchcock was acutely aware of how he and his industry were viewed by thespians, and he cheekily used it in his favor when trying to convince Gielgud to sign up, telling him—misleadingly—that his part of novelist turned assassin was a modern-day version of Hamlet. Inevitably, relations were fraught between Hitchcock and actors who thought they were slumming it on his set. On the first day of filming, he told Redgrave that he hadn’t been the first choice for the role, which Redgrave took as an aggressive attempt to put him in his place. Similarly, Gielgud complained that his director made him “sick with nervousness” and that he seemed intent on asserting his superiority rather than bringing the best out of his cast. For his part, Hitchcock dismissed Gielgud’s background in theater as “absolutely no use to him here . . . rub out everything and start again.” It wasn’t only female stars Hitchcock felt he had the power to deconstruct and rebuild.

Famously, it was in Redgrave’s presence that Hitchcock compared actors to cattle, as though they were dumb beasts who needed to be herded at the point of a prod. It was one of those deliberately “shocking” outbursts that helped bolster his reputation as a forceful, opinionated director, endlessly quotable. On the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 1940, Hitchcock arrived one morning to find three calves awaiting him, each with the name of a cast member around its neck, a joke present from the movie’s star, Carole Lombard. The line “actors are cattle” stuck with him for the next forty years, and he was asked about it in countless interviews. With tongue in cheek, he frequently protested his innocence. “I would never say such an unfeeling, rude thing about actors at all. What I probably said was all actors should be treated like cattle.” As with so many of his other famous quips, Hitchcock never appeared to tire of it, nor did he express irritation when it was raised time and again in the media. It was nothing more than an opportunity to deliver a well-rehearsed comeback, followed by an inevitable giggle from his audience.

Whether or not Hitchcock said “actors are cattle”—Michael Redgrave was certain that he did—the phrase does get close to how Hitchcock regularly felt frustrated by those employed to pose before his camera. When films didn’t perform at the box office, he was quick to pin the blame on bad acting performances, or the casting of an actor who had been foisted on him by studio executives. Farley Granger felt that Hitchcock had been “cold and sometimes cruel” to Ruth Roman during Strangers on a Train because she had been a studio pick that Hitchcock didn’t want for the role of Anne Morton. He also professed to be frustrated or perplexed by what he considered to be the neediness of actors, many of whom were unsettled by the lack of feedback they received on their performance, an instance of Hitchcock’s legendary stinginess with praise. Doris Day described making The Man Who Knew Too Much as “something that I’ll never forget,” though partly because of the baffling behavior of the film’s director who didn’t seem interested at all in working with actors. “He was very pleasant, he was very quiet, and he didn’t seem to direct,” recalled Day. “Jimmy [Stewart] would say, ‘Now, just relax, Doris, of course he liked it. When he doesn’t say anything he’s okay.’ . . . We would go to dinner and laugh and he was warm and loving, just really sweet. But I didn’t understand him on the set.” Despite his own vanity and his own need for external validation, Hitchcock had little patience for it in others.

Unlike the highly skilled people who worked in roles behind the scenes, an anxious actor like Day, or—worse still—one with ideas that didn’t tally with Hitchcock’s thoughts on how a part should be played, could challenge his feeling that all those around him were pulling in the direction of “Hitchcock.” He made an effort to be as diplomatic as possible with actors he didn’t like, but he struggled with those who brought what he perceived to be obstruction and complication to his set. He found Charles Laughton’s process of discovering his character on Jamaica Inn almost more than he could bear, while during the filming of I Confess, he was infuriated by Montgomery Clift’s repeated questioning of the script and his character’s motivation. Particularly galling for Hitchcock was the interference of Clift’s acting coach, whose constant presence on the set Clift had guaranteed in his contract. Similarly, when