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The trope of the “Hitchcock Blonde” has devolved into something now defined by popular culture as an icy icon, often duplicitous and shrouded in mystery, guarding her sexuality like classified information. She is remote and lacquered. Flaxen-haired and frigid. Without soul or humor.
Beyond the Blonde: The Dynamic Heroines of Hitchcock
Iris is not alone. The films of Alfred Hitchcock are abounding with some of the most active and dynamic female characters to be found in twentieth-century cinema. The ladies don’t vanish in Hitchcock: they are front and center, making trouble and making things right. Of course, other directors have shown women as dimensional figures of action but none have accomplished it as consistently, as naturally, or as deeply as Hitchcock. To travel through the oeuvre is to wonder how this director who kept his leading ladies (and their supporting sisters) vital and bursting with character, could be so carelessly accused of misogyny. A Hitchcock woman is never just a wife, just a girlfriend, just a mother, and certainly, never just a blonde.
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Iris Henderson, about to embark on a train that will take her straight to a featureless fiancé, sighs with resignation, “I’ve been everywhere, I’ve done everything . . . what is left for me but marriage?” (fig. 1). She then gets clunked on the head, wakes up, and in the course of The Lady Vanishes (1938), disrupts the lives of her fellow passengers, exposes some Nazis, saves a life, and possibly the world. Along the way, she discovers that love and marriage need not be a dead-end but instead, another part of the great adventure.
Figure 1
Largely responsible for perpetrating this myth of the Hitchcock Blonde, is Hitchcock himself. In his conversations with Francois Truffaut he said: “You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawingroom type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom.”1 He goes on to speak of English and Nordic women as more sexually interesting than Latin, Italian, and French women. He does contradict his own dictum in The Paradine Case (1947), where Ann Todd’s demure English rose pales against the powerful allure of Italian Alida Valli. But there is no denying he had a type, as exemplified by his fascination with Grace Kelly, and later, Tippi Hedren. At the same time, his words to Truffaut not only disregard the vast majority of his heroines but reduce the Hitchcock woman to a sexual sort. And for whatever went on in Hitchcock’s head (none of us can have any idea of that) I believe we can only judge his attitudes toward women by his work. That is whatI choose to do.THE
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And nowhere in Hitchcock does she actually exist in that way. Yet, this moribund concept is still the first stop, and sadly often the only stop, when characterizing Hitchcock heroines.
Already, we can see in the Carroll prototype that there is more to his leading ladies—yellow-haired or not—than the commonplace and unstudied notion that “Hitchcock Blonde”
Though blondes appeared in his films from the beginning—in The Lodger (1927) “golden curls” are the designated trait for the film’s victims—one might say that the definitive image of the Hitchcock Blonde, as we have come to know her, was inaugurated with Madeleine Carroll’s Pamela in The 39 Steps (1935) (fig. 2).Pamela is one of among several women who have a bearing on a plot triggered by the murder of a female spy, sending protagonist Richard Hannay off on one of Hitchcock’s exculpatory tours where the “wrong man” meets the right woman en route to proving his innocence. There is no denying that Pamela meets all of the superficial traits of that overused epithet, but her elegant fair beauty is hardly her defining characteristic, for she is also smart and forthright. “I like your pluck” Hannay tells her.
What Carroll is really introducing is not the Hitchcock Blonde but the dynamic Hitchcock woman. Carroll comesback,just as plucky in Secret Agent (1936), as Elsa Carrington, a witty and eager spy who wanted “to do something worthwhile.”
Figure 2
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It is telling that in a medium that tends to objectify women, Hitchcock’s women were more often than not, love subjects—actively chasing their own desires—rather than inactive loveobjects. Consider the lovelorn likes of the second Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca (1940); Lina Mackinlaw in Suspicion (1941); Marion Crane in Psycho (1960);Alicia Huberman in Notorious (1940),who yearns for “a little bird call from my dream man”; Jennifer Rogers in TheTrouble with Harry (1955) with her “short fuse”;Eve Gill in Stage Fright (1950), whogoes to remarkable lengths to exonerate her love object, Jonathan Cooper. And then there’s the strange case of Vertigo (1958) where a love subject masquerades as a love object.
Alicia Huberman, Iris Henderson, Elsa
What we do see is: Mrs. Verloc exacting piercing vengeance in Sabotage (1937); Erica Burgoyne uncovering a killer in Young and Innocent (1937); Mary Yellen saving Jem Traherne from a noose by ingeniously removing the floorboards of her room in Jamaica Inn (1939); and in Saboteur (1942), Pat Martin pursuing the fiendish Fry all the way to the Statue of Liberty. From there on in, with rare exceptions, the leading ladies of Hitchcock avoid passive victimization to remain at the forefront of the action, distinguishing themselves in ways that go far beyond the color of their hair.
would suggest. In fact, from Carroll on, we don’t see another female lead who comes close to resembling the cliché of Hitchcock Blondeness until the 1950s, and still that label would fail to convey the true substance of those characters.
It is frequently as love subjects that Hitchcock heroines launch into action. But Hitchcock, whose films are firmly rooted in character, allowed them not just action but a moral arc, making them far more interesting than mere victims of romance. These women do not arrive prepackaged as good girls or bad girls left to suffocate in those boxes. They also have a stake in the story that is not confined to a relationship with a man—a cause that often leads to a development of self amid the discovery of their own powers. They are individuals who, in many cases, come to their intrepidity by way of a past tinged with hedonistic self-indulgence.
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Carrington, Eve Kendall in North by Northwest (1959), and Melanie Daniels in The Birds (1963) are all ascending from personal histories of saucy and sometimes outrageous behavior. In the course of their narratives, they not only discover their own mettle but they also develop a spirited and conscientious worldview. It’s not their previous profligacy they need to live down, but their self-absorption. In doing so, they are able to retain their irreverence as they unearth their true, generous selves. Traditional notions of virtue are not wanted here and Hitchcock’s view on them is clear. In Notorious, when Mr. Beardsley refers to Alicia as “A woman of that sort,” Devlin, who harbors his own hang-ups about her, immediately bats back with “Miss Huberman is first, last, and always, not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn’t hold a candle to your wife, sitting in Washington, playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.” There are distinct echoes of Shadow of a Doubt (1943) in Devlin’s rant. In his passionate defense of a valiant partner, Devlin does not share in the dark vision of Charles Oakley but one can imagine Mr. Beardsley’s future widow and her bridge partners as enticing prey for that film’s murderous misogynist who would certainly include them among the “useless women” he targets. In Hitchcock world, traditional notions of virtue are not saving graces and not alwaysThreerewarded.women of “that sort”—Marion, Melanie, and Marnie—are near anagrams of each other, not just in name but in character: audacious women, who can be heedless, reckless and self-destructive, clawing their way to salvation and wholeness. Melanie and Marnie are virtual twins and not just because they look exactly alike, as both are played by Tippi Hedren. Unsettled, with intricate mother issues, they are both instinctively combative with men. The Birds and Marnie (1964) incidentally, have direct counterpart characters—Marnie, Bernice Edgar, and little Jessie mirror Melanie, Lydia Brenner, and Cathy Brenner in their three distinct stages of womanhood. Lil Mainwaring and Annie Heywood complete the correlation as the smart, attractive,
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available women who are thrown over by, respectively, Mark and Mitch for the challenge of a wilder, untamed character. Beyond featuring females in life and death situations, Hitchcock also gives us a perspective of how these women fared against social conventions that hadn’t quite caught up to them. I’d like to take a closer look at a few of the films where the central characters transcend the archetypes of daughter, wife, and career woman. These are films that were made when Hitchcock was firmly ensconced in his adopted country and they illustrate the struggle such bright and gifted women had in finding their place in the mid-century America.
An American Daughter: Shadow of a Doubt Shadow of a Doubt drops us off right into the nucleus of an outwardly “typical” American family in Santa Rosa, California—a town pictured as workaday and unremarkable.
The smartest girl in her class lies on her bed bemoaning that very idea: “We just go along and nothing happens.”
Particularly disturbing to Charlie Newton is the dreariness of her mother’s life, “Dinner, dishes and then bed. I don’t see how she stands it!” She decides to summon her worldly Uncle Charlie to come and stir things up in the Newton household and as telegrams and telepathy cross, Charles Oakley appears in a cloud of black smoke. That the story of an uncle and niece should turn into a battle between good and evil could not have played out if Charlie were not a worthy adversary. How eager Charlie is to identify with Charles: “We’re not just an uncle and niece. It’s something else. I know you. I know you don’t tell people a lot of things. I don’t either. I have a feeling that inside you there’s something that nobody knows about.” She sees herself in him and not her, mother who she loves but who she obviously dreads becoming. Their relationship even dares to carry a whiff of romance. The uncle is indeed a love object to the niece. She loves to walk with him, and be seen with him. The attraction is mutual, as Charlie is the antithesis of what Charles’s perverse perception
Figure 3 sees as the rich, old, useless sows who he so cold-bloodedly dispatches. When he puts a ring on her finger (fig. 3), she accepts it as a sign that they are now one (even if it does have another woman’s initials engraved on it.) But with the information from Detective Graham (bland as a cracker, he hardly makes a dent in our consciousness in the face of the two fascinating Charlies) she discovers, as many wives do, later rather than sooner, what exactly she has wedded herself to. When, in her after-hours visit to the library, she finds the facts in newsprint that lead her to the disturbing truth about her uncle, Charlie, who typically whisks down the street with a purposeful stride, is stopped cold. We get a God’s eye view of a lone girl bearing the weight of the world on her slight shoulders as she assumes the awful responsibility of putting a stop to Charles without exposing him to her family. And when her uncle pushes her through Santa Rosa’s own gates of hell, the Til-Two bar (fig. 4), Charlie gets the full look inside of the man she called her twin. Even Santa Rosa is a wicked world at night, where one’s less fortunate classmates founder in bleakness. “I never thought I’d see you here” woebegone waitress Louise Finch tells Charlie. But there she is, sharing a
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Figure 4 booth in a rendezvous with a murderer. “You’re the head of your family Charlie, anybody can see that” her uncle tells her, and it’s true—she seems to make the decisions, she chastises, she drives the car, and now she must protect them. When there is no hiding that Charlie knows all and intends to do something about it, Charles attempts to brutally diminish her: “You think you know something, don’t you? You think you’re the clever little girl who knows something. . . . You’re just an ordinary girl living in an ordinary town.” He takes her deep down into the inferno of his deranged mind: “The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something!” But she is quite awake and she is far from ordinary. Not only must she protect the world from a killer but at the same time she can’t let her mother know the truth about the brother to whom she has a preternatural attachment. Charlie is undaunted. Rather than shrinking from his intimidation, she grows bolder, vowing right to his face that if he doesn’t go away, she will kill him herself. And he knows he must kill her first. There is nobody around to rescue Charlie. Detective Graham is out of town. It is uncle vs. niece at the
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climax, when after two failed attempts on her life, he prepares to throw her from a moving train. Charlie saves herself, and ultimately, a lot of unsuspecting women out there, like “that nice Mrs. Potter” who has “next victim” practically embroidered on her hat. Charles Oakley, the apotheosis of the suave and appealing Hitchcock villain, brings the intrigue that attracts our attention, but Shadow of a Doubt is also the story of a woman on the verge of discovering and defining herself. Charlie has rid the world of Charles and preserved her mother’s sacred image of him, all while keeping her heroism to herself. But what’s in the cards for Charlie? “She’s got brains!” her father boasts. So, why isn’t this girl who beat East Richmond High in the debate, going to college? Little sister, Ann Newton, a precocious bookworm who has the makings of a woman to be reckoned with, tells us that their mother thinks girls ought to settle down and get married (alerting us to the prospect that in spite of the uncommon bearing of this child, she too runs the risk of caving to convention). And yet, it is that very mother, Emma Newton, paragon of domestic virtue, who questions the orthodox notion of a woman’s place, most exquisitely, in one sorrowful moment when she realizes that her brother is leaving and is taking with him her identity as the girl she used to be: “But you see, we were so close growing up. And then Charles went away and I got married and . . . you know how it is. You sort of forget you’re you.” On that line, the close-up goes from Emma to Charlie—Charlie, who knows things her mother will never understand. From mother to daughter, there too is a warning of losing yourself in marriage, drowning in a sea of children, disappearing into a kitchen, never to be seen or heard from again. It’s a despondent sentiment that resounds from Santa Rosa, all the way to the French Riviera of To Catch a Thief (1955), where Mrs. Stevens laments that “Nobody calls me Jessie anymore.”
In Hitchcock, there is something mournful in motherhood. Meanwhile, marriage-minded Detective Graham and his “average families are the best” pitch, is dogging Charlie before she even has a chance to know how she feels about
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him. He alone is aware of her valor but does he now expect this exceptional woman to simply “settle down”? Custom of the time tells us that it would be the proper and happy ending for our heroine. But can we believe, with what we know about her, that Charlie, who has been a savior, a slayer traveling through the dark side of human nature, will settle down for a life that’s typical, average, ordinary? A life of dinner, dishes, and then bed? How could she stand it? The film’s final moments hint that she may have to. As Charles Oakley is being eulogized as brave, generous, and kind, Charlie tries to fathom her uncle’s twisted take on humanity. By her side, Graham authoritatively simplifies her disquieting and difficult thoughts with an easy bromide designed to shut down any further excavation. Charlie’s seeming acceptance of a future as his wife makes an already somber ending all the more doleful.
An American Wife: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) On the other side of the world, there is a woman who has “settled down”—or at least, she’s made the effort. Jo McKenna a Midwestern doctor’s wife vacationing in Morocco, once had an illustrious career as a singer—a diva who now must content herself with an audience of two. In his 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock tosses American couple Jo and Ben McKenna unwittingly into an imbroglio of international politics. At times independently, and at times together, husband and wife each do their part—equally important and equally dangerous—in thwarting an assassination and ultimately saving their child.
While sharp-shooting Jill Lawrence in Hitchcock’s 1934 take on the story is no slouch—it is she after all, who delivers the bullet that saves her daughter—the film didn’t delve much into her character or the Lawrences’ relationship.
Robin Wood has pointed to the stability of the Lawrence marriage in contrast to the instability of the McKenna marriage.2 He attributes at least part of this dichotomy to Jill having a hobby that her husband can accommodate while Jo
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had a career that Ben can’t brook. Conversely, Donald Spoto puts the onusof the McKennas’ marital discord on “the delicate state of [Jo’s] emotional health,” which may be how Ben sees it but not necessarily how we do. 3 Either way you look at it, in 1956 we find that far more interesting than the whereabouts of young Master McKenna is the state of the McKenna marriage andJo’s voice in it. In fact, in this telling, The Man Who Knew Too Much is more than anything else, a story about Jo McKenna’s voice. Right from the start, we get the message that Jo is a bit smarter, or at least more perceptive than her husband. She sees things that he misses. Ben McKenna might have the medical degree but it’s his wife who has the curiosity and the x-ray vision. Jo wonders about Louis Bernard, the mysterious man they meet on the bus, alive to the fact that Bernard is able to learn a lot about them while revealing nothing about himself. Ben belittles her legitimate suspicions with “I know this is mysterious Morocco, but we’re not going to lose our heads, are we?” That evening with Mr. Bernard in their hotel room, Jo sounds off in a proudly defiant manner when responding to his incessant questions with “Yes, Mr. Bernard, I was on the American stage. And the London stage and the Paris stage.” She then attempts to get some answers of her own about who their elusive guest is while her husband remains completely credulous. When Bernard gets a phone call and opts out of their dinner engagement, Jo and Ben must dine alone. At the restaurant, Jo feels they are being stared at. Ben tells her to stop imagining things. But she is being stared at. It’s the Draytons who apologize for staring and ask, “Aren’t you Jo Conway?” And before Jo can bask in the glow for a second, Ben intrudes with “We’re Doctor and Mrs. McKenna.” In one stroke, he’s promoting his own accomplishments while obliterating her career, her name, and her identity. This leads to a squabble in front of these strangers as Jo makes it clear that she’s given up the stage only temporarily, and when Ben starts explaining that a doctor’s wife is very busy, Jo clarifies “What my husband is trying to
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What Ben doesn’t understand about his wife is that this was a woman who lived in the spotlight, with all the personal freedom, creative expression, and purpose that a celebrated artist enjoys. A songbird kept in a cage, far from her natural habitat, is going to squawk. But he sees her restlessness, discontent, and even her curiosity as neurosis. He ignores her insight as irrational wariness. Her keen discernment does fail her in the hands of the Draytons (and it’s worth noting that in that couple as well, it’s the missus who comes off as the smarter one). As they leave their son in the Draytons’ charge, Jo and Ben enjoy some lightheartedtime alone. Jo asks Ben when are they going to have another baby and from Ben’s spluttering, stammering response to her directness, one gets the impression that she’s really asking “Are we ever going to have sex
Bernard is killed in the marketplace and his last whispers are to Ben. They go to the police station where Ben gets a phone call. And as the sun sets in Morocco, Ben must finally give Jo the information that he’s been withholding from her. Meanwhile, we get a heap of information on this marriage. “Are we about to have our monthly fight?” she asks. Treating Jo like a patient, he prepares to drug her before letting her know that their son has been kidnapped. Why? To quiet the howl of her emotions. Anticipating an eruption that he would be unable to deal with, he takes it upon himself to preemptively shut her down. He begins by staging his own mini-gaslighting, telling her: “You’ve been talking a blue streak, you’ve been walking
Thingsagain?”happen—Louis
say is Broadway shows are not produced in Indianapolis. We could live in New York. I hear that doctors aren’t starving there either.” When Louis Bernard shows up at the restaurant with a woman, Jo acts out her simmering resentment with some expert passive-aggressive wrangling of Ben. She goads him to confront Bernard. He demurs but she gets him going and once she does, she turns to the Draytons with “I don’t know why he gets so worked up over unimportant things.” It’s a master class in marital manipulation that leaves Ben looking rather foolish.
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Figure 5 around in circles,” though she and we know she has been doing no such thing. He presents the sedatives. “Six months ago, you told me I take too many pills!” she counters. He makes a deal with her: he’ll tell her what he knows if she’ll take the pills. “The price of curiosity” he says. She swallows them. He tells her. And Jo McKenna’s voice wails and cracks as she dissolves into primal motherhood (fig. 5). Listen to her strangulated cry when she flails at Ben: “I could kill you! You gave me sedatives!” She wants to fight for her child but he disabled her. The adventure moves to London where the McKennas are greeted by Jo’s amusing show-biz friends, folks who know who the star in the family is: “Oh, Mr. Conway, I didn’t know you were there.” Ben goes out to search for their son. Rather than waiting helplessly, Jo, with the vital revelation that Ambrose Chapel is a place not a person, takes off herself, in hot pursuit. Both of them wind up at Albert Hall, where, as the Storm Clouds Cantata fills the air, the screen is taken over by Jo who mirrors the anguish of the very lyrics being sung: “All save the child around whose head is screaming.” An assassination begins to play out. She knows she must stop it, and so this vocalist does what she would do in any concert hall—she summons up every bit of her natural talent to project across the theater with the bellow of a technician well-versed in finding the perfect note; she is,
The Man Who Knew Too Much concludes on a cheerful note but at the final curtain, there is a trace of trouble hanging over the horizon, what with the McKenna marriage so fraught with landmines and with Jo rediscovering her voice in the excitement of being a player on the international stage. As with Shadow of a Doubt, one wonders how the prevailing expectations of a quiet, domestic life will contain one who clamors to be heard.
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An American Woman: Lifeboat I don’t have a favorite Hitchcock film, but put a gun to my head and I might just blurt out “Lifeboat!” The reason I hold a special fondness for this 1944 World War II story of a ragtag group of survivors of a torpedoed passenger ship, can be summed up in two words: Connie Porter—or if you prefer, Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead was a glorious theater animal
Figure 6 after all, a professional who knows that when she gets her cue, she must act. It is Jo’s voice that made her famous; it is Jo’s voice that delivers the shriek of a mother’s agony; it is Jo’s voice that saves the prime minister; it is Jo’s voice that reverberates through the embassy loud enough to reach her son—“That’s my mother’s voice!” The spirit of a woman with a need to sing and shout, rings out lucidly and loudly (fig. 6).
Figure 7 who never caught fire in films, except here. It was only Hitchcock who tapped into her sublime audacity to create one of the most bold and brazen, compelling and companionable characters in cinema (fig. 7). “I’m practically immortal” Connie purrs and yes, for me she has attained goddess-like status. I love her, I admire her, I want to be her. While Charlie Newton is just beginning to see things as they really are, Connie has been watching and commenting all along, and getting paid for it. A journalist and a woman of the world, she hoisted herself out of the slums of the south side of Chicago to be a high-flying witness at history’s great moments. She is sparkling-smart, multi-lingual, and armed with a wit as sharp as a box-cutter. Lifeboat is essentially an ensemble piece but it is Connie who is at the center, commanding our attention. It is she who we watch evolve from this extraordinary experience. Since she is a woman, Connie is never even considered when nominations for skipper are put in play (nor is the sole African-American, Joe Spencer) but throughout the film, it is Captain Bankhead at the helm. The narrative can be tracked by the possessions she loses: her camera, her coat, her suitcase, her trusty typewriter, and finally, her diamond
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DYNAMIC
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bracelet. And as they are lost, we see her gain in humanity. She gives her last cigarette to the ailing Gus (as well as a generous kiss, smash on the mouth). She easily relates to every individual on board, from deck hand to shipyard owner. She offers running commentary and facilitates communication with the Nazi Willie, and it is shewho galvanizes the crew at their darkest moment. A man’s woman, she does forge a moment of girlish intimacy with Miss McKenzie, the other broad on board. Miss McKenzie, a stalwart and compassionate nurse, shatters the “good girl” mold herself when she reveals her own tangled circumstances in the form of a hopeless affair with a married man. It is Miss McKenzie who strikes the first blow against Willie—inciting a startling incidence of mob violence—once his undeniable deception and brutality has been brought to light with the drowning of Gus. Among the accusations frequently hurled at Hitchcock, is the charge that he employs the technique of the male gaze— depicting women through a heterosexual man’s eyes and reducing them to mere sex objects. Lifeboat is a particularly prime example of why I think such an indictment is illconsidered. Kovac, the closest thing to a leading man here, is on hand to voice some Socialist sense and makes attempts to assert himself as boss, but his primary purpose seems to be as an object of lust for Connie. He appears throughout the film, virile and shirtless—the sexiest available male for miles. Connie’s flirtation with him is loaded with teasing adversarial flourishes—at various times she refers to him dismissively as “that clunk,” “tovarich,” and “Narcissus.” When Connie looks at Kovac she sees a hunk. When he looks at her, he sees a lot more. He has even read her work and is familiar enough with it to point out its solipsistic slant. Whether it’s to critique her professional game or just to be looked at, Kovac’s function is to serve Connie. She gazes at him without illusion, knowing the heat they share is of the moment and as ephemeral as the initials she lipsticks on his naked torso. Connie will not land from this watery voyage with a husband, nor does she want to. But she will come out a deeper and more thoughtful reporter.
Lovely to Look At: Rear Window
Like Connie, L.B. Jefferies is also a peripatetic storychaser. But unlike Connie, he is laid-up and sidelined from the action. Jeff, the peeping protagonist of Rear Window (1954), is restricted to just looking. Had he not been distracted by a possible murder in one apartment across the way, his male heterosexual eye would have likely settled longer on the overtly ogled Miss Torso. At a glance, the lithe Miss Torso suggests nothing more than an objectified blonde babe, there for no other purpose than to be gawked at. But taking a closer look at her, even as we must do so from afar, we can see for ourselves that Miss Torso is a vivacious and independent creature. She doesn’t blankly swan around her little apartment—she jumps, she spins, and when she bounces, it’s not to jiggle but to soar. That is because Miss Torso, played by ballerina Georgine Darcy, is before anything else, a dancer. Jeff might laugh her off as the “eat, drink, and be merry girl” but we can see that she is devoted to her profession and works hard at it. She also proves to have unconventional taste in men, as we see in one of the film’s visual jokes: after spending nights handling herself quite ably as she “juggles wolves,” Miss Torso happily welcomes the unprepossessing Stanley home from the army. It’s a one-two punchline with Stanley heading straight to the icebox, and being a girl of good humor, she goes with it. In spite of the glib soubriquet that Jeff assigns her, Miss Torso is a complete person.
The heroine of Rear Window, however, tells us herself exactly who she is: “Lisa Carol Fremont” she announces, as she both figuratively and literally illuminates the room. We can see that she’s beautiful and wears knock-out clothes and we soon learn that she’s a busy career woman who lives a life that is both glamorous and industrious. If we were to turn the tables on Jeff and stare into his window and study this couple, we would hardly guess that it is Lisa who is the love subject in thrall to Jeff, her object. And yet, we are led to believe that this dream girl has bypassed a whole passel of eligible Park
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Figure 8
Avenue paramours in favor of this aging, scruffy, downtown photographer. With her, he is withholding and unintentionally hurtful, clinging to his independence with the reasoning that she could never keep up with this rough and rugged way of life. In the course of the story, Jeff remains hopelessly hobbled—both physically and emotionally—while Lisa eagerly takes on the job of being his legs, risking her life and proving that she has as much thirst for adventure as he (fig. 8). It is when he watches her in action that he finally sees what he has in her. “You should’ve seen her!” he gushes to Detective Doyle once she’s arrested. At last, the photographer’s eyes are opened and they have a future together. More than merely tapping into a latent venturesome spirit, Lisa evolves from a person preoccupied with the pretty things in life to one who can finally gain a full understanding of lives different from her Asown.with many Hitchcock heroines, Lisa’s character develops as she begins looking out and seeing things beyond her own rarefied existence. In the film’s coda, Jeff is sleeping and she is wide awake and watchful, putting aside Beyond the High Himalayas to sneak a look at Harper’s Bazaar , showing us that though she’s adaptable to Jeff’s way of life, she’ll be one wife who will not forget who she is.THE
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Sister Act: Psycho In its way of looking at women, few films have been subjected to as much painstaking scrutiny as Psycho. It may even be regarded by some as the cornerstone to Hitchcock’s alleged misogyny. This is a charge that I find curious because Psycho is very much a woman’s picture—told mostly from the points of view of three women: Marion Crane, Lila Crane, and, if you’ll allow me, Mrs. Bates. From the opening scene of lunch-time love with Marion and Sam, we can see that Sam lacks Marion’s edge and her keyed-up hunger. Marion is a mass of desire and longing but also crisp and assertive in her intentions toward Sam. She wants to get on with their life together while he sits around, bare-chested and inert, a static love object. We never track the exact moment that Marion decides to risk everything and abscond with Mr. Cassidy’s forty grand but when the goatish Cassidy brags about giving his daughter everything she wants, Marion recognizes that if there is something she wants, she’s going to have to go out and get it for herself. And so, she does. When she hits the road for Fairvale and Sam (fig. 9), we find ourselves fully in league with a thief. With her, we face the ordeal of a woman alone—the intimidation of a highway patrolman, the casual sexism of a used car dealer, and the feeling that at every turn she is being watched, as if there were something unusual in a woman driving her own car.4 So fully identified are we with Marion, we can even hear the voices in her head. When Cassidy joins that chorus, threatening to take his loss out on “her fine young flesh,” she smirks for all of us. The blinding rain forces her to turn into the Bates Motel, as the voices in our heads cry out “No! Don’t do it!” But she does. There, when Norman serves her sad last supper, we become even more deeply attached to this woman, confident that she will find her road to redemption. Her larcenous impulses notwithstanding, it is evident that Marion is a thoughtful, empathetic, and self-aware human being. While we don’t know exactly when she decided to take the money, it is clear that at this point she has decided to return it. She will leave at dawn for the long trip back to Phoenix.
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The following forty-five seconds of the shower that shook cinema has been analyzed plenty. To some critics, it marks the genesis of violence against women in the movies. To reduce it to that is to forget the entire first act of the film. This is not some unknown body in the shower: she is our Marion. She is Marion, with whom we have traveled and shared many an anxious moment, whose moral education we watched unfold, who we have been identifying with and rooting for. The murder of Marion is not, as some have suggested, the price she has to pay, for her crime or for her boldness. It is something far beyond that—it is a tragedy.
Enter Lila Crane, straightforward and determined to find her sister. The Crane sisters never appear together but they have a recognizable dynamic evoking Jane Austen’s Dashwood sisters of Sense and Sensibility. It’s reasonable to suspect that they grew up consistently analogous to Elinor and Marianne, with the sense of Lila-the-responsible, forever checking the sensibility of Marion-the-rash. The first step in Lila’s mission is to jostle Sam out of his complacency and enlist his help. Though a romance between the two is foreseeable, Lila is neither love’s subject nor object. A natural attachment with Sam may be in the works but there is none of
Figure 9
Marion goes to her room relieved and ready to pull herself out of her own trap. She takes account of money spent and owed and then prepares to scrub herself clean of her transgressions.
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Figure 10 the fervency that Marion exuded. What Lila does share with Marion is an inability to sit still. Once insurance detective Arbogast enters the picture and goes off to investigate alone, it is Lila who asks: “What are we going to do sit and wait?” To which Sam suggests they sit and wait. Once Arbogast goes missing and she wants to find him, Sam, finally agreeing to do something, tells her to wait while he goes on the hunt, and again she protests: “I can’t just sit and wait. Patience doesn’t run in my family.”
Lila never wavers.
At every moment of Lila’s and Sam’s search for Marion, it is Lila instigating the action. It is she who decides they’ll go to the motel and snoop around; it is she who insists on going up to the house (fig. 10); it is she who refuses to be satisfied, knowing something is very wrong; it is she who is confident that she “can handle a sick old woman” (though I’m convinced she’d tell Sam she could handle a healthy, young man if she had to.)
As for our third woman, Mrs. Bates, it is plain that it is only as a woman that Norman can take any kind of action, having no agency of his own. In the struggle between he and she, she gets the last word. As Dr. Richman, the psychiatrist, tells us: “The battle is over and the dominant personality has won.” In Psycho , it’s the women who dominate all the way
Ethrough.LISABETH KARLIN52
Alfred Hitchcock did not create these women alone (there were writers, actors, and Alma Reville), but it’s he who kept shoving these heroines to center stage. For all the speculation that’s out there on Hitchcock’s view of women, what matters is this:when Hitchcock’s camera looks at a woman through the eyes of a Hitchcock man, it sees not a stock-still sex object but a dashing woman on the move. It’s when Lisa returns from her escapade across the courtyard, breathless with excitement over her own daring, that Jeff looks at her with open eyes for the first time. It’s when John Aysgarth sees Lina MacKinlaw hold her seat on a rearing horse, that he is suddenly interested. In Stage Fright,love-struck Ordinary Smith, who can’t quite keep up with Eve, sighs: “Every time I’m beginning to think I know what color your eyes are—you disappear!” This is not the vision of a misogynist or of one who saw women as victims, defined by hair and wardrobe. When Iris Henderson gets on that train, it is as a slightly selfish bon viveur. Her encounter with Miss Froy sets off not just the plot but Iris’s ethical passage—one woman of action influencing another. Iris is on her way to comprehending the world at large and taking a useful place in it. The Lady Vanishes is also a love story, perhaps the happiest Hitchcock has given us. It’s only when Iris develops and grows into a woman of exceptional worth that she can be open to finding her proper partner. While so many of his romantic endings tend to be ambiguous with uncertain futures, here he gives us a truly joyful finale. When Iris joins forces with Gilbert, the bohemian
For his last word, in the final shot of his final film, Family Plot (1976), Hitchcock has Blanche—a character who is scrappy, enterprising, and with a touch of the devil—break the fourth wall to look back at us. Blanche is played by the unglamorous but treasured Barbara Harris (as with Bankhead, no director found a way to translate her stage magic to film as ideally as Hitchcock). He chose to close the film and ultimately his career with a wink from a woman who is as far from the Hitchcock blah-blah Blonde, as you can get.
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The Happy Ending
1.François Truffaut, with Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 167.
2.Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 368.ELISABETH
Figure 11 musicologist, we know this will work (fig. 11). He doesn’t explain things to her in the paternalistic style of Detective Graham. He doesn’t treat her like a hysterical patient in the manner of Dr. McKenna. He doesn’t have to be knocked into enlightenment, as Devlin and Jeff do, in order to appreciate what’s before him. Gilbert comes ready-made and receptive, taking Iris for what she is and loving her for it. And along the way, he happens to perfectly express the elemental essence of the Hitchcock heroine. “Do you know why you fascinate me? . . .” Gilbert asks Iris. “You have no manners at all and you’re always seeingNotesthings.” My thanks to Sidney Gottlieb for his expert editorial guidance and to Joel Gunz and Marc Strauss who gave me the opportunity to begin expounding on this subject.
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3.Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976), 268.
4.We often find Hitchcock women at the wheel of a car, either alone or with a man in the passenger seat (and often at high speeds!): Stage Fright opens with Eve driving Jonathan to elude the police; Pat Martin drives wanted man Barry Kane in Saboteur and manages to shackle him to the steering wheel; Erica in Young and Innocent is also driving a man wanted by the police; In both Notorious and To Catch a Thief, Cary Grant is at the mercy of fearless women drivers; Melanie in The Birds helms both a sports car and a motor boat; Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt drives her family to meet Uncle Charlie’s train; In Vertigo, Madeleine Elster covers a lot of ground in her green Jaguar, leading Scottie on a daily tour of San Francisco. When, as Judy, she is driven by Scottie on a final ride, it only adds to the poignancy of her end; Lina too, cedes the wheel to Johnny at the conclusion of Suspicion. As mere passengers, Judy and Lina, in their ultimate submissiveness, are anomalies in the gallery of Hitchcock
Theroines.HEDYNAMIC HEROINESOF HITCHCOCK 55
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Review Essays: David Sterritt on Out of the Fog in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, Matthew Solomon on “Too-Close Hitchcock’s Rope, Neil Badmington on How the Words Appear in Žižek’s Hitchcock
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Thomas Leitch on Awakening from Hitchcock’s Nightmares
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Lesley Brill on the Possessive Passions of Hitchcock’s Villains
Michael Slowik on Hitchcock’s Notes on Sound Elisabeth Karlin on the Dynamic Heroines of Hitchcock
Elizabeth Bullock on Marital and Cinematic Gamesmanship Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith
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The Pleasure Garden The Mountain Eagle The Lodger Downhill Easy Virtue The Ring The Farmer’s Wife Champagne The Manxman Blackmail Juno and the Paycock Murder! The Skin Game Number Seventeen Rich and Strange Waltzes from Vienna The Man Who Knew Too Much The 39 Steps Secret Agent Sabotage Young and Innocent The Lady Vanishes Jamaica Inn Rebecca Foreign Correspondent Mr. and Mrs. Smith Suspicion Saboteur Shadow of a Doubt Lifeboat Spellbound Notorious The Paradine Case Rope Under Capricorn Stage Fright Strangers on a Train I Confess Dial M for Murder Rear Window To Catch a Thief The Trouble with Harry The Man Who Knew Too Much The Wrong Man Vertigo North by Northwest Psycho The Birds Marnie Torn Curtain Topaz Frenzy Family Plot The Pleasure Garden The Mountain Eagle The Lodger The Farmer’s Wife Champagne The Manxman Blackmail Juno and the Paycock Murder! ISBN ANNUAL978-0-231-20479-8252021 The Skin Game Rich and Strange The Man Who Knew Number Seventeen Waltzes from Vienna Too Much Downhill Secret Agent Sabotage Young and Innocent The Lady Vanishes Jamaica Inn Rebecca Foreign Correspondent Mr. and Mrs. Smith Suspicion IN THIS ISSUE n
Viewing”
Norman Buckley on Echoes of Loss in Vertigo and Birth Christina Lane on Young and Innocent and Becoming Joanie and Hitchy
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Review by David Greven of Patricia White, Rebecca
