Hitchcock is frequently thought of and highly regarded as a unique and innovative formalist, interested primarily in exploring film structure and technique, and as a fantasist, centering his films around eruptions of the extraordinary. But he seems to have always thought of himself as a “realist,” a notoriously slippery and ambiguous term, but one that conveys his awareness of various forces that restricted his autonomy: he worked within a studio system; filmmaking is a commercial as well as an artistic enterprise; and the audience is in some ways as much of a director as the filmmaker, demanding vivid, lifelike characters and at least a touch of reality in their entertainments. As early as the 1930s, the period from which all but one of the essays in this section are drawn, Hitchcock was shrewdly commenting on a complex of associated topics, related to the above issues, that have become major points of interest in contemporary film criticism more than fifty years later: the star system, women on screen and in the audience, and the economic and market determinants of cinematic expression.
Hitchcock had a simple answer for the question “Are stars necessary?”—of course they are!—but in his brief essay of that title, he carefully notes that this answer is dictated to film producers by the public. He defends “star worship” with a quick glance at audience psychology—“it fills some inherent need of which I see no reason why the public should be deprived”—but he stresses, first and foremost, that stars are an economic necessity, the “magnets” that draw people to the box office. Even the astonishingly large amount of money paid to such stars as Maurice Chevalier is not unreasonable: stars more than pay their own way by filling the house day after day.
At various points in his life, Hitchcock complained about the star system: as he told Truffaut, he was not happy when stars were forced on him for unsuitable roles, and especially later in his career, when he was a producer of and profit sharer in his films, he was upset by the increasingly large proportion of money that went to stars’ salaries. Perhaps Hitchcock is describing his own wistful dreams when at the beginning of “Are Stars Necessary?” he says, “There are idealists who consider films as an art pure and simple, and who say that all actors should be subordinate to the film.” Still, Hitchcock was a “realist” and accommodated himself to the system, although not without resistance: his defense of the star system here is less memorable than his persistent statements elsewhere about treating actors like cattle and children and his admiration for Walt Disney’s control over his stars, who could easily be redrawn or erased; and he was certainly one of those who tried to establish that even apart from famous actors and actresses, the director could be a star and box office magnet. But perhaps more important than his resistance is his creative adaptation, his ability to use stars for his own purposes. As he notes in another essay of the 1930s, “If I Were Head of a Production Company,” included in the Film Production section below, stars can be used as camouflage, as the “jam round the pill,” pleasing and entertaining the audience, but thereby allowing the director to experiment with new techniques that might not otherwise be acceptable in a commercial medium.
Some of Hitchcock’s most interesting comments in these essays revolve around his descriptions of his particular use of stars and his understanding of what the shape of their careers should be. In “Crime Doesn’t Pay,” he notes that while menacing roles provide a good entry into films, an actor should move rather quickly from villain to straight actor to comedian. His rationale is basically economic: audiences typically do not sympathize with and, more important, do not pay to see the “heavy,” so a long and successful career cannot be based on such roles. There is, to be sure, some simplistic advice in this essay, but perhaps we may read between the lines to see Hitchcock beginning to conceptualize the complicated villains he is usually associated with: sympathetic, attractive, comic, and in almost all ways a captivating screen presence. He notes in passing that the “Continental” model is much different from the Hollywood model: on the Continent, for example, Peter Lorre (whom he had in fact already worked with in several films and praised for his fine acting and humorous villainy) is tremendously popular, because of rather than in spite of “the macabre M.” Hitchcock’s attraction to this model is apparent, even in an essay that seems to recommend another, and one senses that what he outlines for an actor as the stages of a successful career soon becomes what he demands from an actor in the course of one Hitchcock film—that he be simultaneously a menacing villain, skilled straight actor, and entertaining comedian, indeed, Hitchcock notes with great satisfaction, as Lorre was in Secret Agent.
Modern critics often emphasize the relationship of the star system to industrial modes of production, suggesting that stars help satisfy consumer demands for readily identifiable and predictable as well as high-quality commodities. We know what we are buying, for example, when we pay to see a Cary Grant film. Hitchcock, though, is particularly intrigued by using actors and actresses “against the grain,” in unpredictable and unconventional ways. In “What I’d Do to the Stars,” written just as he was about to leave England for Hollywood to work with David Selznick, Hitchcock looks forward to “working under new conditions with an entirely fresh crowd of people,” partly to take advantage of the well-established skills of a new cast of characters but also to stretch and modify their talents. He knows and appreciates the characteristic strengths of many Hollywood stars: William Powell, for example, is so trustworthy and skillful in both melodrama and comedy that Hitchcock could let himself go completely while working with him, and Gary Cooper is a perfect illustration of Hitchcock’s often-repeated description of the ideal actor, capable of doing nothing and doing it extremely well. But he criticizes the Hollywood system for “the way it allows its stars to get into a groove” (for further comments on this topic, see Hitchcock’s nearly contemporary essay “Old Ruts Are New Ruts,” included in the Film Production section) and says boldly, “There is scarcely a star in Hollywood whose appeal I would not try to alter or develop.”
As much as Hitchcock is ostensibly commenting on the star system, though, there seems to be much more going on barely beneath the surface when he turns his comments toward what he does and would do to the female stars who come under his control. By this time in his career, as his interviewer in “What I’d Do to the Stars” notes, Hitchcock had already “developed a reputation as a misogynist,” a charge that Hitchcock does not so much deny as rationalize. He finds British actresses far too dignified and takes delight in “debunking” them, imagining Marlene Dietrich “sucking a toffee-apple” and Claudette Colbert playing “a beautiful mannequin who, having risen from the gutter, has to keep up a good appearance but who is, in her soul, lazy, good-natured, irresponsible, and slightly sluttish.” He repeatedly notes that women should not be glamorized, because, as he explains in “How I Choose My Heroines,” the primary film audience is composed of women who are not particularly interested in the physical sex appeal of the female characters and also, as he explains in “Women Are a Nuisance,” because “reality,” not artificial beauty, is “the most important factor in the making of a successful film.” But this does not account for his evident glee in deglamorizing women in his films—the fine line between “humanizing” and “humiliating” women may be overstepped when he confesses “Nothing pleases me more than to knock the ladylikeness out of chorus girls!”—and his attentiveness to, as he puts it, “whether my potential heroine is sensitive to direction. In other words, whether she is the kind of girl I can mold into the heroine of my imagination.”
“Nova Grows Up” is Hitchcock’s most extensive commentary on molding one of his actresses, and it is both remarkably candid and telling. The essay is shot through with critical comments about what he describes as Nova’s early unwillingness to be directed by him. His final praise for her quick development into an experienced actress is lavish and genuine but by no means unalloyed: she grows up from her early, somewhat annoying “self-confidence” to a maturity characterized by compliance and unassuming willingness to take direction. Derrick de Marney, the male lead in Young and Innocent, reported that Hitchcock was generally sharp-tongued but “deferential” and kind only to Nova on the set (quoted in Spoto, 180). But in “Nova Grows Up,” Hitchcock admits that he teased her, and even though his phrases may simply be loose overstatements, his description of “threatening” her to the point where she was “terrified” is not altogether innocuous. He talks adoringly about using her in his next picture, but this was not to be. Spoto says a film titled Empty World, to be directed by Hitchcock, was announced but then never heard of again (195). He notes that Nova was mentioned as signed for The Lady Vanishes, but Margaret Lockwood got the role. And Leonard Leff documents how vehemently Hitchcock argued against Selznick’s wishes to use Nova as the female lead in Rebecca (49–51). Hitchcock’s attraction to Nova was thus by no means simple or uncomplicated.
While we should not overanalyze such essays, we should nevertheless not miss the clear signs that the prospect of a young woman growing up in front of him both charms and disturbs Hitchcock. Barely beneath the surface we see what may well be a characteristic mixture of adoration, desire, jealousy (fantasizing about the “tragedy” of getting her “into the hands of Hollywood makeup men”), manipulation, and active hostility. What at first glance seems to be a superficial piece of publicity writing for his current film turns out to give a great deal of insight into the perennially intriguing problem of Hitchcock’s conception of and relationship with women, on the screen and on the set.
Nearly twenty-five years later he was still pondering over his “conception of femininity” in “Elegance Above Sex,” and he was still giving evidence that this subject remained mysterious and problematic. He has little interest in the obvious sexuality of a “big, bosomy blonde” but confesses himself particularly interested in elegant ladies, like Grace Kelly, who “blossom out for me splendidly.” Written at the time when he was just introducing Tippi Hedren, who Spoto envisions as the most egregiously manipulated of all Hitchcock’s leading ladies, these sentiments are more than a little troubling. Hitchcock concludes by saying that “a woman of elegance . . . will never cease to surprise you,” but it may well be that the director generates just as many surprises in his complex treatment and representation of women.