Hitchcock is recognized as one of the great auteurs, and he frequently praises the model of what he calls “one-man pictures,” films that bear the signature of a strong producer-director, knowledgeable in all areas of cinematic technique, construction, and economics. The essays and interviews in this section, though, show Hitchcock’s deep awareness that an auteur by no means operates independently but rather in the context of stylistic conventions, production routines, and institutional pressures that set up the horizon of filmmaking (a highly charged term for a director who often identifies his ideal sight as a clear horizon). Describing these circumstances helps Hitchcock analyze why films turn out as they do—that is to say, why films are often unexciting, “stodgy,” and without a soul—and how this might be remedied. He offers not only critical comments and idealistic suggestions but also his own production method as one possible way out of the “old ruts.” Despite his enthusiasm for reform, though, the underlying tone here is often somber, born of the knowledge that film is as much, if not more, an art of unequal negotiation as it is an art of imagination.
“Films We Could Make,” for example, might well be subtitled “And Why We Can’t Make Them.” An important background for his essay is what Tom Ryall calls “the quest for national cinematic identity” (Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema, 61) in the mid-1920s, an attempt to strengthen the confidence and economic base of the British film industry and decrease reliance on imported films, especially from America. (This movement culminated in the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, which had the unfortunate effect of creating not quality pictures but “quota quickies,” made to satisfy the mandate that a certain percentage of films had to be British productions.) Hitchcock participates in this quest not only by enthusiastically calling for films about British village boys, rural dramas, and sea stories but by making such a film himself: The Manxman, one of his finest silent films, which went into production not long after this essay was written, incorporates all these elements.
But a change in subject matter is only one of Hitchcock’s wishes—and somewhat easier to accomplish than his desire to make films that live up to the medium’s full artistic potential. British cinema is a capital-intensive commercial enterprise, and in a situation where the financiers demand profits, the “average filmgoer misses little points which were apparently too subtle,” and the aesthetically interested and sophisticated audience is a small minority, directors do not have the freedom to experiment with films of “rhythmic movement and light and shade” or “studies of cubes and circles . . . like a Cubist painting in motion.” Such elements, however, can be integrated into commercial films. Hitchcock was obviously aware of but does not, for example, make an entire film comparable to Marcel Duchamp’s Anaemic Cinema (1926) or Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mecanique (shown at the London Film Society in March 1926). He does, though, use such avant-garde images and techniques as swirling circles and dreamlike, disordered, kaleidoscopic perspectives to good effect in a number of early films such as Blackmail and Murder! The making of fully satisfying and successful films is for Hitchcock always a matter of balancing “arty” elements with commercial considerations, a balancing act that he mastered. (At this time I suspect that the film Variety [1925]—echoed repeatedly in Murder! and later listed as one of his ten favorite films—was a particularly influential model for him of how one could effectively harmonize experimentation and mass entertainment.) But especially early in his career, one occasionally senses Hitchcock’s regret that a creative compromise is still a compromise.
Although he resigns himself to working within the system, he does not hesitate to shake things up a bit. “‘Stodgy’ British Pictures,” for example, begins from unexceptional premises—films, he says, must be entertaining and realistic to create sympathetic attachment to the main characters—but generates a manifestolike urgency. Like Truffaut many years later in “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” which shows more than a trace of the Master’s influence on the young critic and theoretician, Hitchcock energetically calls for films to be fresh and unusual, atmospheric and cinematically varied rather than literary and predictable. Conventional films are “stodgy” not because they are theatrical but because they fail to learn the lesson of the best plays: drama on stage and on screen should be based on contrast, light and shade, and a comic touch that adds both a sugar coating and a bang to the action. (Hitchcock so typically emphasizes suspense that we should pay careful attention to places where he notes the importance of “complete unexpectedness.”) And, following the example of American films, he notes that British films need to get out more: “Why must we always stick to our middle-class drawing rooms and our middle-class characters?” He elaborates on this argument in “More Cabbages, Fewer Kings,” a plea for British films to stop ignoring “the dramatic coloring to be picked out in the existence of the ordinary people.” Here he describes these people somewhat loosely as “middle class,” but it is clear that he has in mind not the drawing room crowd but the more “colorful belt” of working people, “the men who leap on buses, the girls who pack into the Tube,” and so on. “I am trying to get this stratum of England on the screen,” he says, but it is a difficult battle: filmmakers are restricted by “a hard enemy” of complacent audiences and recalcitrant tastemakers, arbiters of conventionality.
He shrewdly analyzes what might be called these anticinematic forces throughout the pieces collected in this section. Some of the most pressing director’s problems, as he notes in his essay of that title, are economic. After calculating what must be paid for studio rent, equipment, setting, salaries for actors and actresses, film stock, script preparation, technicians’ and director’s fees, and insurance, he concludes that the high cost of making a film is a “Moloch that engulfs everything.” The immediate casualty is cinematic art: “When you are working with those figures there does not seem much hope of experimenting with new ideas.” Ironically, the innate power of cinema to appeal to a universal audience “automatically” imprisons it in an antiaesthetic of common simple stories with happy endings that, he concludes, “has pretty well gone a long way to destroy it as an art.”
In struggling to define and salvage cinema as an art, Hitchcock realizes that he has to do battle with more than mundane audiences, profit-hungry executives, and market conditions. As if this is not enough, there was still much resistance among highbrow critics to the idea that film should be taken seriously as a form of cultural and artistic expression. The specific background of Hitchcock’s essay “Much Ado About Nothing?” is an attack by the arch-Shakespearean critic and man of the theater Harley Granville-Barker on recent films of Shakespearean plays. Why should Hitchcock get involved in this debate? Nearly ten years later he announced plans to make a film of Hamlet with Cary Grant, an unrealized project that he spent more time on in court (defending against a legal action brought by a disgruntled writer who claimed that his rights were being infringed by the proposed film) than in preproduction work, but in the late 1930s Hitchcock had no particular stake in Shakespearean films. It was undoubtedly Granville-Barker’s implicit more than his explicit arguments, though, that exercised Hitchcock, and he energetically and effectively defends the legitimacy of visual expression, the independence of cinema from literature, and the role of cinema as not only a mediator of high culture, bringing Shakespeare to the people, but also as a valuable cultural product in its own right.
Far more formidable an adversary for Hitchcock than Granville-Barker is the institutionalized pressure of the censor. As both Annette Kuhn, in Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality 1909–1925, and James C. Robertson, in The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1975, have recently analyzed in great detail, various censorship boards and unwritten as well as written codes exerted a great deal of influence on filmmakers and exhibitors in England during the 1920s and 1930s, and Hitchcock was a frequent contributor to and focal point of the ongoing debate about censorship in film magazines and newspapers. (See, for example, “The 39 Steps: An Appreciation of the New Hitchcock Film, with a Word on Censorship,” New York Times, September 22, 1935, sec. 10, p. 5; the editorial “Hitchcock vs. the Censor,” Film Weekly, May 16, 1936, 3, noted by Sloan, 352; and W. H. Modaine, “Films that Hollywood Dare Not Make,” Film Weekly, August 4, 1938.) Hitchcock notes matter-of-factly in “Director’s Problems” that “There are dozens of films I want to do” but cannot, including one about “a prison governor who revolts against his job of hanging a man.” This would not be allowed: “Capital punishment is part of our law, and we mustn’t propagate against it.” In “The Censor and Sydney Street,” he says that he “would like to make a film showing the balance of justice in English courts” (the legal system is a recurrent topic whenever he discusses films he would like to make). This is understandably another example of a subject that would cause “difficulties with the censor”: we know from the films Hitchcock did make that he was both fascinated by the law and deeply critical of its mechanisms and operations.
Hitchcock’s most interesting observations on censorship come in “The Censor Wouldn’t Pass it,” in which part of his defense against the claim that his typical film formula is beginning to wear “just a little thin” is his complaint that his options are very restricted. Those who think of Hitchcock as primarily and intentionally a formalist and “nonpolitical” artist may be surprised to hear him explain, “Circumstances have forced me into the realms of fiction. I have always wanted to make films with some sociological importance—but I have never been allowed to do so.” His most startling statement is that he wanted to make a film about the General Strike of 1926, showing “fistfights between strikers and undergraduates, pickets, and all the authentic drama of the situation,” but this was “immediately vetoed” by the British Board of Film censors. Even one of his current film projects, Titanic, he says, is encountering political opposition because cruise operators do not want anyone to be reminded of the horror of the sinking of the Titanic and the incompetence that may have precipitated it.
“The Censor Wouldn’t Pass It” thus helps revise our understanding of Hitchcock in two important ways. First, it at least partially explains why his films do not focus directly on certain political topics that he otherwise was interested in. “Do not blame me for ignoring such subjects,” he concludes. “Blame Whitehall.” Second, it reminds us that these political interests are not always ignored but often obliquely reflected in his films. He did, after all, manage to get a Sydney Street siege scene into The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). And although he never made his film on the General Strike, he did not drop the subject completely: The Manxman, for example, is set during a time of economic distress and labor protest and subtly announces its political subthemes by stylistic allusions to Eisenstein. Politics is no mere MacGuffin for Hitchcock, and much more work needs to be done on the often very subtle political dimensions and intentions of his films, as he himself alerts us in his writings.
Hitchcock’s analysis of the many pressures and restrictions imposed on filmmakers led him to an inevitable conclusion: “Directors are dead,” he announced, in his characteristically outrageous manner. This is not a statement of capitulation or despair but a sensible acknowledgment of current conditions and the beginning of a call for change. For Hitchcock, filmmaking, like politics, is an art of the possible, and many of his writings illustrate how skillfully he maneuvered within the cinematic establishment, carving out a creative space for himself. But we also catch glimpses of Hitchcock attempting to seize as much control of the system as possible. “Directors are dead” is only the first part of his proposition, which ends implicitly with a hopeful cry, “Long live the producer-director.”
If films are to improve, the material and managerial conditions of filmmaking must change, and Hitchcock fantasizes about how he might like this to happen in “If I Were Head of a Production Company.” Unlike the Americans, who have a well-supplied but mechanical production system that creates films without a “soul,” he wants an experimental but integrated system, wherein “one guiding mind is behind the whole production.” Filmmakers need physical space, and in this respect he wants to follow the model of American and German studios, with their extensive capital resources, including state-of-the-art equipment and solid, permanent sets that are cost-efficient and add high production values to their films. But even more important is “mental elbow-room,” rarely a characteristic of a system in which directors are “functionaries” in an assembly-line process, there “only to direct.” The ideal director for Hitchcock is a director-writer-producer, well versed in everything from camera setups to market research but whose primary commitment is to working out all details “in terms of cinema.”
Hitchcock’s vision is more than a fantasy. In “Directors Are Dead,” he notes that the film industry is indeed beginning to move away both from old-style producers who were merely moneymen and ruined pictures by thoughtless cost-cutting and from old-style directors who ruined many pictures by their lack of restraint and careless, unprofessional work habits. The new age Hitchcock foresees will be one of strong producers, overseeing and supporting strong directors (if, indeed, they are not also directors themselves), and he gives the names of many who are leading the way, including David Selznick, Victor Saville, Alexander Korda, Michael Balcon, Pandro S. Berman, Ernst Lubitsch, and Frank Capra.
Conspicuous by its absence on this list is Hitchcock’s own name, but it is clear that he is not only surveying the current state of filmmaking but charting his own future as a director-producer and both forging and describing his approach to film. He turns more directly to his own practice in such essays as “Production Methods Compared” and “Film Production” but still with an eye toward situating himself against the background of conventional filmmaking. In “Production Methods Compared,” for example, he not only offers many specific comments on what goes into the making of a good Hitchcock film—flexibility, efficient pictorial storytelling, careful preplanning, and harmony, that is, the integration of all shots into a cinematic whole—but also seems to be trying to position himself as a filmmaker somewhere between the careless hacks who have only a rudimentary sense of cinematic construction and the overly sophisticated directors who have no concern for a mass audience and make films only for those few who have a “special knowledge of filmmaking.” He is shy of being too “arty,” but he also acknowledges that “a picture maker need not try to please everyone.”
“Film Production” is his longest essay, and it is both a survey of film history and technique and a deeply personal statement of his particular methods and concerns. The latter are conveyed both directly—by inserting many of his well-known statements about suspense, the pictorial basis of cinema, acting as the ability “to do nothing—well,” and so on—and obliquely, through subtle allusions to many of his own films: the discussion of the possibility of dramatic action in a phone booth recalls Blackmail; “murder by a babbling brook” is the basic premise of The Trouble with Harry; the description of how to film a boxing match echoes his technique in The Ring; and the example of sound used to evoke “a stream of consciousness over an unspeaking mouth” is drawn from one of the most memorable scenes in Murder! But the point here is not to blow his own horn. Rather, it is to continue his lifelong effort to determine and assert his place in the dynamic history of film. The concluding sections of the essay show that even after forty years in the business, he was still assessing the impact of changing modes of film production, new patterns of distribution, and the impact of new technology, especially color, the wide screen, and television.
The story of Hitchcock’s career, illustrated in his writings as well as, of course, his films, is one of creative response to such challenges. All the more unfortunate, then, that the last essay in this section shows Hitchcock late in his career, without much buoyancy and resiliency. “In the Hall of Mogul Kings” is both a nostalgic look back at the days when films were hammered out under the supervision of creative talents like David Selznick and Irving Thalberg and a worried look at the current vogue of the “instant producers,” no-name moneymen who are masters, not of cinema, but of the “package deal.” His concern for “the future of the craft of the cinema for world entertainment” perhaps coincides with anxiety over his own position in the changing film establishment. Still, it is bracing to hear him acknowledge, however briefly, that there will be “survivors” of “the hit-and-miss era of picture making”—“purely creative people: producers-directors, writer-directors, producer-writers, etc.” Hitchcock was such a survivor.