Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie

The subject matter of Tony Lee Moral’s Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie is self-explanatory. It was published in 2002 and a revised edition followed in 2013.

I’m quite a fan of Hitchcock’s much maligned and much misunderstood Marnie. It’s a movie that has its problems but it has major strengths as well, it’s extraordinarily bold thematically structurally and stylistically and it’s ambitious. It sees Hitchcock once again attempting a different approach, just as he had done with Psycho and The Birds. It was savaged by critics who displayed unbelievable obtuseness in failing to comprehend that if Hitchcock made a movie in a particular way that was because he thought that that was the way that movie needed to be made. He always did things for a reason.

I’m always happy to see this movie get some attention, especially sympathetic attention. And Moral is certainly keen to see Marnie get a positive re-evaluation and recognition as one of Hitchcock’s major films.

There’s a lot to like about this book. The author offers us an exhaustively detailed account of the genesis of the movie, the various attempts to come up with the right screenplay, Hitchcock’s attempts to persuade Grace Kelly to take the lead role and the process of actually making the film. Moral seems somewhat suspicious of auteurist theory and (rightly) emphasises the contributions of Hitchcock’s extremely talented collaborators. We really feel that we are watching the making of the movie unfold.

The level of detail is impressive and absolutely fascinating.

He also addresses the absurdity of the attacks on the movie by film critics at that time. The movie was attacked for not looking realistic. You have to wonder if those critics had ever watched a Hitchcock movie, or rather you have to ask if they had ever understood a Hitchcock movie. Hitchcock was never slavishly devoted to realism, and Moral (correctly) points out that Hitchcock’s movies are uncompromisingly subjective. We see the point of view of a particular character whose view of reality is subtly, or sometimes seriously, distorted. The use of rear projection and the controversial use of an obvious painted backdrop in a crucial scene enhance the movie’s feel of subtle unreality. Marnie’s view of the world is distorted by her fears. Moral disposes of these silly attacks by critics in fine style.

He’s also determined to defends Hitchcock from some of the ridiculous and hysterical attacks on his character by people Donald Spoto.

Moral is incredibly good on the subject of the marketing and critical and commercial reception of Marnie.

When he tries his hand at interpretation of the movie he’s on much less solid ground, often resorting to meaningless film school waffle, ideological buzz-words and psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo even sillier than that found in the movie itself. Moral would have been well advised to stick to giving us information about the production while letting us make up out own minds what the movie means.

There’s a silly chapter on the various pretentious arty types who have exploited the movie’s notoriety for their own ends.

The information on the dramatic changes the script went through at the hands of three separate writers is intriguing, and he deals well with the slightly controversial question of Hitchcock’s decision to fire Evan Hunter. The extra chapters added for the revised version give us more information than we could possibly require about the author of the original novel, Winston Graham, and the writer of the final screenplay, Jay Presson Allen. He also tells us at immense length abut Hitchcock’s abortive attempt to film J.M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose. This is reasonably interesting but it’s veering wildly off-topic.

This is not a particularly well written or well structured book. It really needed some attention from a good editor.

It’s the copious amounts of information on the journey from Hitchcock’s original idea of filming Winston Graham’s novel to the time the cameras started rolling, and on the movie’s fate after its release, that makes this book an essential read for Hitchcock fans. For those reasons, despite some flaws, it’s highly recommended.

Leave Her To Heaven, the novel

Leave Her To Heaven was a 1944 bestseller by Ben Ames Williams. The 1945 movie is now much better remembered (in fact it’s one of the half dozen best Hollywood movies of the 40s). I’ve become very  interested in tracking down the source novels of some of my favourite movies. I was lucky enough find an affordable used copy of Williams' novel (it is of course long out of print).

The film followed the plot of the book fairly closely, with a few significant and extremely interesting changes.

If you're a fan of the movie the book is worth a look.

Here's my review of Leave Her To Heaven, the novel.

some books on which classic movies were based

I always find it interesting to check out the books on which some of my favourite movies were based. And since I have a book blog (Vintage Pop Fictions) as well as my movie blogs I post reviews of some of these source books. Here are some links to some of the interesting ones, plus links to my reviews of the movies in question.

Anthony Hope’s classic adventure tale The Prisoner of Zenda was filmed several times, the most notable version having been made in 1937.

Talbot Mundy’s King of the Khyber Rifles is another of the great adventure stories. The  1953 film version stars Tyrone Power.

Johnston McCulley's The Curse of Capistrano (later retitled The Mark of Zorro) was very entertainingly filmed as The Mark of Zorro in 1940, and there was of course a fine silent version as well. 

Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male was the source for Fritz Lang’s excellent 1941 spy thriller Man Hunt.

Horace McCoy's amazingly bleak Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye became a movie of the same name and a starring vehicle for James Cagney in 1950. It’s one of many cases of a movie being considerably better than the novel it was based on.

Eric Ambler’s superb gritty spy novel Epitaph for a Spy became a very good 1944 British spy movie under the title Hotel Reserve.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four has been filmed multiple times, including a 1932 British version.

There have been several movies of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, including the very loose 1937 adaptation.

And Rudyard Kipling’s magnificent short story The Man Who Would Be King was turned into John Huston’s greatest movie in 1975.

Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille

Scott Eyman’s Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille is biography on the grand scale, which is of course the only way anyone could do justice to a man like DeMille.

DeMille has been out of critical favour for decades and to most people today his name is synonymous with everything they think was wrong with Hollywood in its heyday - that his movies were too commercial, too grandiose and too old-fashioned. Happily that situation seems to be improving slightly with the DVD era allowing people to see his movies looking more or less as they should look. And while US critics tended to be dismissive of DeMille even when he was at the height of his popularity in France he has long been regarded as one of the greats, and rightly so.

DeMille was more than just a director. He was one of the founders of the American film industry. He was one of the creators of Paramount Studios and one of the true pioneers of the industry. He was directing films as early as 1914. By the mid-1910s we was one of the major film-makers in Hollywood, the creative backbone of the studio that would eventually become Paramount. And unlike many of the other pioneers of the industry, forty years later  he was still one of the major players in the industry.

A movie directed by DeMille was always a Cecil B. DeMille movie. He was never a director-for-hire. He directed and produced, he either initiated or approved the original concept, he exercised ultimate control over the casting. Every set and every costume was approved by him. He had the final say on whether the screenplay was acceptable or not. if he wasn’t happy with the screenplay it got rewritten. Every movie he made had the Cecil B. DeMille stamp on it, and was instantly recognisable as one of his productions. As French critics realised back in the 50s, DeMille was a true auteur.

DeMille also had the extraordinary knack of being able to continue making movies his way right up to the very end of his career, whilst still pleasing the cinema-going public. His movies expressed his own distinctive vision but he never lost touch with his audience. His last two movies were the biggest hits of his career, and his final movie, the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, was one of the greatest box-office successes of all time. Within a few short years it had been seen by almost a hundred million people, making it still one of the most popular movies ever made, with the only real challenger being Gone with the Wind. A success on that scale from a man in his seventies at the very end of his career is without parallel.

And he was much much more than a director of epics. His output encompasses most genres. His 1920s silent comedies starring Gloria Swanson are among the best ever made. With his 1936 hit The Plainsman he transformed the western from a minor B-movie genre into a major genre worthy of the talents of the best directors in the industry.

The coming of sound made no difference to him. He refused to change his style, always insisting that the motion picture was a visual medium and that it was the image that counted. And DeMille was always technically at the cutting edge. The introduction of sound meant that the camera had to be insulated from the action by a glass wall so that the microphones would not pick up the sound of the camera. This limited the choice of camera angles and reduced the quality of the image. This was totally unacceptable to DeMille, and he did not accept it. He insisted that a solution be found, and it was found.

Scott Eyman does a magnificent job of chronicling DeMille’s career, while also giving us a thorough understanding of a very complex man. DeMille was and still is a controversial figure for both his private life and his politics. Eyman does not gloss over DeMille’s faults but he is remarkably fair about DeMille’s politics, making it clear that DeMille was always making a sincere stand on principles in which he firmly believed.

Despite his reputation as a control freak on the set DeMille was a man capable of extraordinary generosity and great kindness. He never forgot anyone who worked for him. Many of the actors of the silent era had fallen on hard times when sound came in but DeMille would always manage to find at least small parts for them in his later movies. DeMille was widely disliked, but almost always by people who did not know him. Those who actually worked for him remembered him with both reverence and affection.

This is by no means a mere exercise in hero worship. DeMille’s achievements are substantial enough to speak for themselves.

DeMille always believed in offering his audience entertainment and it’s fitting that Eyman’s biography is equally entertaining. A fascinating account of a great career that is equally valuable portrait of Hollywood at its greatest. Highly recommended.

The Genius of the System

The Genius of the System isn’t quite a history of Hollywood during the golden age. As the author admits, to have tried to tackle the history of all the studios in this period would have been beyond the resources of a single writer and would have made for an inordinately long book. Instead author Thomas Schatz concentrates his attention on two major studios, one minor studio and one independent producer.

The two major studios Schataz chooses are MGM and Warner Brothers, his third subject is one of the “major minors,” in this case Universal, and the independent producer David O. Selznick.

The great strength of this book is that the author does not set out with a preconceived idea that the studio system was repressive or morally dubious, or that studio executives like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner or Darryl F. Zanuck were monsters. As his book makes clear, Hollywood in its golden age made great movies as a result of a fruitful partnership between  enlightened but practical studio executives, visionary producers and talented directors.

The book’s other great strength is that Schatz largely ignores the auteur theory, the theory that there is only one true creative force behind any movie and that force is the director. He argues, very convincingly, that producers had at least as much impact on the finished product as directors and that those directors who are usually singled out for auteur status were those directors who were able to combine the roles of director and producer.

The great strength of the studio system is that it created an environment in which creativity could blossom and in which a unique balance was achieved between business and art. Even those mavericks who operated largely outside the studio system needed the support that the studio system provided. The creative personnel who bucked the system, people like Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick, flourished during the great days of the studio system.

The studio system represented a unique partnership between capitalism and art, and it worked. When it was destroyed, by a combination of television and excessively zealous government intervention in the marketplace, the result was a cultural tragedy of epic proportions. A unique balance has been achieved and once that balance was disrupted Hollywood started on a downward slide that has continued to this day.

The Genius of the System is one of the finest books ever written about Hollywood and is highly recommended to anyone who loves movies.

The Birds - Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s book on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (published by the British Film Institute in 1998) focuses, not surprisingly, more on the women in the movie than on the birds.

This approach is I think quite justified. It’s easy to get carried away by the technical achievements of the film (which were mightily impressive in 1963) but given Hitchcock’s obsession with women and his famously ambivalent attitudes towards them it makes sense to concentrate on the fascinating dynamics between the various female characters.

There’s certainly a power struggle going on between Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch’s rather possessive mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy), and of course there’s the rivalry between Melanie and Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) for Mitch’s affections.

Paglia also notes the gradual disintegration of Melanie. She starts out as confident and assertive, perhaps even aggressive. Her pursuit of Mitch is certainly aggressive. She has the self-confidence that money brings, but as  is often the case with inherited rather than earned wealth it’s a rather superficial self-confidence. By the end of the movie she’s down, if not quite out. And Lydia has reasserted her power.

Paglia sees a parallel between the remorseless and mysterious power of nature and female power. Paglia has never subscribed to a view of women as powerless and this sort of parallel not surprisingly appeals to her.

She also makes a strong case that Tippi Hedren’s performance has been under-appreciated and I think she’s right. Considering her inexperience her roles in the two movies she made with Hitchcock, The Birds and Marnie, were both very demanding and in both cases she acquitted herself well.

I’ve always considered The Birds to be one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces and Paglia’s book makes me want to watch this movie yet again, even though I’ve seen it at least a dozen times. The book is typical Paglia - provocative and amusing and idiosyncratic. I highly recommend it.