Day 93/97 - The Girl (HBO, 2012)

HBO’s The Girl, based on two chapters of Donald Spoto’s Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, concentrates on The Birds and Marnie, the only two films Tippi Hedren made for Hitchcock and their relationship. The whole thing suggests to any armchair-psychologist that Hitchcock fell victim to the same kind of obsession he filmed in Vertigo, where Jimmy Stewart finds Kim Novak, a woman who looks like a woman he has loved and lost and forces her to undergo changes to become the woman he loved.

Hitchcock was a genius filmmaker, but his treatment of women like Hedren suggests an almost infantile need to control them. Today, he might have been sued for sexual harassment. Back in the 1960s, people accepted his actions as part of his quirks.

Hitchcock first sees Hedren in a commercial on television, when his wife Alma suggests she has a pretty smile. Hitchcock traces her down and puts her under contract for seven years. Her first attempts at acting are embarrassingly bad, but Hitchcock is not deterred.

Toby Jones’ Hitchcock, inspired perhaps by Spoto’s  insights, becomes a highly complex character, who has a love/hate relationship with his wife Alma, tells dirty limericks to Hedren knowing she will be offended, and literally punishes her with live birds and breaking glass. At one point, he discusses with his assistant director his loathing of his own overweight unattractive body, which may hint at the reason he is so obsessed with an “ice-princess” he cannot have. Jones is quite effective in the role, allowing us to wonder what makes the apparent misagonist tick. Hitchcock once said that “actors should be treated like cattle.” Jones shows his constant disdain for and attraction to his creation quite convincingly.

The most written about point in the production of The Birds was the filming of the moment that Hedren’s character enters an attic and is attacked by scores of birds. For an entire week, with take after take (beyond 40), Hedren has to protect herself from birds that are thrown at her and even hooked onto her clothing. She had been led to believe the birds would only be mechanical ones, but as she comes on the set she realizes live birds had been in the planning from the beginning.

Sienna Miller is good, but she is not always as convincing as Jones. Miller, in many respects, has the more difficult role in trying to make clear why any actress would allow herself to be treated as she was. Hedren in Spoto’s book says she was an inexperienced actress under contract to a powerful man who was convinced by others that this is the way movies were made. The character has a confidant to tells this to, and Peggy, Hitch’s secretary, and Alma. But, at times the script needs to make her feelings clearer to allow us more sympathy for the character.

As difficult as acting in The Birds proved, Hedren's nightmare continued when she was next cast in Hitchcock’s Marnie, as a sexually frigid woman who is raped by her husband on her wedding night. By this point, Hitchcock was making clear intentions that he wished to leave Alma and start a new life with Hedren.  After Hedren totally rejects Hitchcock, she asks to be let out of her contract.

The film has convincing sets and costumes, and there are times that the director seems to be paying homage to some of the other Hitchcock films. When Hedren gets her hair dyed for Marnie, the shot looks like it is quoting Hitchock’s Novak hair-dying scene in Vertigo. Care has been taken to suggest the period. Penelope Wilton as Peggy Robertson, Hitch’s secretary, and Imelda Staunton as Alma, give evidence of the long suffering that many close to Hitchcock endured.

The Girl (HBO, 2012) ****

Day 40/42 - The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes shows its low budget from the beginning when a camera begins a surprisingly jerky pan of a miniature "Bandrika" train station, a fictional foreign country pre-World War II. The beginning section is slow as it establishes the characters with 1930s "witty repartee." A group of English travelers are trapped in this border hotel while the train is dug out from an avalanche.

Our initial focus seems to be on two English gentlemen who are trying to get to England in time for a major cricket match. There is Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a rich bored young woman who is heading back to England to marry her boring fiancé. She meets a sweet old English governess, Miss Froy (Dame  May Whitty), who is heading home after six years. Miss Froy listens to a folk singer who is serenading below her window. The moment is disturbed by noise coming from above Iris' room.  Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a cheeky young musicologist in the Noel Coward-vein is collecting folk songs from the region and is having three of the staff dance and sing while he records their music. When Iris gets him thrown out, he joins her in her room until she agrees to have him reinstated. The governess continues to listen to the folk singer, but he is mysteriously strangled, unbeknownst to her.

The next morning people begin boarding the train. Just as the Iris helps Miss Froy, someone knocks down a planter which hits Iris on the head. Dazed, she is taken by Miss Froy to a compartment. Also in their compartment is a traveling magician, his wife and child, a Baroness, all foreign. 

The plot begins after Iris and Miss Froy share tea. Iris sleeps, and when she awakens Miss Froy is gone and no one admits to having seen her. Eventually Iris enlists the help of Gilbert and a Dr. Hartz to find Miss Froy and a search of the train begins. Has Iris hallucinated the whole thing or is something much more sinister at hand?

[For a much more psychologically disturbing use of the disappearance theme, find The Vanishing, a 1988 Dutch film based on The Golden Egg, about a man whose wife disappears from a gas station.]

The rest of the film involves spies, coded songs, a clue written on a window, a fight in a baggage compartment, a fake nun, and Englishmen trapped on a train with foreign military men shooting at them.

Hitchcock memorably used trains in several of his films: Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps.

Among some of Hitchcock’s early signatures are the ordinary individual as hero, the double, (people who are not who they seem to be), the seemly benign villain, close-ups of sinister objects, the surprises hidden in the luggage compartment, a MacGuffin never fully explained, and a resolution with a happy ending where the bad dream is banished away.

Hitchcock in interviews talked about the importance of building suspense by showing the audience something a character doesn’t know and then playing with that idea. Here we have drugged drinks that we know have been doctored but of which the characters are unaware.

Even though there are obvious cheap film techniques—the miniature sets are laughably and the rear projections clearly artificial—Hitchcock’s strength is always his storytelling so that one tends to ignore the falseness.

This was the last of Hitchcock’s London films, made to fulfill his contract with producer Edward Black. The growing threat of the English by the Germans can be felt particularly near the end of the film. While the film takes place in a fictional country, it is pretty obviously German in culture. The small group of English trying to reach London become separated from a main train and will be executed if caught--a seemly obvious symbol. One of the characters who claims he is a pacifist tries to surrender and is shot. Another obvious symbol.

While this is not one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, it certainly shows the artist growing into the man who would create Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window (my favorites).

The Lady Vanishes (1938) *** The entire film can be streamed on The Internet Archive or Hula Plus.