21 Essays Recap

I’ve been taking my customary little break after a big essay series.  My current plan is to spend the summer doing an occasional “Inexhaustible Moments…” series focusing on a specific year or time period.  These are relatively easy for me to do (thereby keeping the blog alive), while the down time will allow me to enjoy some vacations and quality time with family.  I plan on tackling the next full-scale essay series in September.

Next up on the “Inexhaustible Moments…” random year generator:  1930.

Here’s a quick recap of 21 Essays to date:  I launched the blog on September 21, 2011.  Since then, I’ve completed six essay series, starting with…

3 Essays on Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World (2000):  I opened the blog with this goofy series that riffed on Maddin’s six-minute tour de force.  It netted me the title of “Third Best Maddin-est Blogger in the World,” an honor I hold with pride.

21 Essays on The Golem (1920):  I originally wrote this series for the IMDb Classic Film Board, then saved it to the IMDb’s Golem message board, and finally reclaimed it for this blog which is based on its essay model.

15 Essays on Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (1953):  I like the two-part structure that I used on this series and feel like I finally settled on the right tone for the blog.

12 Essays on “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti:  This was my first venture into writing essays on literature, religion, and music.  For it, I wrote 12 essays—one-a-day for the twelve days of Christmas.

15 Essays on Skull Island in King Kong (1933):  For this series, I restricted myself to a thirty-minute section in one of my favorite films.  It was fun tracking down some of the history, art, and science that inspired its creators.

6 Essays on Blackmail (1929):  This was my contribution to the “For the Love of Film” blogathon and a welcome excuse to revisit some of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell films.

That’s all so far!  More to come, I promise.

© 2012 Lee Price

The Legend of the MacGuffin

21 Essays is a proud participant in
For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III,
May 13-18, 2012.

LAST DAY:  PLEASE SUPPORT THE CAMPAIGN TODAY

If you like this blog...  
if you like Alfred Hitchcock...
if you support the cause of film preservation...
then please follow this link to make a donation or click on the donation box  to support the effort of the National Film Preservation Foundation to make the recently discovered silent film The White Shadow (1923) accessible to a wide audience via the internet.

We're trying to raise $15,000 and it's going to take many generous small (and large!) donations to get there.  With great appreciation for your generosity, THANK YOU!

Blackmail-blogging, essay 6 of 6 blog entries

The Legend of the MacGuffin

Introduction:  The Setup

The thought of young Alfred Hitchcock as a bright and eager assistant on the set of The White Shadow (1924) reminded me of Michael Powell’s apprenticeship on Hitchcock movies like Blackmail (1929).  Michael Powell eventually became a major film director himself, responsible for such classics as Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and Peeping Tom (1960).  With each of these blog entries, I’m opening with a fantasy dialogue between Hitchcock and Powell, circa 1929, as they meet at the nearest pub after a full day of shooting.

Part One, The Sixth Fantasy Dialogue

From the taxidermy studio in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956),
directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The camera follows Powell as he enters the pub and joins a group of people being entertained by Hitchcock.

Hitchcock:  “It’s a Scottish lion, he said.  No, that may not be right.  I must attempt to learn these stories better.  Oh, there’s Mr. Powell.  He can tell us…  Michael, what was that Scottish beast you were telling me about?”

MacGuffin in a bottle
from Hitchcock's
Notorious (1946).

Powell:  “The MacGuffin?”

Hitchcock:  “Yes, that was it!  And there is no MacGuffin because…  there are no lions in Scotland!  Did I get it right, Michael?”

Powell:  “Close enough.  The MacGuffin is a trap for catching lions in the Scottish highlands.  But there are no Scottish lions, so—and here’s the punchline—there is no MacGuffin.  In our film, you could say the MacGuffin is that glove that Alice leaves behind.  The plot pivots on it, yet it could be any object at all.”

A MacGuffin filled
with microfilm in
Hitchcock's North
by Northwest (1959).

Hitchcock:  “Perhaps I’d better write it down…  You never know when a good story will come in handy.  You must find me some more Scottish tales when you are in the Orkneys next, Mr. Powell.”

Powell:  “That MacGuffin story came from a man who could spin quite a tale.  Would you believe that he told me that when he was a young boy, his father sent him with a note to the local police department?  The policeman read the note and promptly jailed the boy!  For some minor offense, apparently.  Can you imagine such a father?”

Hitchcock:  “A terrifying story, Michael!  I imagine he was scarred for life.”

Powell:  “Perhaps.  But he was such a big liar we never knew if his stories were true or not.  He might have borrowed the story from someone else or made it up entirely.”

Hitchcock:  “Do people really do such things?”

Powell:  “All the time!”

Hitchcock:  “Have no fear.  Your stories are safe with me, Mr. Powell.”

From the taxidermy studio in Hitchcock's
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

Part Two, Parting Thoughts

Who Wrote Act 3?  This isn’t a question about the British Museum.  I’m willing to accept Michael Powell’s claims that he proposed the chase to the roof of the museum.  I want to know who wrote that last scene that uses the jester painting so effectively and so ironically.  To some degree, I feel like this scene is more quintessentially Hitchcock than the chase.  Yet no one takes credit for it.

Final scene of Blackmail (1929):
Alice between Frank and a
police officer.

The published version of the Charles Bennett play excuses Alice from murder because it turns out that the artist Crewe suffered a very timely heart attack that killed him rather than the knife.  The blackmailer dies when he runs out into traffic.  The resolution between Frank and Alice is left ambiguous.  (Note:  I haven’t read the play so I may have garbled this a little in trying to construct the plot from references in several different sources.)

Alice sees the jester painting
being carried into the station.
The men continue to laugh.

When the play ran on the British stage, lead actress Tallulah Bankhead requested a rewrite of the play’s ambiguous end.  She confesses and goes to jail, thereby demonstrating her character’s ethical convictions.  Hitchcock appears to have liked this ending and to have disliked the published version.

Complicating things further, the film studio insisted that Alice must remain free at the end of the movie.  They didn’t want a downbeat ending with the heroine shuffled off to prison.

From Alice's point of view:
The jester painting
still mocks her.

In his famous Francois Truffaut interview, Hitchcock said that he always wanted the end to match the beginning—the movie would begin with the details of the arrest of a common criminal and end with the details of the arrest of Alice.  Hitchcock typically enjoyed this kind of symmetry.  As the movie stands, it’s unbalanced from this standpoint.  The opening appears tacked on, bearing little relationship to the actual story.  You can see how Hitchcock would be unhappy—and you might also wonder why he didn’t simply rewrite (or scrap) the opening.

So who came up with the ingenious idea of bringing the jester painting into the final scene, thereby creating a superb dissonance in the studio-requested happy ending?  It could have been either Michael Powell or Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitch biographer Patrick McGilligan regularly reminds his readers that there were always three Hitchcocks at work on the script:  Hitchcock’s officially chosen collaborator (Powell in this case), Hitchcock himself, and that mysterious presence in the background of nearly every Hitchcock movie—his wife Alma Reville.  She’s my candidate.  I think that while Powell and Hitchcock were planning their merry chase, Alma figured out how to end the movie with style.

Alma Reville
(Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock).

Mary Rose:  Hitchcock loved J.M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose, a ghost story set on a remote Scottish island.  He saw it on the London stage in 1920 and the prospect of filming it obsessed him for his entire career.

Scottish island landscape in
The Edge of the World (1937),
directed by Michael Powell.

As Powell was much more familiar with Scotland than Hitchcock, they probably discussed the play frequently.  In Powell’s memoirs, he recounts how Hitchcock asked for advice on filming Mary Rose during one of Powell’s visits to Hollywood.  Apparently, it was something of a sore subject with Powell.  Because of his work on remote Scottish islands on The Edge of the World and I Know Where I’m Going!, Powell seems to have felt a personal claim on the area.

But, in retrospect, if ever a movie would have been appropriate for a “Written, Produced and Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell” credit, it would have been Mary Rose!

On the Scottish island in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945),
written, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

The End:  If Alfred Hitchcock, with his considerable wealth and vast popularity, spent the last years of his life being miserably unhappy, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Michael Powell spent the last thirty years of his life struggling to make movies, only to encounter myriad obstacles and disappointments.  Nevertheless, he met and married the love of his life, Thelma Schoonmaker, at the age of 78 in 1984 and died in 1990 surrounded by loving friends and confident that his films would continue to be remembered.

It’s an interesting, and rather sad, contrast…  but instead let’s close this series with the brighter picture of these two brilliant men, Alfred Hitchcock just 29 years old and Michael Powell at 23, as they stood at the outset of their careers, burning with enthusiasm to create popular movies that dared to be intensely personal too.  They had hopes and dreams—and would actually accomplish so many of them in the years to come, leaving behind them a legacy of dozens of wonderfully original movies that are still cherished today.

End title card of Hitchcock's Blackmail.

Reference Sources

A Life in Movies by Michael Powell

Million Dollar Movie by Michael Powell

Michael Powell: Interviews by David Lazar

Hitchcock's Films Revisited by Robin Wood

Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan

The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto

Arrows of Desire by Ian Christie

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut

The Hitchcock Romance by Lesley Brill

A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague

A special thank you to Joe Marcincuk for tracking down and delivering a copy of A Life in Movies to me in the nick of time.

© 2012 Lee Price

Hitchcock Alone

21 Essays is a proud participant in
For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III,
May 13-18, 2012.

LET'S RAISE SOME MONEY!!!

If you like this blog...  
if you like Alfred Hitchcock...
if you support the cause of film preservation...
then please follow this link to make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation to support the effort to make the recently discovered silent film The White Shadow (1923) accessible to a wide audience via the internet.

We're trying to raise $15,000 and it's going to take many generous small (and large!) donations to get there.  With great appreciation for your generosity, THANK YOU!

Blackmail-blogging, essay 5 of 6 blog entries

Hitchcock Alone

Anny Ondra as Alice in Blackmail (1929),
directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Introduction:  The Setup

The thought of young Alfred Hitchcock as a bright and eager assistant on the set of The White Shadow (1924) reminded me of Michael Powell’s apprenticeship on Hitchcock movies like Blackmail (1929).  Michael Powell eventually became a major film director himself, responsible for such classics as Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and Peeping Tom.  With each of these blog entries, I’m opening with a fantasy dialogue between Hitchcock and Powell, circa 1929, as they meet at the nearest pub after a full day of shooting.

Part One, The Fifth Fantasy Dialogue

Alice's hallucination of a knife in neon from Hitchcock's Blackmail.

Medium shot:  Leaning against the bar, Hitchcock smiles paternally at Powell.

Hitchcock:  “You are a handsome young devil, Michael.  I envy you the actresses you will direct.  Make them beautiful.  Mold them into your ideal.”

Powell:  “I’d rather cast women with character, a visible intelligence.  Flaws capture my attention more than beauty—a limp or a harelip demand my complete attention.  I can’t turn away.”

Murder in Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train (1951).

Hitchcock:  “What you call a leading lady, I call a victim.  The audience wants beauty threatened but not destroyed.  The ones with interesting looks must perish in the funhouse.”

Powell:  “My interesting women will stand up to the villain, turn the mirror upon him.”

Hitchcock:  “Cast your homely women then, Michael, and have them battle the monster.  But no audience will come.  And then watch me as I take that homely woman of yours and have the murderer escort her up to his lair.  The next time you see her she’ll be inside a sack.”

Powell:  “I say, that’s not very sporting of you.”

Hitchcock:  “Don’t look to an audience for compassion, Michael.  They have no loyalty.  If I were to toss my beautiful leading woman from a great height, the audience would turn away, saying, ‘No, thank you, Mr. Hitchcock.  You have not made a proper Hitchcock film.  Please restore her to life and try again.’ ”

Part Two, Hitchcock Alone

Alice immediately following the murder in Hitchcock's Blackmail.

We come to my favorite section of Blackmail.  Much as I appreciate the famous “knife-knife-knife” scene and the innovative British Museum chase, my absolute favorite section is the ten-minute meditation that spans from Alice’s post-murder emergence from behind the curtain to her arrival at home the following morning.  To closely examine this scene, I’m afraid I have to abandon previous efforts to link everything with Michael Powell.  This isn’t the type of subject that attracted the more gregarious Powell. 

Much of the scene’s strength derives from the performance of Anny Ondra.  Freed from the need to synchronize her speech with the off-screen dubbings of Joan Barry, Ondra shows enormous originality and compassion in her depiction of Alice’s shock, confusion, and incomprehension.  And when her walk through London begins, the scene gains additional power through its use of location to comment upon our heroine’s numbed psychological state (Hitchcock  meets Antonioni thirty years before l’Avventura (1960)).

Alice has murdered the artist Crewe with a knife, performing the deed while hidden behind a curtain.  She backs into view in a medium shot, awkwardly holding the knife and looking as puppet-like as Moira Shearer in The Tales of Hoffmann (okay, allow me the ONE Powell reference!).

Appearing utterly lost, Alice loses her sense of time.  Hitchcock conveys this through the use of dissolves.  In typical film shorthand, a dissolve would indicate that time has elapsed, but these dissolves seem to return us to the same time and place.  Alice walks zombie-like toward the camera and the shot dissolves to a far shot of Alice still pacing the apartment.  Seconds might have elapsed or hours.  We sense that Alice herself does not know how long she spends in the apartment.

Alice slashes the painting and turns toward the viewer
in Hitchcock's Blackmail.

Alice moves directly toward the camera.

The closeup dissolves to a long shot of Alice still in the apartment.

Alice leaves the apartment and descends the stairs, with Hitchcock cutting to an overhead shot like he would use so effectively in later movies such as Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960).  Once she is on the street, ghostly people pass by, eerily superimposed on the film to render them translucent.  She is alone, apart from everyone else in the city.  The world seems to cruelly comment on her plight.  She passes under a marquee advertising “A New Comedy,” calling to mind the painting of the mocking jester.  She sees a neon advertisement and imagines that it shows a stabbing knife.

Alice and seeming ghosts of people passing her by.

The marquee advertising "A New Comedy."

Hitchcock makes use of interesting match cuts.  There are two cuts from Alice seeing hands (first a policeman’s extended hand and then a sleeping beggar’s hand) to her memory of the dead man’s rigid hand.  And there is an unusual aural match cut, where Hitchcock implies that Alice is about to scream only to shock cut to the landlady screaming as she finds the dead body.

Best of all is the simple long shot of Alice still walking the deserted streets at dawn.  Hitchcock holds the shot for awhile, creating an effect much like that of the neo-realist cinema that emerged in Italy twenty years later (a style which Hitchcock would consciously adopt when filming The Wrong Man in 1956).

Alice on the street at dawn.

Of course, both Hitchcock and Michael Powell filmed many actors and actresses walking.  But this Blackmail walk is special because of its intense evocations of stark alienation.  Hitchcock had a special gift for expressing loneliness.  Midway through Alice’s walk, there’s a remarkable overhead aerial shot of London.  I’ve seen this described as a precursor of a similar aerial shot in The Birds (1963), but I think the point of the Blackmail shot is very different.  The sad truth expressed in the shot is that the city is probably full of Alices wandering in an existential haze, each feeling utterly alone.

In later movies, Hitchcock would create similar strong scenes of guilt-scarred women feeling trapped and alone.  There’s Sylvia Sidney realizing the truth about her married life in Sabotage (1936), Janet Leigh driving aimlessly after she steals the money in Psycho, and Tippi Hedren’s reaction to the maiming of the horse in Marnie (1964).  In each of these scenes, the bottom has dropped out of the heroine’s world.  And the performances in these scenes are impeccable and heartbreaking—among the most emotionally moving in Hitchcock’s work.

This isn’t the world of Michael Powell.  His frequent match cuts (most notably the delightful cut from falcon to airplane in the prelude to A Canterbury Tale) expand on the experimental techniques of Blackmail but handle them in a way suitable to his own playful style.  Two very different geniuses;  two very different worldviews.

Sylvia Sidney alone in a movie theater in Sabotage (1936),
directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Alone in her car, Janet Leigh drives into the night after stealing
the money in Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Tippi Hedren feeling utterly alone after the horse accident
in Marnie (1964), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Reference Sources

A Life in Movies by Michael Powell

Million Dollar Movie by Michael Powell

Michael Powell: Interviews by David Lazar

Hitchcock's Films Revisited by Robin Wood

Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan

The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto

Arrows of Desire by Ian Christie

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut

The Hitchcock Romance by Lesley Brill

A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague

A special thank you to Joe Marcincuk for tracking down and delivering a copy of A Life in Movies to me in the nick of time.

© 2012 Lee Price

The Art Gallery

21 Essays is a proud participant in
For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III,
May 13-18, 2012.

LET'S RAISE SOME MONEY!!!

If you like this blog...  
if you like Alfred Hitchcock...
if you support the cause of film preservation...
then please follow this link to make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation to support the effort to make the recently discovered silent film The White Shadow (1924) accessible to a wide audience via the internet.

We're trying to raise $15,000 and it's going to take many generous small (and large!) donations to get there.  With great appreciation for your generosity, THANK YOU!

Blackmail-blogging, essay 4 of 6 blog entries
The Art Gallery

Detail of the jester painting that figures prominently
in Blackmail (1929), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Introduction:  The Setup

The thought of young Alfred Hitchcock as a bright and eager assistant on the set of The White Shadow (1924) reminded me of Michael Powell’s apprenticeship on Hitchcock movies like Blackmail (1929).  Michael Powell eventually became a major film director himself, responsible for such classics as Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and Peeping Tom.  With each of these blog entries, I’m opening with a fantasy dialogue between Hitchcock and Powell, circa 1929, as they meet at the nearest pub after a full day of shooting.

Part One, The Fourth Fantasy Dialogue

Anny Ondra as Alice in Blackmail.

Fade in on Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell quaffing beers at a London pub following a busy day of shooting Blackmail (1929):

Hitchcock:  “Did you get enough stills of Miss Ondra today, Mr. Powell? Some women are made for viewing through a lens.  Unfortunately for our lovely Miss Ondra, she was designed for a silent movie lens.”

Powell:  “I always endeavor to be professional, Mr. Hitchcock.”

Hitchcock:  “Endeavor away, my boy, but our work is legalized voyeurism and often little more than that.  Everyone gets a charge out of watching a pretty woman in a state of undress.  In America, they think the movie camera was invented to film horses but we know better than that.  It was invented for filming lingerie.”

Powell:  “I prefer to think that movies have progressed beyond the peep show stage.  What you are describing has a technical term and it’s not a nice one:  it’s called scroptophilia, the morbid urge to gaze.”

Hitchcock:  “Yes, our audiences are eager scroptophiliacs— that is a lovely word.  We filmmakers drill the hole in the wall that the audience looks through.  The audience may not admit it, but they hope the hole will look into the bedroom.”

Powell:  “You’re talking about pandering.  As a director, I would hang a beautiful picture over that hole.”

Hitchcock:  “And I would have my hero take that picture down and peer through the hole at the undressing heroine in the next room.”

Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Powell:  “Your hero sounds like a very sick man to me.  I would advise the heroine to exercise great caution around him.”

Hitchcock:  “She is wearing white lingerie and is very attractive in it.  I think you would enjoy filming her very much with your tripod, camera, and lens, Michael.  You must learn to become comfortable with the dark side of your desired profession.  Voyeurism is the sport of the invalid and all cinema-goers are temporary invalids.  Place me alone in a flat and I’ll stare out the window at the rooms across the way, imagining scenarios for each of my neighbors. Every room I see looks like a movie set—it’s the curse of the movie director. You may not see it yet, Mr. Powell, but wait until you direct a movie.  You may turn out to be the greatest voyeur of them all!”

Open on an eye:  Title credit to Vertigo (1958),
directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Open on an eye:  Opening shot of Powell's Peeping Tom.

Open on an eye:  Opening shot of The Thief of Bagdad (1940),
co-directed by Michael Powell, who conceived this image for the movie.

Part Two, The Art Gallery

One of my favorite haunts is the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.  In their collection, there is a remarkable oil painting of a jester by William Merritt Chase.  Titled Keyed Up - The Court Jester, it is the painting that launched Chase’s very successful artistic career.  He painted it in Munich and brought it back to America where it proceeded to win a medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.  Chase capitalized on its popularity by reproducing it as a popular etching.  It became a very well-known image.

Keyed Up -- The Court Jester (1876) by
William Merritt Chase, American, 1849-1916,
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

While there is no known link between Chase’s jester and Hitchcock’s, I can’t help myself from associating Keyed Up with Blackmail and its taunting jester.

The jester painting in Blackmail.

The jester painting by the artist-villain Crewe becomes a recurrent theme in Blackmail (1929), offering a dark and sardonic commentary on every scene in which it appears.  It appears in three scenes:  1) the scene between Alice and Crewe in his studio apartment, 2) the scene of the police investigation, and 3) the movie’s final scene where the painting is brought into the police station.

The first jester scene:  Our heroine Alice and the artist Crewe enter his apartment.  Curiously looking around, Alice wanders over to a window and appears reassured when she sees policemen on the street outside.  She turns around and sees the painting.  Shock cut to a close-up of the jester.

Alice laughs at the picture, delighted.  “I say,” she says to Crewe, “that’s good, isn’t it?”

Alice’s initial response is only to the painting’s surface quality—it is technically accomplished.  But thanks to Hitchcock’s shock cut and rapid backward dolly, the audience is instantly clued into the disorienting nature of the picture.  The jester’s finger brazenly points outward—depending upon the camera’s placement, it appears either that his finger is pointed at the film’s characters or directly at the audience.  Like a traditional jester, he stands apart, laughing at the film’s denizens and perhaps even suggestively breaking the fourth wall to laugh at the audience itself.

The ghosts of bygone days:
Rebecca's portrait in Hitchcock's
Rebecca (1940).

The painting reappears in this scene after the murder has been committed.  Still in shock, Alice retrieves her dress from where it dangles across the painting.  Once again, the grotesque painting is abruptly revealed as the dress is swept off it.  But this time Alice appears to be revolted by it.  She impulsively slashes a large gash in it with her hand.  Unlike the murder which took place behind a discreet curtain, the viewer is allowed to witness Alice’s violence this time. The torn and ruined picture will return later to taunt her again.

The ghosts of bygone days:
Paintings on the walls of the palace
in Powell and Pressburger's
Black Narcissus (1947).

The second jester scene:  Alice’s boyfriend Frank, a police detective, encounters the jester next.  While investigating the crime scene, he absent-mindedly fingers the torn canvas, not showing any reaction to the painting.  Then Frank discovers the incriminating glove left behind by Alice, and Hitchcock cuts to a close-up of the jester, now appearing to point and laugh at Frank.

The third jester scene:  And, last of all, the jester returns to close the movie on a very ironic note.  Frank and another police officer enjoy a good laugh at the supposedly comic idea that Alice knows who committed the murder.  At this moment, the jester painting is carried through the room.  Alice stands uncomfortably between the laughing men as the jester turns his mocking laughter toward her for the last time.  We can assume that it is an image that will haunt her for the rest of her life.

That elusive object of desire:  Painting from The Age of Consent (1969),
directed by Michael Powell.

That elusive object of desire:  Painting from The Age of Consent.

That elusive object of desire:  Painting from The Age of Consent.

That elusive object of desire:  Portrait of Carlotta Valdes
in Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Reference Sources

A Life in Movies by Michael Powell

Million Dollar Movie by Michael Powell

Michael Powell: Interviews by David Lazar

Hitchcock's Films Revisited by Robin Wood

Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan

The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto

Arrows of Desire by Ian Christie

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut

The Hitchcock Romance by Lesley Brill

A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague

A special thank you to Joe Marcincuk for tracking down and delivering a copy of A Life in Movies to me in the nick of time.

© 2012 Lee Price

Artists and Their Models

21 Essays is a proud participant in
For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III,
May 13-18, 2012.

LET'S RAISE SOME MONEY!!!

If you like this blog...  
if you like Alfred Hitchcock...
if you support the cause of film preservation...
then please follow this link to make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation to support the effort to make the recently discovered silent film The White Shadow (1923) accessible to a wide audience via the internet.

We're trying to raise $15,000 and it's going to take many generous small (and large!) donations to get there.  With great appreciation for your generosity, THANK YOU!

Blackmail-blogging, essay 3 of 6 blog entries

Artists and Their Models

Cyril Ritchard as Crewe the Artist and Anny Ondra as Alice in
Blackmail (1929), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Introduction:  The Setup

The thought of young Alfred Hitchcock as a bright and eager assistant on the set of The White Shadow (1924) reminded me of Michael Powell’s apprenticeship on Hitchcock movies like Blackmail (1929).  Michael Powell eventually became a major film director himself, responsible for such classics as Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and Peeping Tom (1960).  With each of these blog entries, I’m opening with a fantasy dialogue between Hitchcock and Powell, circa 1929, as they meet at the nearest pub after a full day of shooting.

Part One, The Third Fantasy Dialogue

(Hitchcock waves to Powell who has just entered the pub.)

Hitchcock:  “Mr. Powell!”

Powell:  “Please call me Micky, Mr. Hitchcock.  That’s  what my friends call me.”

Hitchcock:  “Unfortunately, that name has been purloined by Mr. Disney’s amazing rodent.  Until Mr. Disney tears him up (an act I would deeply envy him as a fellow film director), you would be wisest to go by either Michael or Mr. Powell.”

John Longden as Frank
in Blackmail.

Powell:  “I was thinking that perhaps we should tear up one of our characters.  I’m happy with the work we’ve done on Act Three of Blackmail, but Acts One and Two are no longer feeling as strong.  My problem is that dullard Frank.  He’s unethical, overbearing, and, worst of all, boring.”

Hitchcock:  “Yes, but since he’s entirely too dull to be a villain, I believe we are stuck with Frank as our hero.”

Powell:  “Could we at least add a little charm?  A hint of wit?  It bothers me that our beautiful Alice must end in his arms.”

Hitchcock:  “It is malicious, isn’t it?  To lead our girl into such a nasty situation and then fade out on her.  Perhaps I should bring our heartless jester back to laugh at her in the final reel.”

Powell:  “The last laugh, eh?  You would do that, wouldn’t you?  It’s symmetrical and mean-spirited.  But surely we shouldn’t be so cruel to our beautiful girl.”

Hitchcock:  “We directors must be cruel, Michael.  Our muse is Bluebeard himself, and we leave a string of discarded actresses hanging in our small back room.  I have a secret fondness for the Bluebeard nature of our artist-villain Crewe.  I believe he would have strangled Alice if she had not intervened.”

In Bluebeard's domain:  Vera Miles explores the house
in Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

In Bluebeard's domain:  Anna Massey explores the
darkroom in Peeping Tom (1960), directed by Michael Powell.

Powell:  “You should have more compassion for your fellow artists.  After all, not everyone with a paintbrush or a camera is a would-be murderer.”

Hitchcock:  “Aren’t they?  The camera is the ultimate weapon.  Women should scream in terror when they see one approaching.”

Powell:  “Then I must be a born criminal because I find myself looking at the world as if I was a camera—as if I were cinema itself.”

Hitchcock:  “That would either make you a sadistic killer or a film director.  May you choose the more respectable of these professions, Mr. Powell.”

Creative use of a camera:  James Stewart in
Rear Window (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Creative use of a camera:  Carl Boehm and Moira Shearer
in Peeping Tom (1960), directed by Michael Powell.

Part Two, Artists and Their Models

Anny Ondra and Cyril Ritchard flirt in Blackmail.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
flirt in Shall We Dance (1937).

Fred meets Ginger and he fancies her.  He tells her that she can find him in a popular crowded restaurant at 6:30. Ginger goes to the restaurant with her stodgy boyfriend, curious to see if Fred will be there. When she sees Fred signaling to her in the crowd, Ginger breaks her date with her boyfriend and sneaks out to be with Fred instead.

Fred takes Ginger back to his apartment.  He tries some of his best lines on her, trying to entice her to come upstairs to see his art.  The audience waits for Ginger to give in, to dance with Fred, and to be swept off her feet into the happy-ever-after ending that she deserves.

I can’t help it!  The lead-up to the murder in Blackmail (1929) feels like an Astaire-Rogers flirtation scene to me!

Fred Astaire’s come-on line was always an invitation to dance, and it gained conviction from the fact that he truly was a real dancer.  In Blackmail, Crewe (aka The Artist) uses the come-on line that he’s an artist:  Would Alice like to come up and see his work?  She flirts in return, plays coy, then submits. Crewe aggressively pushes further.  Would she like to learn something new?  He steadies her hand as he shows her how to paint.  Would she like to pose?  He offers to paint her.

Simply substitute dancing for painting and you’ve got a classic build-up to an Astaire-Rogers routine.

To Crewe’s credit, his come-on line has legitimate truth behind it.  He IS an artist and the viewer’s two experiences of his art demonstrate legitimate talent.  We see his jester painting and we watch as he completes Alice’s portrait of a (nude) woman.  His talent appears to be real.

Of course, it all goes bad in a way that it never would with Astaire and Rogers. Crewe definitely attempts to rape Alice;  she murders him in an act of self-defense.  Her action is understandable, but a remarkably sour end to a potentially fine romance.

Attempted rape in Blackmail.

Hitchcock would struggle to understand the nature of violence all his life. After his death, biographies by men like Donald Spoto and Patrick McGilligan revealed aspects of Hitchcock’s own dark side, suggesting the large degree to which his own movies operated as a self-lacerating critique of his worst tendencies.  He easily identified with both victims and victimizers.

The aftermath:  Cyril Ritchard
dead in Blackmail.

In retrospect, Blackmail appears to have been a natural subject for Hitchcock. The controlling tendencies of Crewe, the sudden shift into violence, the ironic use of the jester painting, and the crushing guilt suffered by Alice echo down Hitchcock’s great movies.

By contrast, it’s hard to imagine a less congenial story for a director like Michael Powell.  In film after film, Powell celebrates his striving artists and his strong women.  There’s Leslie Howard’s sensitive aesthete in 49th Parallel (1941), Dennis Price’s musician in A Canterbury Tale (1944), David Niven’s poet in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and Anton Walbrook’s theatrical director in The Red Shoes (1948).  But most of all there’s the matter of Powell’s final feature film, The Age of Consent (1969).  It’s hard to imagine a more complete contrast with the tone of Blackmail.

The Age of Consent is Michael Powell’s idyllic examination of the relationship between artist and model.  When Cora, the free-spirited girl played by Helen Mirren, suffers an attempted rape by the island’s  ferryman (Harold Hopkins), she pushes him overboard into the water and humiliates him by towing him ashore.  Later Cora actually causes a death—somewhat similar in its unpremeditated violence to the scene in Blackmail—but Powell breezily skims over any suggestion of guilt in her personality.  The artist-model scenes between Cora and Bradley Morahan (James Mason) portray the professionalism of an artist depicting sensuality while maintaining a guarded distance.

With The Age of Consent, it’s as if Powell indulged in making an anti-Blackmail, returning to the themes and plot points of forty years previous but transforming them into a proper Powell movie this time.

Attempted rape in The Age of Consent (1969),
directed by Michael Powell.

The aftermath:  Harold Hopkins tossed overboard in
The Age of Consent.

Helen Mirren as the artist's model and James Mason as the artist
in The Age of Consent.

Reference Sources

A Life in Movies by Michael Powell

Million Dollar Movie by Michael Powell

Michael Powell: Interviews by David Lazar

Hitchcock's Films Revisited by Robin Wood

Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan

The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto

Arrows of Desire by Ian Christie

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut

The Hitchcock Romance by Lesley Brill

A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague

A special thank you to Joe Marcincuk for tracking down and delivering a copy of A Life in Movies to me in the nick of time.

© 2012 Lee Price