The MacGuffin: News and Comment (23/Feb/2008)
(c) Ken Mogg (2008)
February 23
Am literally putting my house in order at present. Which means, cleaning up. 'My house is my filing cabinet', I told an inquiring editor. Accordingly, here are some miscellaneous items which I happen to have come across. First, some excerpts from an interview with Hitch by Peter Lennon for 'The Sunday Times', 1 August, 1971, when the director was in London making Frenzy. 'Over a long day's chatting [Hitchcock] emerges as one of nature's innocents. Innocent in politics: When he took out American citizenship he gave as a reason that he wanted to have "the constitutional right to sound off acidly on all the ludicrousness around me in America." But it was just a schoolboy raspbery; he has never made a genuinely political film. Lifeboat, which he thinks was political, was just war-time propaganda.' Hmm. I also came across someone's (Jim Davidson's?) excellent report on the Hitchcock Centennial Conference held at NYU, 13-17 October, 1999. I read this: 'The notion of Hitchcock's need for control was echoed in the opening plenary session of the Conference by Robin Wood, who stated that Hitchcock's working methods suggested a form of fascism. Despite this, Wood voiced his admiration for Lifeboat, which he called underappreciated, and commented that the film offers a compelling critique of the American free enterprise system in its depiction of the wealthy character Rittenhouse and his [effective] complicity with the Nazi.' But back to the Peter Lennon interview with Hitch. The director mentioned working with a difficult Charles Laughton on Jamaica Inn (and later on The Paradine Case). '"What was wrong with Laughton?" "'Fraid of himself," said the Master. "scared. Very frightened man, but very nice man."' Again I was reminded of the Hitchcock Centennial Conference. 'Again and again as the Conference went on, particularly during the plenary session mentioned above, a variety of Hitchcocks seemed to emerge. To [Donald] Spoto, who was quick to point out that he actually knew Hitchcock later in his life, the director "lived his 80 years in an envelope of unimaginable pain." Spoto believes that Hitchcock wanted to be thought of as a respectable bourgeois, but that at home he sometimes lived the life of a crude, vulgar Cockney. This account was contradicted by the person at the Conference who knew Hitchcock best, his daughter Patricia, who stated that home life with her parents was quiet and orderly.' Now here's something else I came across. The actress in North by Northwest who plays the woman reading in bed whom Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) disturbs when he climbs through her hotel window, was Patricia Cutts, the daughter of director Graham Cutts with whom Hitchcock had worked in the 1920s. (I was also reminded that in 1935, when Hitch was making The 39 Steps, 'there were some odd extra shots to be done, [so to speed things up] the producer suggested that someone else handle them, and mentioned Graham Cutts. Hitchcock at first refused, saying that he used to work for Cutts and that they would both be embarrassed. However, when told that Cutts hadn't worked for a while and needed the money, Hitchcock showed his magnanimity by agreeing.') Okay, perhaps that's trivia. But I also found this, mentioned on the website www.artsjournal.com, and summarising an article that had originally appeared in 'The Observer' (UK), 6 October, 2002. I find it interesting for the light it may throw on the director of Suspicion (where a crime writer says that her real heroes are her murderers) and Rope (in which Brandon says that murder, too, can be an art): 'OF CRIMINALS AND ARTISTS: A controversial theory suggests that artists and criminals have a lot in common: they both break the rules. Both "express a primal rage. Love, hate, fury, despair and passion can be given utterance with brushes and pens, or with guns and knives. Artists enjoy seeing themselves as raffish outsiders, people of dubious morality."' Gentle reader, do you detect a pattern, or thread, in what I've brought together here?
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