The MacGuffin: News and Comment (24/May/2008)
(c) Ken Mogg (2008)
May 24
I spoke last time of Hitchcock's dual-mindedness, his capacity to see - and be sympathetic to - the detail of individual lives while not losing sight of the bigger picture. That is very true, I think, of the misunderstood film Stage Fright (1950), in which 'the bigger picture' is represented at the very start by a view of London war ruins dominated by an unscathed St Paul's Cathedral. (Reference to the War is reprised later in the film with the theatrical garden-party, held to raise funds for war orphans.) Now, there have been some good essays on Stage Fright - Donald Spoto's on this website is one - but I must say that the one I most admire is Molly Haskell's in 'Film Comment', Fall 1970. Here's how it begins: 'Of all Hitchcock's major films (and I believe it is a major film, though in a minor key), Stage Fright is the only one to give sheer delight, unclouded by deeper disturbance or fear. As Truffaut points out, in his cursory and, I think, unjustified dismissal of the film, no character is ever in any real danger. This is registered as a defect but is actually what makes it so purely and perfectly what it is: a film about acting and the theater which never descends into commonplace, straightforward reality at all.' And Haskell notes in conclusion that the various characters - each playing a role - but notably the essentially innocent heroine, Eve Gill (Jane Wyman), together contribute to 'the grand directorial design'. By this, Haskell means Hitchcock's design but which might in turn stand for God's. (Again and again you feel this in Hitchcock. I'm reminded, for example, that The Trouble With Harry [1955] is another film that opens with a shot of a church.) Okay, the DVD of Stage Fright has a wretched short documentary whose various contributors (e.g., a film historian named Robert Osborne) are blind to what the film is actually doing - they see small details but miss the conceptual point these are making. So I must quote Molly Haskell again. 'Theatricality is not concealed but flaunted', she writes. 'The initial lie of the theater - This Is Reality - is never uttered; disbelief is not suspended but short-circuited by an ecstatic, multiple adventure into different levels and values of duplicity.' When, in his 'lying flashback', Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) is shown going to the house of Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), a hurdy-gurdy plays in the street outside. Hitchcock would not normally use such a cliché (cf The Magic Box, made the same year) but here he deliberately 'plays up' the theatricality involved. Also, a moment later, he uses technical trickery and 'acting' to fake Jonathan's entry through the front door. As Richard Osborne points out, Todd mimes closing the door and we hear it close, but in fact we don't see this happen (so that the effect is of the camera doing the impossible, passing through a door that has been closed to it - an effect that Hitchcock would use again in The Wrong Man [1957] and The Birds [1963]). The point here is that duplicity is the order of the day: the same goes for the 'lying flashback'. (In 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' I analyse an entire sequence to show how 'theatricality' fills practically every moment of the film: e.g., Eve, 'standing in' for the absent maid, Nellie Goode, must respond 'on cue' when Charlotte summons her by a cough, itself a piece of 'acting'.) I would make one exception to what I said just now about the wretchedness of the contributors to the Stage Fright documentary. Film director Richard Franklin was quite right to compare Jonathan to Psycho's Norman Bates. For it's clear that Todd plays the mentally unstable Jonathan as like a little boy - subject to tantrums in unguarded moments - playing at being a grown man who would rise from the chorus-line to win the arm of stage star Charlotte: aspiration beyond a show's chorus-line is a motif that goes back to two of Hitchcock's earliest films: The Pleasure Garden (1925) and Downhill (1927). The fact that sometimes Jonathan's (not Todd's) 'performance' shows through is doubtless what Hitchcock intended - though not without ambiguity. For example, at one point Jonathan appears to wake from dozing in a chair, and promptly seizes the incriminating evidence, a bloodstained dress (itself a highly melodramatic object), and throws it on the fire. Had he really been dozing? Or had he overheard Eve talking with her father Commodore Gill (Alastair Sim), and realised that they might go to the police (which, appropriately, would be 'curtains' for him)? In other words, is his action here another piece of acting? Well, we can't be sure, and that's the point, definitely. In turn, Hitchcock wants us to see that we're all subjective, 'all in our private traps', as Norman Bates says. Molly Haskell puts it like this: 'We are left only ... with the distinct, occasionally overlapping truths of a group of disparate human beings.' I'll talk next time about, for example, Mrs Gill (Sybil Thorndike), who lives in a a world of her own but not disfunctionally so (or not altogether). Meanwhile, Hitchcock as usual implies the need for a general compassion. For me, a key moment is how, even when (contra Truffaut's statement above) Eve's life is in danger, at the film's climax, she listens to the now clearly psychopathic Jonathan with pity - Charlotte had been using him all along - and exclaims, 'Oh, Jonathan, I'm so desperately sorry for you.' (See frame-capture below.) A note in Whitfield Cook's screenplay tells us that she means it. Her own life isn't everything. Eve has attained dual-mindedness. More next time.
This material is copyright of Ken Mogg and the Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website (home page) and is archived with the permission of the copyright holder. |
