The MacGuffin: News and Comment (27/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 27
Hitchcock was not joking when he once said that he liked 'stories with lots of psychology'. Yesterday I started to discuss how, during the 1940s, he read Heinrich Heine's tragedy 'William Ratcliff' (1822) several times. The story is set in 17th century Scotland. Here again is a synopsis: 'Maria has lost two suitors to the murderous hand of William Ratcliff, whom she fears but really loves. Her latest groom, Douglas, succeeds at defeating and wounding Ratcliff. But Ratcliff finds Maria, kills her father, then her, and then he himself dies.' Notice that the woman is called Maria, making her (potentially) yet another of Hitchcock's heroines whose name begins with the letter 'M' - suggestive of both the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. (I'll come back to this. There's also discussion of this particular matter on our 'Hitchcock and Dickens' page.) I strongly suspect that Hitchcock saw parallels in Heine's story with some of the Gainsborough period romances that were being mounted at the time, notably The Wicked Lady (1945) in which a married milady (Margaret Lockwood) grows bored and becomes the mistress of a highwayman (James Mason). (I have mentioned here before how The Wicked Lady seems to have influenced Hitchcock's Notorious [1946] at a couple of points, notably a scene of a bolting horse.) David Stivender says that Ratcliff identifies 'with highwaymen and thieves', suggestive of Heine's own inclination to defy smug middle-class attitudes by taking unorthodox friends such as one Joseph Levy who had a notorious reputation as a usurer. Next, notice in the above synopsis the reference to Maria's 'latest groom'. Instantly you think of Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947) in which Maddalena Paradine - another 'M' heroine - seduces her blind husband's manservant Latour whom Hitchcock sometimes called a groom - and as Flusky in Under Capricorn (1949) was in fact when he ran off with his employer's daughter, Lady Henrietta. 'Lots of psychology' indeed! Nor are we finished! Apparently Ratcliff sets himself against all laws, mundane and celestial, thus again representing Heine whom Max Brod ('The Artist in Revolt') described as 'standing on an eminence from which he looks down with a contempuous smile on the swarm of insignificant humanity milling below'. Is this where Hitchcock got his concept of 'the moron millions' perhaps, a concept one can see working in Vertigo (1958) in the aspiration of Scottie to 'ascend' from his everyday condition to something 'higher'? (Once again this is something discussed further on our 'Hitchcock and Dickens' page.) More tomorrow.
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