Hitchcock and actors

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I cannot find the exact citation, unfortunately, but I recall reading back in the '90s a magazine story chronicling the making of director Gus Van Sant's ostensibly shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho, and said piece containing many quotes from the participating actors in which they justified/rationalized their participation in the project, which, depending on who you were talking to was either a senseless kockamamie scheme or some kind of conceptual coup. And I remember William H. Macy, who was playing the part of Arbogast that had been originated by Martin Balsam, opining that one good reason, for him, to get on board with what many might consider a desecration was to get some kind of payback with respect to Hitchcock, because Macy didn't like that thing Hitchcock said about actors, that they were "cattle." And I read this, and I sighed. Because Macy is a soulful and not unintelligent man, and his misbegotten notion that Hitchcock was somehow the enemy of actors is unfortunate. And, I guess, very hard to kill. 

The Hitchcock of 1939, anticipating a trip from Great Britain to Hollywood, in an interview in Film Weekly (reprinted in the invaluable Sidney Gottlieb-edited compilation Hitchcock on Hitchcock), revealed not just a great enthusiasm for American stars, but (and this shouldn't really come as a surprise) an acute sensitivity with respect to both particular abilities and potential. On Gary Cooper: "[He] has that rare faculty of being able to rivet the attention of an audience while he does nothing." Andre De Toth saw this in Cooper too, although he did not articulate it in quite the same way. On Carole Lombard: "I should like to cast [her] not in the type of superficial comedy which she so often plays but in a much more meaty comedy-drama,giving her plenty of scope for characterization." Once in Hollywood, Hitchcock and Lombard became friends. And they collaborated, on Mr. And Mrs. Smith, a 1941 divorce comedy that Hitchcock, in one of his legendary interviews with François Truffaut, kind of pooh-poohed: "That picture was done as a friendly gesture to [...] Lombard...I didn't really understand the type of people portrayed in the film, all I did was photograph the scenes as written." It was on the set of this picture that Lombard played the famous practical joke in which she built a mini-corral on the set and stocked it with three pieces of livestock tagged with the names of the film's three principal players. 

Hitchcock's retrospective disconnection from Mr. And Mrs. Smith, juxtaposed with his previously stated eagerness to push Carole Lombard's performance envelope, suggests several questions, the most obvious being "What happened?" Well, it's entirely possible that nothing happened. That while Hitchcock's observations concerning the various actors were sharp and truly meant, his stated desire to remold them in certain ways was little more than public-relations bluster/diplomacy.On the other hand, the fact is that Hitchcock did approach Gary Cooper for the lead in Foreign Correspondent, and Cooper turned it down, which he (Cooper) later regretted.  But whether or not Hitchcock's creative struggles with David O. Selznick during the making of Rebecca made the director subsequently dig in his heels harder with respect to hermetically sealing his creative process in the future, it's difficult to argue against the notion that the actor had a very specific and kind of immovable secondary place in Hitchcock's creative process. But it's also incorrect to translate this into an attitude of actual hostility. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan goes over the ways that different directors handle/respond to actors. His view: "Hitchcock told his screen stories as much as possible without help from his actors' performances. When Cary Grant, going into a film, asked him how he should play his part, Hitchcock answered, 'Just do what you always do.' Hitchcock relied on his camera angles and his montage [...] to do what on stage we relied on the actors for." Note the neutrality of Kazan's description; recall also Hitchcock's observation on Gary Cooper's ability to resonate while doing "nothing;" juxtapose with the theory behind the Kuleshov effect; and there's all the more reason to regret that Cooper and Hitchcock never got together.

Of course, Hitchcock made no bones or apologies for the fact that he considered shooting to be the most boring part of making a film. His pre-production work was the process by which he developed the movie in his head and assembled the means by which it could be materialized. So the actual shooting became a mechanical process, not unlike stuffing sausage casings. You could understand why an actor who was savvy to this attitude might build a resentment toward this. You can also understand how one actor might take "Just do what you always do" as a compliment and sign of respect, or as an insult. Until the period when he was getting all weird with his leading ladies, Hitchcock's expectation of a performer was that he or she would bring their best abilities and have whatever homework they felt they needed to do, done. Various acting methods and the work of directors like, well, Kazan, brought a notion of a more active collaboration between actor and director to the fore. The actor would not be playing a role in someone else's motion picture but creating a character/characterization, and hence the actor's notion of what was proper for the picture was to be taken rather seriously. This kind of idea, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, was anathema to Hitchcock, who was only concerned with filming what HE saw. Here's how he describes (to Truffaut) his difficulty with Paul Newman during the filming of 1966's Torn Curtain, discussing a scene that was ultimately cut from the film: "As you know, he's a 'method' actor, and he found it hard to just give me one of those neutral looks I needed to cut from his point of view. Instead of looking toward Gromek's brother, toward the knife or the sausage, he played the scene in the 'method' style, with emotion, and he was always turning away." If we look at the camera as a pen, then here we can see Newman as runny ink. Martin Scorsese can be seen as having, in some ways, synthesizing Kazan's sympathy for actors with Hitchcock's plastic storytelling style. Talking about working with Newman some twenty years after Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, for 1986's The Color of Money, he recalls (in the Faber and Faber book Scorsese on Scorsese): "Paul [is the] kind of actor who doesn't like to improvise that much on the set, so [...] everything was rehearsed beforehand. We did it the way he suggested, which was to take two complete weeks and just work out with the actors in a loft. I was really nervous, because it was like the theater [...] So when he said, 'What you do is take a tape and mark out an area for a chair; then you tape out an area for a bed,' I could foresee those terrible theater things when people pretend a door is there, which I hate. I said, 'What if we use a real chair?' 'A chair is good,' he said, to my relief."

While we cannot imagine Hitchcock in such a situation getting anywhere near to, let alone beyond "just work out with the actors in a loft," we shouldn't, by the same token, beat his ghost or his films over the head with some conception that he, and they, are anti-human-performer. That's a rap more applicable to, say, Michael Bay.

Comments

[D Cairns]

For Macy to win his point he'd have to give a better performance than Martin Balsam did in the same role. Macy is perfectly good... but certainly no better than Balsam.

[Tom Russell]

Great post, Glenn.

I think that De Palma at his best achieves a similar synthesis as Scorsese of Hitchcock's storytelling techniques and Kazan's more actor-oriented approach.

[bill]

I remember that article with the Macy quote. So for what it's worth, I know you're not lying.

[Grand Old Movies]

Hitchcock's attitude toward actors is often portrayed as mechanistic, that they're somehow the 'cattle' to be pushed around the set, but I see it instead as Hitchcock being very intuitive about what he was looking for and trying to fit the right actor to the image he had of his film and what he was trying to do. Once he had that actor, then of course it would just be a matter of the actor 'doing' what he always did - since that would complete the image. It also seems a method that could allow actors freedom to be themselves and react naturally. As you note, an iconic actor like Cooper would, just by his very presence, convey the specific mood or tone that a director wanted; the actor is thus an integral part of the whole Hitchcock film.

[Joel]

I think that David Mamet has said worse things about actors. Perhaps Macy was not being 100% serious about his reasons for performing in PSYCHO.

[Victor Morton]

When Max Von Sydow presented THE VIRGIN SPRING at Toronto shortly after Bergman's death, he said some things about Bergman's attitude toward actors that struck me as very Hitchcockian. I described the whole screening in an essay here (http://vjmorton.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/me-and-max/) but here is the here-relevant part:

"Surprisingly to me, von Sydow said Bergman gave little explicit direction³, something to the effect of “he gave us general ideas and if we weren’t doing something right, he’d tell us.” But he was not a control-freak, which von Sydow said he liked. “Actors don’t like to be given orders. You want the sense of having some input and some control over what you’re doing. Otherwise, it’s boring,” he said. Surprisingly, this was more or less the direction style of another of my favorite directors, but a man who doesn’t have Bergman’s reputation as a great director of actors — Alfred (“actors are cattle") Hitchcock."

[lazarus]

Not sure what Hitch's philosophy re: actors was on Under Capricorn, but his use of long takes certainly enabled Ingrid Bergman to go well beyond "doing what she does", giving one hell of a performance. She ain't bad in Notorious either, also not a typical Bergman role. Would these two be her most sexually-charged, complex turns?

[La Faustin]

How about her Hedda Gabler? (Not that the above Hitchcock roles are anything near hay ...)

[La Faustin]

One of my capcha words was norman!

[Petey]

"recall also Hitchcock's observation on Gary Cooper's ability to resonate while doing "nothing;" juxtapose with the theory behind the Kuleshov effect"

Bingo. Think of all the shots of James Stewart's following Kim Novak in Vertigo for just how well that worked for Hitch.

"Until the period when he was getting all weird with his leading ladies..."

I think that's where all the modern objections to Hitch's actor wrangling methods REALLY come from.

No one cares about what Kubrick did to Shelley Duvall because he wasn't sexually hitting on her.

[David Ehrenstein]

In his excellent memoir "Include Me Out," Farley Granger discusses working with Hitch on "Rope" and "Strangers on a Train." As the former was all about camera technique their interactions were minimal. But on the latter Hitch brought Farley right into thet process, explaining how certan shots would look once edited into the whole design. He found Hitch delightful and the whole experience very enjoyable. Barbara Harris felt exactly the same on "Family Plot." Hitch loved eccentric actors -- and few are quite as eccentric as Barbara. He told her where he was positioning the camera and why. Therefore in the scenes where Madame Blanche goes into her fake trances Ht indicated where she was to start and where she was to end up in flouncing around the room. As for what she was do - "Oh whatever you want." She had a ball, as is obvious from her smiling face in hte last close-up in the history of Hitchccck.

[I.B.]

Apparently Von Sternberg too complimented Gary Cooper for that very same quality Hitch exalted, as Cooper wrote in the prologue to 'Fun in a Chinese laundry'.

[Tinky]

An intriguing topic. Of course, in some cases, even as he may (or may not) have seemed to ignore the actors, he ended up serving their careers--until, as you say, he went "all weird with his leading ladies." At that point (the Tippi era) he seemed to think that by casting non-performers he could entirely shape them in celluloid ... and acting skills do help.

[Kevyn Knox]

Hey, whatever way Hitch may have been with actors (the cattle things is probably a bit on the wingnut side of things) at least he knew their names and did not care if they went and did other films. Now let's talk about Bresson...

[David Ehrenstein]

Speakig of Sternberg, he was notorious for his alleged mistreatment of actors. I suspect he was disinclined to offer priase and carry water, for there was a recent TCM roundtable of child stars and Dickie Moore spoke of how kind Sternberg was to him during the shooting of "Blonde Venus." He even allowed Dickie his pet dog on the set to play with while they were setting up the lighting for the shots -- whcih with Sternberg was of course quite the deal.

[Petey]

"Speakig of Sternberg, he was notorious for his alleged mistreatment of actors."

There is the infamous Sam Jaffe story, which I think is the core of that notoriety.

But Marlene always said no one else knew how to light and shoot her...

[Petey]

And worth noting that both Von Sternberg's abuse of Sam Jaffe and Kubrick's abuse of Shelly Duvall had legitimate rationales in producing a better filmic product.

Non-child actors in such productions are well paid professionals, and I've got no ethical qualms in that type of stuff going on during the pro-filmic event, just as long as its for the art rather than for personal reasons.

[Tom Block]

"filmic product"

Is this what we're calling movies now?

[Petey]

Well, as opposed to the pro-filmic event, sure.

[Ryan Kelly]

I've always thought this element of the discourse regarding Hitchcock to be a little bizarre, and Joseph McBride speculates in his biography that it was an offhanded joke that became completely blown out of proportion over time. Makes sense to me, because so many incredible performances are given in Hitchcock's films that I don't see how it can be argued that he didn't value the artistry of actors.

And even if that was the way he personally felt, the process doesn't really matter - the results are what matter. And the results place a clear emphasis on performance.