Everyone knows movies are collaborative, polyvalent, and multiform; it\u27s only in our stubbornly powerful experiences of them that they can seem autonomous, homeostatic, or singly begotten. Hitchcock\u27s Notebooks—a tantalizing, frustrating glimpse through a narrow chink in the thick door of a hallowed vault—will not doom the myths of the auteur to their final resting place, but the book tellingly reveals the many negotiations, improvisations, sleights-of-hand, and slipknots that went into the crafting of Hitchcock\u27s exacting, austerely precisionist films. To that extent, it contributes some compelling new information to both he meanings of the films and the image of their maker

Morrison, James

English

Keck Graduate Institute

Hitchcock’s Notebooks
An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside 
the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock
By Dan Auiler. New York: Avon Books, 1999. $30.00.
Everyone knows movies are collaborative, polyvalent, and
multiform; it’s only in our stubbornly powerful experiences
of them that they can seem autonomous, homeostatic, or
singly begotten. Hitchcock’s Notebooks—a tantalizing , frus-
trating glimpse through a narrow chink in the thick door of
a hallowed vault— will not doom the myths of the auteur to
their  nal resting place, but the book tellingly  reveals the
many negotiations , improvisations, sleights-of-hand, and
slipknots that went into the crafting of Hitchcock’s exact-
ing, austerely precisionist   lms. To that extent, it contributes
some compelling new information to both the meanings of
the  lms and the image of their maker.
The standard version of Hitchcock as an impish sadist,
reveling in the Dark Side of Genius, is regrettably entrenched
by now; maybe it is only because of that reputation, but the
pictures from the archive that show Hitchcock as a  gure of
foreboding are the ones that stand out most strikingly  here.
Consider a shot from the set of Dial M for Murder: there he
is, inclined in the director’s chair like a malignant toad, face
twisted with rancor, stern hand sweeping across the photo-
graph’s blurry foreground, blunt  nger extended in the lordly
demand the whole picture declaim s—Get lost! But there’s
enough of Hitchcock in dialogue with his collaborators in
the book to offset the image of the neurotic, magisterial po-
tentate jealously guarding his creative dominions. Especially
in contacts with his writers, Hitchcock could be gracious,
personable, sometimes downright oleaginous—until, as we’d
already learned from Me and Hitch , Evan Hunter’s recently
published account of his work with Hitchcock on The Birds,
he thought they’d crossed him.
At times, at least in Dan Auiler ’s selections for Note-
books, these transactions appear to be decidedly, if sugges-
tively, unilateral.  Samson Raphaelson’s letters regarding his
own work on the script of Suspicion address Hitchcock with
intim acy and affection (“Dear Hitch . . . blessings on you
and Alma”), but though no replies are included from Hitch-
cock, potentially unfavorable ones are implied by the fact
that nearly all of Raphaelson’s suggestions are ignored in
the  nished  lm. And a good thing, too. Here’s Raphaelson
on an early  scene: “When Lina overhears her father and
mother calling her a spinster— if, before Johnny is discov-
ered, we could see him walking toward her, we would not
have the feeling he has overheard. . . . I don’t think that is
good. If she thinks he has heard her parents calling her a
spinster, she wouldn’t be likely to kiss him.” But in the  lm,
Hitchcock goes in exactly the opposite direction , heighten-
ing the ambiguity : a quick, blithe pan reveals Johnny stand-
ing at the window beside Lina, where we had no idea he
was, and he smirks with what could be pity, derision, con-
spiratorial sympathy, or just plain acknowledgment—and
that is exactly what gives the desperate, impulsive kiss its
perverse poignancy. “I don’t think she should say the line
about ‘Is it a painful death’ [at the dinner party],”  Raphael-
son cautions elsewhere. But Hitchcock keeps the line—
indeed, underscores it— and in Joan Fontaine’s exquisite
delivery, hesitant but direct, it becomes one of the  lm’s un-
forgettable moments, transformin g a Gothic melodrama into
a complex, moving study of human vulnerability.
Raphaelson objected to the line because he thought it
denied the character’s volition: “That [line] comes from a
supine, licked woman.” A similar omission in the  nished
 lm from Thornton Wilder’s script for Shadow of a Doubt
begins to suggest a pattern . In the script,  as excerpted  in
Hitchcock’s Notebooks, during the  nal confrontation on the
train, when Uncle Charlie tries to push Charlie from the mov-
ing vehicle, Wilder has her repeat, “You won’t! You won’t!”
and suggests that Uncle Charlie “weakens” because of her
expression of determination and resolve. In the  lm, there is
no such implication, and the mordant, breathtaking scene
evokes Hitchcock’s dark poetry of helplessness—his alter-
nately forlorn and corrosive chronicles of the power of the
precarious in human experience—far more strongly than it
does Wilder’s lyric celebrations of the indomitable pluck of
the small-tow n spirit.
The tension in Hitchcock’s reputation between popular
entertainer (the “master of suspense”) and serious artist is re-
peatedly visible in the material gathered in this collection,
though it seems to have caused only passing anxiety  on
Hitchcock’s part. He prided himself on perfectionism, the
evidence here suggests, but did not, at least until very late
in his career, fret over mistakes beyond the next “project,”
and though he welcomed the nod of posterity, he nursed a
showman’s faith in the public’s receptiveness and, at times,
its gullibility. We see him paying some attention  to reviews
on occasion, but he’s always willing to write them off in ex-
change for the audience’s favor. At the same time, he doesn’t
appear to have lavished any excessive respect on the public;
when his assistant, Peggy Robertson, noticed a crew mem-
ber standing in the background of one of the long takes in
the finished print of Under Capricorn, “Hitchcock didn’t
seem at all disturbed. He said, ‘Peggy, we’ve seen this  lm
countless times and we’ve just noticed it. All we’re con-
cerned with is getting it by the audience once—they’ll never
notice.’”
Hitchcock worried about being typed as only a director
of suspense thrillers, but turned down the chance to direct
Anastasia, among other projects  that might have demon-
strated greater range. Working in popular forms such as
melodrama and the thriller, the director must have felt him-
self beset by philistin ism at every point in his career, and
some of his impatience registers here, though most often in
relation to underlings who fail to follow his orders, or toad-
ies who work to enforce the demands of labor unions. We can
only imagine Hitchcock’s response to the surpassing idiocy
of George Schaefer’s suggestion for the ending of Suspicion:
“‘Low as I have sunk,’” Johnny says to Lina in Schaefer ’s
fervid imaginings, “‘realizing that you would die for me in
this way makes me know that I am not fit to live’—With
62
which he puts the glass to his lips and empties it, falling on
the bed unconscious.”
Lest one conclude, however, that Hitchcock himself al-
ways dependably exhibited personally the artistry so amply
visible in his  lms—the highbrow sheep among lowbrow
goats— turn to a document like his revised treatm ent for
Marnie, reprinted here. The treatm ent reveals a lot about the
development of that project, but what is mainly on view,
rather painfully, is a sensibility  fraught with penny-dreadful
sentiments and dime-novel clichés, complete with wildly
melodramatic plot revelations and suggested dialogue of
Schaeferesque awfulness: “She was leading a double life,
Marnie. When the baby came, it knocked the lid off that
make-believe world of hers.”
Part of the point here, of course, is that Hitchcock’s
artistry is visual, not verbal, and Hitchcock’s Notebooks
reminds us over and over again, as did Hunter’s memoir,
exactly how, and in what ways, this is the case. The neo-
expressionist ardor of Marnie , for instance, overwhelms the
trite  romance-novel conceptions of the film’s origins on
paper. Indeed, Auiler errs in dispersing the materials across
separate chapters with headings like “Building the Screen-
play” and “Preparing the Visual,” because doing so fails to
emphasize, or even to suggest, the crucial interdependency
of these phases in the construction of Hitchcock’s  lms. John
Michael Hayes (scriptwriter on Rear Window, To Catch a
Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Trouble with
Harry) emphasizes this interdependence in a quotation in-
cluded here: “Hitchcock taught me how to tell a story with
the camera and tell it silently.”  Hitchcock’s own most im-
portant preproduction contributions were shot lists accom-
panied by visual sketches. Consider in particular one for the
Ambrose Chapel scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much,
where the shot breakdown is accompanied by a visual con-
ception of the space, its symmetry and imposing vertical
construction anticipating the set later designed for the  lm
itself.
The chapter on building the screenplay shows Hitch-
cock’s involvement in the writing process to be more intri-
cate than many could have supposed, but it does so, most
often, by juxtaposing variant drafts without providing much
guidance or even speculation on the editor ’s part regarding
how to interpret the changes. One of the real  nds of the col-
lection is certainly  the excerpt from Wilder’s handwritten
script for Shadow of a Doubt (though this is sometimes il-
legibly reproduced in the book), but Auiler ’s brief comment
on it that “the  lm has only the slightest variations on what’s
excerpted here” is puzzling at best. If that were the case,
then why not devote the 25 pages these excerpts occupy to
some material that diverges more signi cantly from the  n-
ished  lm?
In truth, though, the differences should certainly enrich
viewers’ sense of the  lm’s intentions and meanings. In the
script’s dinner scene, many of Emma’s key lines from the
 lm are simply not there, and the tone of Charlie’s outburst
at her father in the scene is completely different from its
counterpart in the  lm. In the script’s climax, Federal agent
Jack actually witnesses Uncle Charlie’s death, a major vari-
ation on the  lm’s action, and the  nal speech, though ad-
mittedly subtle in its differences from that of the  lm, yields
large implications for the key critical problem of the  lm’s
ending, its relation to the conventions of the traditional  Hol-
lywood “happy ending.” Readers will decide for themselves
how “slight” such variations are, but such comments often
suggest that Auiler is not sufficiently  attuned to Hitchcock
studies to know what the big critical issues really are.
Readers should also be aware in general that it is best to
approach Auiler’s commentary with caution. Its weaknesses
range from outright mistakes to seeming misrepresentations
to arguable errors of judgment that mar the selection and
arrangement of materials in important ways. There is also a
certain insensitiv ity to nuance, which can come in more lit-
eral ways, as when Auiler, transcrib ing a production con-
ference on Marnie and apparently missing Hitchcock’s
musical metaphors, transcribes “leitmotif”  as “light motif.”
It’s also clear that Auiler has decided overall to try to keep
a low editorial pro le, and the reader welcomes the points
where he steps aside to let the material speak for itself. Too
often, though, Auiler’s cryptic or inaccurate comments on
the selections obscure rather than clarify principles of in-
clusion, and his self-effacement tellingly gives way to baf-
fling bouts of self-promotion. Auiler ’s modesty is further
undermined, too, by the fact of his identifying  himself as the
“author” of this book, rather than its editor, though his writ-
ten contributions make up considerably less than one-tenth
of the text, and selection  and arrangement clearly constitute
the bulk of his labors.
Because so much material inevitably had to be left out,
the reader must trust the editor of this book as a guide to an
unusual degree. Auiler does little to build such trust. He
doesn’t tell us enough about what has been omitted, or de-
scribe the logic of his choices, as if they were somehow self-
evident. He does not include postproduction materials on
Under Capricorn—that least appreciated among Hitchcock’s
great  lms—because, he tells us, they seem “innocuous,”
but that’s a word one could use to describe much of what
has been selected often merely to corroborate already well-
known facts. Nor does Auiler provide the compelling per-
sonal responses to Hitchcock’s work that might have lent
resonance or conviction to his editorial presence behind the
project. His take on Hitchcock’s work is rather ordinary,
apart from some quirky chronology (the “golden decade” of
Hitchcock’s career is said to run from 1954 to 1962, Rear
Window to Psycho, a pretty slim decade at a mere eight years,
even padded with that extraneous two, giving the impres-
sion that Auiler thinks Psycho was released in 1962).
In the last analysis, then, this is a book that largely con-
firms rather than revises our notions about Hitchcock. We
come to the end with a keen and not unexpected sense of
Hitchcock’s occasional pettiness, frequent glibness, and
consummate professionalism . The Herrick  Library of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds enough
material on Hitchcock, no doubt, to fill dozens of books
like this one. Maybe another book, and another editor, will
63
someday help us to trace the exact moment—some time be-
fore the camera begins to whir or after the lights go down—
when that professionalism  turned into visual artistry,  the
glibness into depth, the pettiness into poetry.
James Morrison’s book Passport to Hollywood (SUNY, 1998)
was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in Film for
1999. His next book, Broken Fever, a memoir, will be published by
St. Martin’s Press.
Italian Film
By Marcia Landy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 2000. $64.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.
Marcia Landy is a leading  gure in Anglo-American Italian
 lm scholarship, having been one of the  rst American schol-
ars to elaborate the richness of Italian  lm production during
the Fascist regime in her book Fascism in Film: The Italian
Commercial Cinema, 1931-43 (1986). She returned to this
subject in her recent text, The Folklore of Consensus: The-
atricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930-1943 (1998). Her lat-
est book is a synoptic history of Italian  lm, titled, simply,
Italian Film, and is part of Cambridge University Press’s new
series, “National Film Traditions,” edited by David Desser.
Landy’s boldest step in this work—and the one that most
clearly distinguishes hers from other histories of Ita lian
 lm—is also her most problematic: she has organized her
book thematically rather than in the linear, historical  frame-
work used by historians like Peter Bondanella in Italian
Cinema, From Neorealism to the Present and Mira Liehm in
Passion and De ance, Film in Italy from 1942 to the Pres-
ent. Landy seems to be defending this crucial decision when
she writes in her preface:
My examination is primarily concerned with ex-
ploring the narratives, images, and sounds and their
relation to other cultural forms through which this
“ ctive entity” known as Italian cinema has been
disseminated and recognized as national. The book
explores the persistence of various styles and mo-
tifs and the differin g ways these have been ex-
pressed in Italy from the silen t cinema to the
present. (xiv)
The themes range from the representation of gender to
the use of landscape to the role of the family in Italian  lm.
In many ways such an approach is refreshing. Too often his-
tories of Italian cinema rely on a teleological template that
casts everything in the silent period as a harbinger of Fascism
and everything after Rome, Open City (1945) as a recoil from
the same. Oddly enough, such histories rarely say anything
substantial about  lms produced during the Fascist period.
As Landy claims, Italian Film “does not gloss over or un-
derestim ate  lms from the years of Fascism” (xiv), and her
passages on  lms made during the 20 years of the Fascist
regime are some of her most compelling . Her sensitive read-
ing of a rarely-discussed Fascist period satire, Sorelle Mat-
erassi (Ferdinando Poggioli [1943]), a  lm which she argues
“makes visible the grotesque and theatricalized character of
dearly held values,” suggests that this period of  lmmaking
merits the attention she has given it here and elsewhere.
Two chapters in particular are the book’s most original:
“The Landscape and Neorealism, Before and After” and
“Gramsci and Italian Cinema.” The subject of landscape is
a central issue that has received scant attention in Italian  lm
studies. Certainly location is an important feature of  lms
produced in every part of the world, but in Italian  lm the
issue of cinematic location assumes a special density due to
its participa tion in a centuries-old art-historical tradition of
representing the Italian  landscape, and especially the
cityscape. Landy’s discussion of the landscape covers  lms
from every major period of Italian  cinema (for example,
Napoli d’altri tempi, by Amleto Palermi [1938] and Fed-
erico Fellini’s Roma [1972]), but the chapter ’s forcefulness
is vitiated by omitting several key  lms (Roberto Rossellini’s
Paisa, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, and Michelangelo
Antonioni’s Il Grido) whose representation of the landscape
are much more crucial and complex than the examples Landy
has chosen. Nonetheless, Landy’s focusing on the question
of landscape goes far in drawing attention to this under-
researched area of Italian  lm history.
The chapter on Gramsci redresses a blind spot in
Liehm’s and Bondanella’s histories in which he is referenced
only  eetingly and almost exclusively in connection to Vis-
conti and Pasolini. In Italian Film, Landy gives the patron
saint of the Italian Communist Party his full due, arguing
that “No other  gure’s ideas played such a large role in the
development of the post-World War II Italian cinema” (149).
Landy supports this claim with analyses of  lms by Mario
Monicelli, Ermanno Olmi, the Taviani brothers, as well as
Visconti and Pasolini. Landy demonstrates that these  lm-
makers’ relationships to modernism and modernity are
in ected by a Gramscian consciousness that resists roman-
ticizing history and sentimentalizing the working class.
Landy’s thematic chapters do produce some discon-
certing effects. While the organization by motif manages to
avoid the evil of teleology, it runs the risk of invoking the
specter of synchrony. The book’s organization, in fact, makes
it difficult to get a sense of the developmental trajectory  of
Italian  lm history. The historical contexts of individual  lms
are rather hastily sketched, a method of economy which, to
be fair, is forced on any general national  lm history. But in
a history that is not arranged chronologically, the effect is
that the precise historical distinctions  between  lms begin to
break down. Films from different periods seem to be frozen
side by side in the same amber.
Italian Film is a book for a broad readership, and should
be read alongside one of the standard histories of the  eld as
a provocative conceptualizing tool. It will encourage stu-
dents of Italian cinema to draw connections across periods
and genres; in the hands of inquisitive and historical ly in-
formed students, Landy’s book could do much to help them
move beyond the prosaic données of Italian  lm history.
John David Rhodes is  nishing his dissertation on urbanism and
Italian cinema of the 1960s at NYU’s Dept. of Cinema Studies.
64


Book Review: Hitchcock\u27s Notebooks

Scholarship@Claremont

Hitchcock’s NotebooksAn Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred HitchcockBy Dan Auiler. New York: Avon Books, 1999. $30.00.Everyone knows movies are collaborative, polyvalent, andmultiform; it’s only in our stubbornly powerful experiencesof them that they can seem autonomous, homeostatic, orsingly begotten. Hitchcock’s Notebooks—a tantalizing , frus-trating glimpse through a narrow chink in the thick door ofa hallowed vault— will not doom the myths of the auteur totheir  nal resting place, but the book tellingly  reveals themany negotiations , improvisations, sleights-of-hand, andslipknots that went into the crafting of Hitchcock’s exact-ing, austerely precisionist   lms. To that extent, it contributessome compelling new information to both the meanings ofthe  lms and the image of their maker.The standard version of Hitchcock as an impish sadist,reveling in the Dark Side of Genius, is regrettably entrenchedby now; maybe it is only because of that reputation, but thepictures from the archive that show Hitchcock as a  gure offoreboding are the ones that stand out most strikingly  here.Consider a shot from the set of Dial M for Murder: there heis, inclined in the director’s chair like a malignant toad, facetwisted with rancor, stern hand sweeping across the photo-graph’s blurry foreground, blunt  nger extended in the lordlydemand the whole picture declaim s—Get lost! But there’senough of Hitchcock in dialogue with his collaborators inthe book to offset the image of the neurotic, magisterial po-tentate jealously guarding his creative dominions. Especiallyin contacts with his writers, Hitchcock could be gracious,personable, sometimes downright oleaginous—until, as we’dalready learned from Me and Hitch , Evan Hunter’s recentlypublished account of his work with Hitchcock on The Birds,he thought they’d crossed him.At times, at least in Dan Auiler ’s selections for Note-books, these transactions appear to be decidedly, if sugges-tively, unilateral.  Samson Raphaelson’s letters regarding hisown work on the script of Suspicion address Hitchcock withintim acy and affection (“Dear Hitch . . . blessings on youand Alma”), but though no replies are included from Hitch-cock, potentially unfavorable ones are implied by the factthat nearly all of Raphaelson’s suggestions are ignored inthe  nished  lm. And a good thing, too. Here’s Raphaelsonon an early  scene: “When Lina overhears her father andmother calling her a spinster— if, before Johnny is discov-ered, we could see him walking toward her, we would nothave the feeling he has overheard. . . . I don’t think that isgood. If she thinks he has heard her parents calling her aspinster, she wouldn’t be likely to kiss him.” But in the  lm,Hitchcock goes in exactly the opposite direction , heighten-ing the ambiguity : a quick, blithe pan reveals Johnny stand-ing at the window beside Lina, where we had no idea hewas, and he smirks with what could be pity, derision, con-spiratorial sympathy, or just plain acknowledgment—andthat is exactly what gives the desperate, impulsive kiss itsperverse poignancy. “I don’t think she should say the lineabout ‘Is it a painful death’ [at the dinner party],”  Raphael-son cautions elsewhere. But Hitchcock keeps the line—indeed, underscores it— and in Joan Fontaine’s exquisitedelivery, hesitant but direct, it becomes one of the  lm’s un-forgettable moments, transformin g a Gothic melodrama intoa complex, moving study of human vulnerability.Raphaelson objected to the line because he thought itdenied the character’s volition: “That [line] comes from asupine, licked woman.” A similar omission in the  nished lm from Thornton Wilder’s script for Shadow of a Doubtbegins to suggest a pattern . In the script,  as excerpted  inHitchcock’s Notebooks, during the  nal confrontation on thetrain, when Uncle Charlie tries to push Charlie from the mov-ing vehicle, Wilder has her repeat, “You won’t! You won’t!”and suggests that Uncle Charlie “weakens” because of herexpression of determination and resolve. In the  lm, there isno such implication, and the mordant, breathtaking sceneevokes Hitchcock’s dark poetry of helplessness—his alter-nately forlorn and corrosive chronicles of the power of theprecarious in human experience—far more strongly than itdoes Wilder’s lyric celebrations of the indomitable pluck ofthe small-tow n spirit.The tension in Hitchcock’s reputation between popularentertainer (the “master of suspense”) and serious artist is re-peatedly visible in the material gathered in this collection,though it seems to have caused only passing anxiety  onHitchcock’s part. He prided himself on perfectionism, theevidence here suggests, but did not, at least until very latein his career, fret over mistakes beyond the next “project,”and though he welcomed the nod of posterity, he nursed ashowman’s faith in the public’s receptiveness and, at times,its gullibility. We see him paying some attention  to reviewson occasion, but he’s always willing to write them off in ex-change for the audience’s favor. At the same time, he doesn’tappear to have lavished any excessive respect on the public;when his assistant, Peggy Robertson, noticed a crew mem-ber standing in the background of one of the long takes inthe finished print of Under Capricorn, “Hitchcock didn’tseem at all disturbed. He said, ‘Peggy, we’ve seen this  lmcountless times and we’ve just noticed it. All we’re con-cerned with is getting it by the audience once—they’ll nevernotice.’”Hitchcock worried about being typed as only a directorof suspense thrillers, but turned down the chance to directAnastasia, among other projects  that might have demon-strated greater range. Working in popular forms such asmelodrama and the thriller, the director must have felt him-self beset by philistin ism at every point in his career, andsome of his impatience registers here, though most often inrelation to underlings who fail to follow his orders, or toad-ies who work to enforce the demands of labor unions. We canonly imagine Hitchcock’s response to the surpassing idiocyof George Schaefer’s suggestion for the ending of Suspicion:“‘Low as I have sunk,’” Johnny says to Lina in Schaefer ’sfervid imaginings, “‘realizing that you would die for me inthis way makes me know that I am not fit to live’—With62which he puts the glass to his lips and empties it, falling onthe bed unconscious.”Lest one conclude, however, that Hitchcock himself al-ways dependably exhibited personally the artistry so amplyvisible in his  lms—the highbrow sheep among lowbrowgoats— turn to a document like his revised treatm ent forMarnie, reprinted here. The treatm ent reveals a lot about thedevelopment of that project, but what is mainly on view,rather painfully, is a sensibility  fraught with penny-dreadfulsentiments and dime-novel clichés, complete with wildlymelodramatic plot revelations and suggested dialogue ofSchaeferesque awfulness: “She was leading a double life,Marnie. When the baby came, it knocked the lid off thatmake-believe world of hers.”Part of the point here, of course, is that Hitchcock’sartistry is visual, not verbal, and Hitchcock’s Notebooksreminds us over and over again, as did Hunter’s memoir,exactly how, and in what ways, this is the case. The neo-expressionist ardor of Marnie , for instance, overwhelms thetrite  romance-novel conceptions of the film’s origins onpaper. Indeed, Auiler errs in dispersing the materials acrossseparate chapters with headings like “Building the Screen-play” and “Preparing the Visual,” because doing so fails toemphasize, or even to suggest, the crucial interdependencyof these phases in the construction of Hitchcock’s  lms. JohnMichael Hayes (scriptwriter on Rear Window, To Catch aThief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Trouble withHarry) emphasizes this interdependence in a quotation in-cluded here: “Hitchcock taught me how to tell a story withthe camera and tell it silently.”  Hitchcock’s own most im-portant preproduction contributions were shot lists accom-panied by visual sketches. Consider in particular one for theAmbrose Chapel scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much,where the shot breakdown is accompanied by a visual con-ception of the space, its symmetry and imposing verticalconstruction anticipating the set later designed for the  lmitself.The chapter on building the screenplay shows Hitch-cock’s involvement in the writing process to be more intri-cate than many could have supposed, but it does so, mostoften, by juxtaposing variant drafts without providing muchguidance or even speculation on the editor ’s part regardinghow to interpret the changes. One of the real  nds of the col-lection is certainly  the excerpt from Wilder’s handwrittenscript for Shadow of a Doubt (though this is sometimes il-legibly reproduced in the book), but Auiler ’s brief commenton it that “the  lm has only the slightest variations on what’sexcerpted here” is puzzling at best. If that were the case,then why not devote the 25 pages these excerpts occupy tosome material that diverges more signi cantly from the  n-ished  lm?In truth, though, the differences should certainly enrichviewers’ sense of the  lm’s intentions and meanings. In thescript’s dinner scene, many of Emma’s key lines from the lm are simply not there, and the tone of Charlie’s outburstat her father in the scene is completely different from itscounterpart in the  lm. In the script’s climax, Federal agentJack actually witnesses Uncle Charlie’s death, a major vari-ation on the  lm’s action, and the  nal speech, though ad-mittedly subtle in its differences from that of the  lm, yieldslarge implications for the key critical problem of the  lm’sending, its relation to the conventions of the traditional  Hol-lywood “happy ending.” Readers will decide for themselveshow “slight” such variations are, but such comments oftensuggest that Auiler is not sufficiently  attuned to Hitchcockstudies to know what the big critical issues really are.Readers should also be aware in general that it is best toapproach Auiler’s commentary with caution. Its weaknessesrange from outright mistakes to seeming misrepresentationsto arguable errors of judgment that mar the selection andarrangement of materials in important ways. There is also acertain insensitiv ity to nuance, which can come in more lit-eral ways, as when Auiler, transcrib ing a production con-ference on Marnie and apparently missing Hitchcock’smusical metaphors, transcribes “leitmotif”  as “light motif.”It’s also clear that Auiler has decided overall to try to keepa low editorial pro le, and the reader welcomes the pointswhere he steps aside to let the material speak for itself. Toooften, though, Auiler’s cryptic or inaccurate comments onthe selections obscure rather than clarify principles of in-clusion, and his self-effacement tellingly gives way to baf-fling bouts of self-promotion. Auiler ’s modesty is furtherundermined, too, by the fact of his identifying  himself as the“author” of this book, rather than its editor, though his writ-ten contributions make up considerably less than one-tenthof the text, and selection  and arrangement clearly constitutethe bulk of his labors.Because so much material inevitably had to be left out,the reader must trust the editor of this book as a guide to anunusual degree. Auiler does little to build such trust. Hedoesn’t tell us enough about what has been omitted, or de-scribe the logic of his choices, as if they were somehow self-evident. He does not include postproduction materials onUnder Capricorn—that least appreciated among Hitchcock’sgreat  lms—because, he tells us, they seem “innocuous,”but that’s a word one could use to describe much of whathas been selected often merely to corroborate already well-known facts. Nor does Auiler provide the compelling per-sonal responses to Hitchcock’s work that might have lentresonance or conviction to his editorial presence behind theproject. His take on Hitchcock’s work is rather ordinary,apart from some quirky chronology (the “golden decade” ofHitchcock’s career is said to run from 1954 to 1962, RearWindow to Psycho, a pretty slim decade at a mere eight years,even padded with that extraneous two, giving the impres-sion that Auiler thinks Psycho was released in 1962).In the last analysis, then, this is a book that largely con-firms rather than revises our notions about Hitchcock. Wecome to the end with a keen and not unexpected sense ofHitchcock’s occasional pettiness, frequent glibness, andconsummate professionalism . The Herrick  Library of theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds enoughmaterial on Hitchcock, no doubt, to fill dozens of bookslike this one. Maybe another book, and another editor, will63someday help us to trace the exact moment—some time be-fore the camera begins to whir or after the lights go down—when that professionalism  turned into visual artistry,  theglibness into depth, the pettiness into poetry.James Morrison’s book Passport to Hollywood (SUNY, 1998)was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in Film for1999. His next book, Broken Fever, a memoir, will be published bySt. Martin’s Press.Italian FilmBy Marcia Landy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000. $64.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.Marcia Landy is a leading  gure in Anglo-American Italian lm scholarship, having been one of the  rst American schol-ars to elaborate the richness of Italian  lm production duringthe Fascist regime in her book Fascism in Film: The ItalianCommercial Cinema, 1931-43 (1986). She returned to thissubject in her recent text, The Folklore of Consensus: The-atricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930-1943 (1998). Her lat-est book is a synoptic history of Italian  lm, titled, simply,Italian Film, and is part of Cambridge University Press’s newseries, “National Film Traditions,” edited by David Desser.Landy’s boldest step in this work—and the one that mostclearly distinguishes hers from other histories of Ita lian lm—is also her most problematic: she has organized herbook thematically rather than in the linear, historical  frame-work used by historians like Peter Bondanella in ItalianCinema, From Neorealism to the Present and Mira Liehm inPassion and De ance, Film in Italy from 1942 to the Pres-ent. Landy seems to be defending this crucial decision whenshe writes in her preface:My examination is primarily concerned with ex-ploring the narratives, images, and sounds and theirrelation to other cultural forms through which this“ ctive entity” known as Italian cinema has beendisseminated and recognized as national. The bookexplores the persistence of various styles and mo-tifs and the differin g ways these have been ex-pressed in Italy from the silen t cinema to thepresent. (xiv)The themes range from the representation of gender tothe use of landscape to the role of the family in Italian  lm.In many ways such an approach is refreshing. Too often his-tories of Italian cinema rely on a teleological template thatcasts everything in the silent period as a harbinger of Fascismand everything after Rome, Open City (1945) as a recoil fromthe same. Oddly enough, such histories rarely say anythingsubstantial about  lms produced during the Fascist period.As Landy claims, Italian Film “does not gloss over or un-derestim ate  lms from the years of Fascism” (xiv), and herpassages on  lms made during the 20 years of the Fascistregime are some of her most compelling . Her sensitive read-ing of a rarely-discussed Fascist period satire, Sorelle Mat-erassi (Ferdinando Poggioli [1943]), a  lm which she argues“makes visible the grotesque and theatricalized character ofdearly held values,” suggests that this period of  lmmakingmerits the attention she has given it here and elsewhere.Two chapters in particular are the book’s most original:“The Landscape and Neorealism, Before and After” and“Gramsci and Italian Cinema.” The subject of landscape isa central issue that has received scant attention in Italian  lmstudies. Certainly location is an important feature of  lmsproduced in every part of the world, but in Italian  lm theissue of cinematic location assumes a special density due toits participa tion in a centuries-old art-historical tradition ofrepresenting the Italian  landscape, and especially thecityscape. Landy’s discussion of the landscape covers  lmsfrom every major period of Italian  cinema (for example,Napoli d’altri tempi, by Amleto Palermi [1938] and Fed-erico Fellini’s Roma [1972]), but the chapter ’s forcefulnessis vitiated by omitting several key  lms (Roberto Rossellini’sPaisa, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, and MichelangeloAntonioni’s Il Grido) whose representation of the landscapeare much more crucial and complex than the examples Landyhas chosen. Nonetheless, Landy’s focusing on the questionof landscape goes far in drawing attention to this under-researched area of Italian  lm history.The chapter on Gramsci redresses a blind spot inLiehm’s and Bondanella’s histories in which he is referencedonly  eetingly and almost exclusively in connection to Vis-conti and Pasolini. In Italian Film, Landy gives the patronsaint of the Italian Communist Party his full due, arguingthat “No other  gure’s ideas played such a large role in thedevelopment of the post-World War II Italian cinema” (149).Landy supports this claim with analyses of  lms by MarioMonicelli, Ermanno Olmi, the Taviani brothers, as well asVisconti and Pasolini. Landy demonstrates that these  lm-makers’ relationships to modernism and modernity arein ected by a Gramscian consciousness that resists roman-ticizing history and sentimentalizing the working class.Landy’s thematic chapters do produce some discon-certing effects. While the organization by motif manages toavoid the evil of teleology, it runs the risk of invoking thespecter of synchrony. The book’s organization, in fact, makesit difficult to get a sense of the developmental trajectory  ofItalian  lm history. The historical contexts of individual  lmsare rather hastily sketched, a method of economy which, tobe fair, is forced on any general national  lm history. But ina history that is not arranged chronologically, the effect isthat the precise historical distinctions  between  lms begin tobreak down. Films from different periods seem to be frozenside by side in the same amber.Italian Film is a book for a broad readership, and shouldbe read alongside one of the standard histories of the  eld asa provocative conceptualizing tool. It will encourage stu-dents of Italian cinema to draw connections across periodsand genres; in the hands of inquisitive and historical ly in-formed students, Landy’s book could do much to help themmove beyond the prosaic données of Italian  lm history.John David Rhodes is  nishing his dissertation on urbanism andItalian cinema of the 1960s at NYU’s Dept. of Cinema Studies.64

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1259&amp;context=cmc_fac_pub

Book Review: Hitchcock\u27s Notebooks

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Keck Graduate Institute

Scholarship@Claremont