Steven Jacobs,
The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock.
Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007.
ISBN: 978 90 6450 637 6
€29.50 (pb)
344pp
(Review copy supplied by 010 Publishers)

‘Authoritative’ is how I would describe this book. Steven Jacobs, an art historian, lectures on film history at Sint Lukas College of Art, Brussels, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, and on urban studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Hitchcock scholar Michael Walker had the pleasure of participating with Jacobs in a recent symposium, and emailed me afterwards: ‘Steven Jacobs knows his stuff’. The Wrong House is more than a taxonomy of the buildings in Hitchcock films, or a small history of interior and exterior design traced in those buildings, or a description of architectural motifs (staircases, windows) that recur in the films. It is all of those, but is finally about filmmaking itself. The stimulus is Hitchcock’s holistic vision which respected the work of numerous skilled colleagues – and Jacobs is clearly up to taking the measure of the visual components of that vision.

As good a film as any to demonstrate what I mean may be the underrated Dial M for Murder (USA 1954). For a start, it reflects both the German and English strains in Hitchcock’s work, present from the start of his career (and whose first two features were in fact shot in Germany). As Jacobs emphasises: “Rather than expressionism, the Kammerspielfilm, which also developed in German film culture of the 1920s, proved influential for Hitchcock’s entire career. … The combination of intimacy, careful exploration of domestic interiors, use of highly charged objects, and mobile camera work … also characterize several of Hitchcock’s films …”. (pp. 16-17) A possible stumbling-block for Jacobs in the case of Dial M for Murder is its diabolical would-be wife-murderer Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) who surely owes his basic devilry to such mastermind figures as Doctor Caligari and Doctor Mabuse, and the Devil himself in Murnau’s Faust (Germany 1926) – that is to say, to the non-Kammerspiel German films.[1] (Gavin Elster in Vertigo [1958] may have a similar provenance.) But of course Wendice’s scale of operations is definitely narrower, more domestic, than theirs. Jacobs’s essential point stands.

At the same time, an emphasis on domesticity – on hearth and home – can’t easily be separated from Hitchcock’s Englishness. John Ruskin had called the Victorian home “a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods” (p. 33) For his part, Hitchcock was always intrigued by the relatively ‘cosy’ nature of English murder. From The Lodger (UK 1926) to Dial M for Murder is a straight line. Perversely, the Warner Brothers managers on Dial M opposed Hitchcock’s hope of shooting the film in London (on location and at the Elstree Studios). They couldn’t see any difference between a Brownstone New York street on their back lot and the characteristic Edwardian mansion houses in Randolph Crescent, Maida Vale, which Hitchcock had earmarked for his fictitious ‘Charrington Gardens’. Still, and despite further problems with what he called the ‘shocking taste’ of his set-dresser, he was able to impose a look on the apartment interior that reflected the Wendices’ sophistication. Jacobs details their many artworks, including a Fragonard-like painting in the bedroom. Furthermore, at one point Margot Wendice (Grace Kelly) leaves her purse on a table where we see art books on Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini, and French Impressionism. The studio now saw fit to issue a press release stating that “because he is a man of taste and culture, Hitchcock hand-picked many of the props, including an original Rosa Bonheur oil painting, long hidden in Warners’ property gallery, and a pair of valuable Wedgewood vases”(p. 107). My guess would be that the holistic Hitchcock dictated that press release himself.

Ever since Bill Krohn published in Cahiers du Cinéma (#559, July-August 2001) inventories of the Hitchcocks’ extensive art and book collections, we have had confirmation of the director’s keen interest in such matters. Jacobs in turn reminds us that in films like Rope (USA 1948), Under Capricorn (UK 1949), and The Birds (USA 1963), we are given tutelage by a master aesthete. Hitchcock seems to have vastly enjoyed making his characters lovers of the arts and then working out with his production designers and set decorators how to depict those characters’ lifestyles iconographically. The apartment of the two gay killers in Rope is a virtual “temple of [the] fine arts”(p. 271). There’s even a classical balustrade motif painted on the hallway’s wall. Art Direction was by Perry Ferguson (whose credits include Citizen Kane) and the principal Set Decorator was Emile Kuri. Among the film’s paintings is one by the Cuban modernist Fidelio Ponce de Léon which Hitchcock had recently acquired for his own collection. I don’t think any part of that collection figures among the paintings shown in Under Capricorn (Production Design by Thomas Morahan, Set Dressing by Philip Stockford), but we do get to see a genuine Gainsborough landscape, plonked down, so to speak, with studied incongruity, in the mansion home of successful emancipist Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotton) in penal colony New South Wales. Photos taken on the set record Hitchcock and Morahan showing the painting to visitors. As for The Birds (Production Design by Robert Boyle, Set Decoration by George Milo), both the Brenner farmhouse and the nearby schoolteacher’s house are full of modernist paintings, most of them in a suitably decorative or domestic vein. The portrait of the late Mr Brenner, which a Hitchcock memorandum asked be painted by ‘the best portrait painter in San Francisco’, is described by Jacobs as ‘bourgeois realist’ and, like portraits elsewhere in Hitchcock, ‘embodies the mysterious presence of an important absentee’ (p. 148). In the schoolteacher Annie Hayworth’s house, a Modigliani print can be spotted in the living room.

A special feature of the book are the reconstructed floor plans for many of the films. These enhance the precision of Jacobs’s descriptions – of, say, the two-storied ‘Manderley’ in Rebecca (USA 1940), with its Great Hall and adjoining rooms, and two residential wings – and for practically every descriptive point Jacobs makes there is a black-and-white digital frame-capture (over thirty of them in the case of Rebecca). Production drawings, matte paintings, photos of actual homes and buildings that the filmmakers used as reference, even newspaper advertisements for furniture, are among other visual items included. This must be one of the most thoughtfully illustrated of all film books.

Jacobs’s text seeks to quote definitive remarks by other Hitchcock commentators, thereby enriching the book’s reference function. Included, too, are deft cross-references to the films, as here: “Easy Virtue [UK 1927], an adaptation by Eliot Stannard of a controversial Noel Coward play, anticipates Rebecca, Notorious [USA 1946], and Marnie [USA 1964] through its story of a new bride brought back to the family mansion where she encounters hostility” (p. 163). This particular mansion isn’t described by Jacobs as ‘claustrophobic’ or ‘imprisoning’ – terms which I feel he overuses elsewhere in the book – though naturally he seizes on the name ‘Moat House’, saying that it emphasises the family’s insular values and the house’s seclusion (p. 164). By the same token, he misses the name’s likely allusion to a famous passage in Richard II, which is unfortunate because of the foretaste it gives of Rebecca: the mansions in both films represent (an aspect of) England itself, an England that has become dangerously puritanical in its thinking and set in its ways.

I gather that Jacobs isn’t a native speaker of Shakespeare’s (and Hitchcock’s) English, and his book has some minor quaint phrasings that betray this. Even so, he is hardly ignorant of the literature: at one point, he cites Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1880) to show us that the Victorian bourgeois domestic scene was not always as John Ruskin had idealised it back in 1856 (in the passage I’ve already quoted). But any topic outside of Jacobs’s specific fields of art and architecture, and production design – especially when Hitchcock scholarship hasn’t dealt with it already, or been sufficiently penetrating – may occasionally reveal him as fallible. His description of the baronial dining hall in Easy Virtue is true enough: “Sitting down to dine beneath a mural of gaunt-looking saints, the characters find themselves in a sepulchral realm where the dead hand of the past weighs oppressively.” (p. 166) What this description misses is something Coward’s play had specified, that the Whittaker family are Catholics. This is important because it helps explain the horror of Mrs Whittaker (Violet Farebrother) on learning that her son’s bride (Isabel Jeans) is a divorcée. In turn, and again Coward was specific, all of the Whittaker females are repressed. The film even extends this idea beyond the immediate family, so that a large and straight-laced woman juror is a virtual stand-in for Mrs Whittaker. Unfortunately, Jacobs chooses to refer to the film’s ‘theme of the oppressive male gaze’ – when it’s clear that both play and film have a different emphasis. Both show their males as prepared to be tolerant and open-minded but beaten down by the weight of matriarch-led public opinion. The oppressive or hostile matriarch would become a staple of Hitchcock’s films after Easy Virtue, memorably including Mrs Danvers in Rebecca and ‘Mother’ in Psycho(USA 1960). However, as Bill Krohn has shown (in Hitchcock at Work, 2001), The Birds finally answers Easy Virtue by giving Mrs Brenner a change of heart towards the interloper, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), as the household prepares to confront an altogether different order of hostility.

Apart from a fascinating passage apropos Rebecca on the day-to-day arrangements in Victorian country houses (pp. 181-83), which equally fits Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (UK/USA/Italy 2001), Jacobs denies us particular insights into what goes on behind the scenes in the films’ hotels, mansions, prisons, and the like. Hitchcock’s interest in large kitchens, which he may have got from Arnold Bennett (The Grand Babylon Hotel, 1902) and John Buchan (The Power House, 1912), is on display in Young and Innocent (UK 1937), I Confess(USA 1953), To Catch a Thief(USA 1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (USA 1956). But like the Kammerspielfilm, Jacobs’s interests seem largely confined to the intimate and domestic. (True, he does discuss Hitchcock’s several scenes set in museums and public monuments.) The director never did make either his version of the ‘Titanic’ story, for David O. Selznick, nor his cherished R.R.R.R.R. project, the latter set in a New York hotel run by a gang of thieves (the script by the Italian writing team of Age and Scarpelli wouldn’t jell). Both would have given the trained engineer and graphic artist in Hitchcock new scope. And Jacobs, you feel, would have met the challenge of describing the resulting films with his customary insight and painstaking detail.

As it is, The Wrong House is practically indispensable for Hitchcock scholars. The book includes an extensive Bibliography and an Appendix detailing the work of 75 art directors who were employed on Hitchcock films.

Ken Mogg,
Melbourne, Australia.
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/news-home_c.html

Endnotes

[1]  In Dial M, recall the close-up of Tony smiling malevolently, his face lit by the flames from the grate that figures in his ingenious plot against his wife.

Created on: Wednesday, 17 September 2008