Camille Paglia,
The Birds. British Film Institute: BFI Film Classics. 1998
ISBN 0851706517
104pp
A$19.95 (Pb)

Evan Hunter, Me and Hitch. Faber & Faber. 1997
ISBN 0571193064
96pp
US$12.95(Pb)

Uploaded 1 July 1999

Camille Paglia’s BFI Film Classics monograph on The Birds is an odd duck, and Evan Hunter’s alternately warm and bitter memoir of writing that film, Me and Hitch, is a croaking raven of a book that obscures as much as it reveals. Neither delivers what it promises – a satisfactory interpretation of Hitchcock’s most enigmatic film, or an illuminating behind-the-scenes look at how it came to be – but each delivers something else: from Paglia, a deeply felt appreciation of Tippi Hedren’s unfairly maligned performance, and from Hunter, a relatively frank look at the psycho-dynamics of Hitchcock’s relationship with writers – a relationship that was at least as complex as the director’s Svengali relationship with actresses, which has been dissected, gossiped about and frowned over at such great length by Donald Spoto, notably with regard to Hitchcock’s direction of Hedren in The Birds.

First, the duck. It is entirely to Paglia’s credit that her book, rather than trying to put a respectable distance between itself and the bracing lunacies of what Slavoj Zizek calls Higher Hitchcock Criticism, commits scores of lunacies of its own by way of gaining admission to the club. That said, these aperçus are not the book’s strong point. For example, I suppose it is not inconceivable that Hitchcock, during a whirlwind location scout with Hunter in San Francisco, noticed the statue of the goddess Victory in Union Square, discovered that it commemorated Admiral Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay, and put it in the film’s first shot to anticipate Melanie Daniels’ motorboat assault on the Brenner home in Reel 3; but Paglia’s observation that the goddess is “normally winged” shamelessly gilds the hermeneutic lily, since she is visibly wingless here.

Some of these points seem intended as jokes, like the observation that the camera filming Mitch Brenner’s interrogation of Melanie while administering first aid after the first gull attack “turns at a slight (north-by-northwest!) angle”, particularly since it is now well-known that this direction is not found on any compass except Hamlet’s; or the deadpan observation, a propos of the fantastic vision of a flock of murderous ravens rising up over the little white schoolhouse while the children flee, that “Academe breeds nightmares” – an interpretation that has more to do with Paglia’s intertext than with Hitchcock’s, although the Goya reference is pertinent. But for every four jaw-droppers like that, Paglia comes up with an interpretation that is spot-on, almost always one which bears on her only theme, Melanie Daniels and the actress who plays her.

There has been a fair amount of commentary built around the notion that Hitchcock made The Birds to destroy the dangerously seductive female at its center, and damn near did the same to the actress. While not disagreeing with the broad outlines of this reading of Melanie’s fate (which she compares to the lobotomizing of Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer ), Paglia puts her interpretation on a different footing by enthusiastically adopting the director’s point of view on both character and actress, which she identifies with her own first reactions as a youthful spectator. Concerning Hedren’s sexy walk in the first shot she writes:

Though she hasn’t spoken a word yet, Melanie has already conveyed her character as a mistress of chic, a beautiful woman haughtily exercising power over men in public and private. As a professional model, Hedren displays a discreet, balletic command in this scene that instantly impressed me as a teenager – as it also did legions of gay men worldwide who have an eye for fashion. Hedren’s Melanie exudes cocky self-confidence and a mesmerising narcissism, prefiguring that of another devastating San Francisco femme fatale played by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. (21)

For Paglia, who has lost none of the breathless admiration she felt as a teen, Melanie’s play with the pencil she’s holding in the bird-shop scene (which Hitchcock wrote into the script) evokes Scarlett O’Hara’s fan, while the fur coat she wears on her impulsive trip to Bodega Bay “symbolizes human dominion over nature as well as male economic power in society. From earliest history, fur and jewellery have been trophies heaped by men on women in tributes to their beauty. Pampered and parasitic, Melanie is an exquisite artifact of high civilisation. She is literally a walking work of art.” (28)

That artifice calls forth some of Paglia’s funniest squibs, which also express her love for a character she sees as embodying the madcap heiress tradition of thirties and forties screwball comedy. When Mitch treats Melanie’s cut at the Tides restaurant, for example, Paglia notes that “as a bottle blonde herself, she seems to gain strength from the peroxide, which operates on her like a transfusion of plasma” (40), adding the observation that “Hitchcock has jokingly seated Melanie under a sign that says ‘Packaged Goods Sold Here'”(40).

By the same token, her deep approval of Melanie at her most stunning and her most trivial keeps her from any moralizing view of the character’s “development”:

Most commentators on The Birds approve of the deepening friendship between Cathy and Melanie, who softens and loses her femme fatale drive as she nurtures someone outside. Like most gay men and drag queens, however, I adore the bitches of Hollywood and do not approve at all of Melanie’s enforced maturation… Melanie is pretentious, foolish, and to me irresistibly charming. Cathy Brenner, on the other hand, has the annoying stridency of those ever-chipper Girl Scouts and cheerleaders of 50s America; she’s exactly what a nice little girl should be. I want to slap her! (44)

Few would argue with Paglia’s assessment of “little Iphigenia Brenner”, which cuts against Hitchcock’s own oft-stated belief that he had made a film about Melanie’s “complacency” and (to use his word for it) the “sobering” impact on her of the events in Bodega Bay. But whether Veronica Cartwright’s birdlike stridency is part of a larger design that unfolded during the film’s making and in part eluded its creator’s conscious mind is not a question Paglia, who is working primarily from her own responses, with no attempt to censor out the most outlandishly private ones, can begin to answer.

The book’s achievement is to clear away a lot of misconceptions that have accumulated around a masterpiece, including some of Donald Spoto’s – Paglia’s one major piece of research, a new interview with Hedren, discredits Spoto’s hair-raising account of how Hitchcock traumatised Melanie Griffith by giving her a doll of her mother in a “miniature coffin” – while restoring Melanie Daniels to her rightful place in the pantheon of Hitchcock heroines. Paglia’s interpretetation of the character and the archetype she embodies harks back to Sexual Personae – as a source for the theories in that book, it turns out, rather than as a new object to try them out on.

After paying tribute to Hedren’s “crisp, elegant body language and rapid, fluid facial expressions” (65) in the jungle gym scene (recalling Albert La Valley’s praise for Cary Grant’s contribution to another montage tour de force, the crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest ), Paglia observes:

The enormous burden of crows on the jungle gym, when Melanie finally sees them, is almost an accumulation of her fears and fantasies…Over the years, Hitchcock’s jungle gym came to symbolize civilisation itself to me, and it influenced my theory of Apollonian form in Sexual Personae. (66)

Nature’s revenge on civilisation in this scene, she is saying, is also an image of what lurks behind Melanie’s Hellenic mask: “The woundlike rawness of female genitals” Paglia writes in Sexual Personae “is a symbol of the unredeemability of chthonian nature..I will argue that all cultural achievement is a projection, a swerve into Apollonian transcendence, and that men are anatomically destined to be projectors..The chthonian superflux of emotion is a male problem. A man must do battle with that enormity, which resides in woman and in nature”.

I believe that quote, which would have been much too heavy for the book under review, takes us as far as Paglia goes with her reading of the film. Her summing up of the film’s meaning in her monograph is again couched in autobiographical terms:

When I first saw The Birds, blonde sorority queens ruled social life in most American high schools, a tyranny I accepted as their divine due. Melanie Daniels has the arrogant sense of entitlement of all beautiful people who sail to the top, from Athenian stoa and Florentine court to Parisian salon and New York disco. Nature gives to them, but then nature takes away.

This gnomic formulation fits better into a book where the loose, epigrammatic style of Paglia’s journalism has happily dissolved the labored academic style that mars much of the first volume of Sexual Personae. The second volume, which will be about movies, promises to be a much livelier read. (27)

What is really bracing about Paglia’s critical impression of The Birds is the shock of reading feminist film criticism that actually sounds like it was written by a woman, as in this delightful throwaway:

As Melanie and the trembling Cathy desperately embrace, Mitch must jog Melanie’s arm to hand her her purse. A sign of her degeneration (or radical remaking) is that this is the second scene in a row where Melanie has forgotten her purse! – the waitress had to run after her with it when Mitch and Melanie retreated from the diner. Haggling, shrewd-shopper Lydia also abandoned her precious purse in extremity. (76)

Compare that to this quote from a more recent degree candidate writing on the same film:

The film especially draws attention to (Melanie’s) finger-nails. From the opening scene in the pet shop in San Francisco to the point at which she opens the door to Cathy’s room before the brutal assault, the redness of her nails is prominent. By contrast, when Melanie sits next to Lydia in the car at the end, a closeup of her hand on Lydia’s reveals that Melanie’s nails are chipped and without polish. Her fingernails are one indication of her power – her claws, to use bird imagery. By the close of the film, she has been declawed, rendered impotent, castrated.” (Margaret Horowitz “The birds : a mother’s love” in A Hitchcock Reader )

One is tempted to say the same thing – if only one knew what it meant – of the writer of those words.

The difference in tone between the two quotes is important. Paglia’s comment, which is knowing without being bitchy, enabled me to see with new eyes the most famous image of Melanie, running from the crows, protecting a little girl with one hand while clutching her purse with the other: smartly accessorized in the direst straits. It is the ludicrous touch of the purse that makes the character human and endearing. And what I was more than pleased to find in Paglia’s quirky book is the voice of a future film critic whose impact could be wide-spread and salutary in a profession that is still pretty much all-male at the national level – an improved Pauline Kael, without the anti-intellectualism.

My disappointment with Me and Hitch is a measure of my hopes for the book: at last someone well-placed to unveil the secrets of The Birds had put his recollections on paper! Then I discovered that Hunter remembers the film as an embarrassing misfire and a betrayal of his script, not worthy of detailed discussion. In fact, it was something of a tour de force on his part to write a book of ninety pages that casts so little light on the film that most of those pages are about. The book is also a tough read, because it is in some ways incoherent and poorly told: Hunter doesn’t even indicate how many drafts the screenplay went through, and the chronology of what he does tell us about the writing is foggy in places.

That is partly because the aim of this skilfull story-teller was to write a memoir of his relationship with Hitchcock – in essence, a story of friendship betrayed (Hitchcock changed Hunter’s script for The Birds and curtly dismissed him from Marnie after receiving his first draft), which sounds at times like a discarded lover singing the blues. (Hunter still ends the book with a warm tribute to the friend who let him down). Hitchcock could be charming, and it’s clear that he seduced writers in order to get out of them what he needed, usually with impressive results. Because of the fusion of minds which this entailed, the end of one of these collaborations was not without psychic peril on both sides, and sometimes bad behaviour – again on both sides – was the result.

Here I wish to digress. One of the most spectacular cases of a bad divorce recounted by Donald Spoto in The Dark Side of Genius (presumably as an example of the “ungenerous streak in Hitchcock’s nature”) is the rupture with John Michael Hayes, who wrote Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much over a period of three years – a highly successful collaboration that ended when Hitchcock insisted on his old friend Angus MacPhail sharing screen credit with Hayes for the last film and Hayes had MacPhail’s name removed after a Writers Guild arbitration.

Described to Spoto by Hayes as “a dying alcoholic”, MacPhail had been brought in by Hitchcock as a technical consultant for the spy parts of the story, Hayes says adding that he guessed the director was “trying to do MacPhail a favour by giving him work”. That guess, at least, is true: a look at Hitchcock’s correspondence at the Margaret Herrick Library reveals that MacPhail – a collaborator from the Gaumont-British days – had been bombarding Hitchcock with heart-breaking pleas for money and professional help for weeks. But Hayes’ unverified assurances to Spoto that MacPhail, called in only during shooting in London, “did no work on the script” because “all he could do was sit there, shaking with his disease”, are rather horribly untrue.

Put on the production payroll for eight weeks on January 24, 1955, while Hayes was working on another project for Hitchcock that was never made, MacPhail worked with the director for four weeks writing the outline for the new version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (having already collaborated, uncredited because of his studio job, on shaping the story of the original). This is unequivocally shown by around thirty pages of story notes and two treatments by MacPhail left among Hitchcock’s papers, which bespeak an imagination and quick intelligence undimmed by drink. The resulting story, which was already very close to the finished film, was then turned over to Hayes when he came on board February 23, although it appears that MacPhail, still on salary, was still contributing suggestions through discussions with the director.

The Writer’s Guild (of which MacPhail was not a member) backed Hayes all the way, and Hitchcock’s insistence on a credit for his friend ended one of his most fruitful collaborations with a writer apparently by his own choice: according to Spoto, he made Hayes an offer he could not possibly accept to write The wrong man and despite friends’ urgings refused to hire him for The Birds – which led ironically to the hiring of Evan Hunter.

And Angus MacPhail, that “dying alcoholic”, was hired to rewrite playwright Maxwell Anderson’s screenplay for The Wrong Man , which he did with producer Herbert Coleman on hand to keep him from drinking, Coleman told Spoto, receiving co-screenwriting credit for his efforts. In keeping with the one-sided and often simplistic treatment he accords Hitchcock in his otherwise very useful biography, Spoto notes all this without acknowledging the extraordinary generosity his subject had shown on this occasion – and what’s more, to a writer. If more people in Hollywood had “dark sides” like that, this town would be a kinder place.

The only justification I can offer for this detour linking Hunter’s apologia to Spoto’s biases is that the latter seem to have infected the former, perhaps suggesting to Hunter a fashionable justification for his disagreement with Hitchcock and subsequent dismissal: the breakup came over the rape scene in Marnie, which he urged Hitchcock to skip because it would make the Sean Connery character unsympathetic. Hunter was fired for insubordination and a young woman, Jay Presson Allen, was brought in to write the film. Allen began a distinguished career as a screenwriter, Hunter wrote a novel about amnesia that seems to have been partially inspired in part by his research for Marnie, and the Sean Connery character did indeed come off as unsympathetic: a major nuance in an ambiguous film that could be Hitchcock’s own confession about his Svengali complex, with Mark Rutledge as a romantic – but neither lucid nor lovable – surrogate for the director.

Unfortunately, while Hunter’s memoir of these events makes interesting reading, it is filled with holes which are either Freudian lapses or deliberate falsifications. One reason for the foggy chronology may be the fact that Hunter had already gone on record about the screenplay in Cinefantastique s’ Fall 1980 article “The making of The Birds” and couldn’t back down:

Hitchcock has been quoted as saying that, at one point, the script called for Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) to be attacked in the attic, not Tippi Hedren. Hunter, however, stated that no such plot change ever took place. “Never, in any version of the script, was a supporting character ever considered for such an important scene,” Hunter said.

But she WAS, in Hunter’s first draft, which was changed six days later by x’ing out ANNIE and writing in MELANIE, with more substantial rewrites being done by Hunter in the second draft to accommodate the substitution. (Hunter actually refers obliquely to this change in a letter quoted in his memoir.)

If this seems strange in light of the attic scene as we know it, we should bear in mind that in all three versions of the script that Hunter wrote it was not a climactic scene. It became one the same weekend, well into shooting, when Hitchcock decided to eliminate the ending Hunter had written for him, a final bird attack on the fleeing car. That decision becomes another source of bitterness in the memoir, coupled with accusations of artiness that seem strange in view of the fact that the open ending Hitchcock decided on (the car diving away through a bird-filled landscape) follows the structure of Daphne Du Maurier’s novella, which ends as the beseiged family at the story’s centre are enduring another attack on their fortified home, with no indication of what the outcome will be.

The substitution of Melanie for Annie in the attic is just one of a number of important changes made during the writing of the three drafts done by Hunter, a process which continued into production with Hunter’s collaboration, and after he went off to work on Marnie, with an uncredited assist from the distinguished writer V.S. Pritchett – not Hitchcock, as Hunter says in his book, or Tippi Hedren, as he told Cinefantastique – who wrote the new scene where Melanie tells Mitch about being abandoned by her mother as a child.

But it was Hitchcock who requested that Hunter make many other major changes that he doesn’t mention (like taking out an improbable church scene where the minister preaches about “vanity” to a congregation that includes all the main characters) and one he is rightly proud of (the wonderful restaurant debate which he came up with as a replacement for the dull “town meeting” in the first draft). And it was Hitchcock himself who, very uncharacteristically (he told Francois Truffaut), went on rewriting the film while he was shooting it, so that the “fourth draft”, done without Hunter, is really to be found in revised pages added to the rainbow shooting script and in the daily production reports, where we can see the filmmaker muscling the story into final form so that its full significance could emerge.

Hunter’s poor memory for this part of the process appears to be a consequence of his desire to take credit for a script for which he is justifiably proud while distancing himself from the changes of which he doesn’t approve. “I don’t think Hitchcock was fair to my script,” he told Cinefantastique back in 1980. “Robert Altman, to the contrary, I still feel writers should write and actors should act and directors should direct.” Unfortunately this theory also leads him to make ungenerous comments about Hume Cronyn, an actor and sometimes writer who read the script as a favor to Hitchcock and made a few suggestions, of which only one was used. As it happens, that suggestion greatly improved the final attack on the house, which Hitchcock then “rewrote” one last time on the set.

Some of Hunter’s bile may stem from remarks like this by Hitchcock, which appeared in the Cinefantastique article: “‘Hunter wasn’t the ideal screenwriter,’ Hitchcock later admitted to us. ‘You look around, you pick a writer, hoping for the best.'” But examination of the interview transcript from which this was taken shows that the “admission” was simply the director’s precise response to the question “Why was Evan Hunter the ideal writer for this project?” In response to a more intelligently phrased question from Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock gave this answer, which didn’t make it into Truffaut’s famous interview book: “The reason I chose to have Evan Hunter is because…the average script writer (is) not strictly a creative person. He’s a technician who shapes and orders material in the form. Now, when you have a short story and you need expansion, then it’s necessary to get a creative writer who can write characters.”

Perhaps the misunderstanding stems from nothing more complicated than the fact that Hunter, as a literary artist in his own right, was temperamentally unsuited to collaboration: in a trade story that appeared last week announcing that he has been writing off and on for the last three years the book for the Broadway musical version of The Night They Raided Minsky’s , he says “The hardest part for me has been that as a novelist, I’m not used to collaboration.” Nevertheless, it was to writers like Hunter (a distinguished list which includes Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck) that Hitchcock turned for some of his most ambitious films, and the fact remains that the film Hunter is still burned up about is one of the Master’s best – in no small part because of Hunter’s contribution. (He proudly notes that Hitchcock – “Guilt-stricken, I hoped” – increased the writer’s screen credit from 25% to 50% of the film’s title after they watched the opening credits together. Actually, it ended up being 75%).

Hunter told Cinefantastique that he considers The Birds to be a film that “just misses”, comparing it unfavorably to Jaws and speculating that Steven Spielberg would have done a better job than Hitchcock. That remark shows how much Hunter bought into Hitchcock’s oft reiterated assertion that they were making The Birds solely to scare the liver and lights out of the audience – which is in fact the only purpose of Jaws – when in truth, as the writer discovered to his dismay, “Hitch wasn’t going for that. He was going for high art.” That he succeeded in making just that is demonstrated by the spell the film still casts over audiences and also filmmakers, who are likely to number it among their favorite Hitchcocks. As I can attest from my own research for a book on Hitchcock at work, it also has the most fascinating production history of any Hitchcock film, to which Evan Hunter has contributed a document that is most informative when we read between the squawks.

Bill Krohn
References:

Except where noted, quotes in this review are from the Alfred Hitchcock Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Marshall Deutelbaum & Leland Poague (editors). A Hitchcock Reader. Iowa State University Press, 1986.