Was Alfred Hitchcock a sexual monster? Or was he, as the French film makers Rohmer and Chabrol once claimed, a moralist whose films are steeped in Roman Catholic themes?
Whatever his achievement as an artist, the personal reputation of Alfred Hitchcock remains the subject of heated dispute. Glance at biographies of the British director and two wildly differing Hitchcocks emerge. Donald Spoto’s highly readable The Dark Side of Genius: the Life of Alfred Hitchcock portrays a frustrated lecher who delights in torturing his leading blondes. Yet in Patrick McGilligan’s later, authoritative, 818-page Alfred Hitchcock: a Life in Darkness and Light, Hitchcock appears as an iconoclastic if ultimately devout Roman Catholic whose entire oeuvre is “suffused” with a profound Catholicism.
“His Catholicism is overt on a superficial and a profound level” McGilligan claims. “On a superficial level, he is irreverent: think, for example, of the false nun with high heels in The Lady Vanishes. On a profound level, the Catholicism is conscious. A constant theme in the Hitchcock film is the wrong person being caught by the police, and convicted. The police in his movies are often stupid, and Hitchcock was not prepared ”“ with the exception of The Paradine Case (1947) – to let his victims go to court. Often they precipitate their own demise. Hitchcock was strongly opposed to capital punishment and his films question the infallibility of earthly justice as opposed to God’s justice.”
Well I can’t, and I won’t, make a judgment on the man’s soul one way or the other. At the very least, I am quite certain he had a dark sense of humor. But when I think of Alfred Hitchcock’s works, I at once think not of one of his major works but of an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents about a priest whose church is struggling financially, and the priest gets wind in confession of a rigged horse race. And then bets through the bookie some of the church’s money on the horse that can’t lose.
He then gets into a “Ends Justifies the Means” moral argument with himself, and tries to rescind the bet, but the bookie says the bets are already placed, So he starts to earnestly pray that the horse he bet on will lose because he does not want tainted money, and by a miracle during the race the horse actually does.
The kicker in the end, however, is that the bookie also took some of the church’s money without telling the priest and bet it on the place, show, and long shot as insurance. So the priest ends up making a bundle anyway.
I watched that on rerun for the first time when I was maybe 9 years old, and it was the first time I ever started thinking about a serious theological problem. Here I am 20 something years later as a priest, in part due to an old Alfred Hitchcock episode.
Even with his dark themes, he affected people for good, perhaps despite his best effort.
Go figure…
“…..a frustrated lecher who delights in torturing his leading blondes.” Horrors!!!: one can scarcely imagine a Hollywood film director doing a thing like that!
I don’t know the whole picture here, but does this “a sexual monster” make?
Whatever he was, he made movies that are fascinating to watch even today. My 19 yr old daughter saw “Psycho” and “the Birds” for the first time not too long ago (on a TCM marathon), and was scared silly! “North by Northwest” and “Rear Window” still keeps me on the edge of my seat, and I know what’s going to happen!
Give me Hitchcock over a John Carpenter or a Wes Craven any day.
“Donald Spoto’s highly readable The Dark Side of Genius: the Life of Alfred Hitchcock portrays a frustrated lecher who delights in torturing his leading blondes”.
I read this particular book and found the whole thing sad. There’s no excuse for Hitchcock’s treatment of some of the actresses he worked with, but I think a great deal of his pain was a result of the fact that, in reality, he wanted Cary Grant’s looks and life(or equivalent), and just wasn’t built that way.