Hitch and Cary: A Study in Charm

"Even Cary Grant isn’t Cary Grant."—Cary Grant

Grant and Hitchcock—not exactly identical twins, but the same kind of guy, really. They had charm. "Thin people," Jackie Gleason said, "are beautiful, but fat people are adorable." Hitchcock seems to have agreed. "In England," he said when he got to Hollywood, "everybody looks like this." He does his de rigueur cameo in Lifeboat, with its confined setting, in a weight-reducing ad. He's the one on the left. Neither of these blubber-bellies ever got serious about dieting. 

As the television host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents he came into our living rooms every Sunday night with perfect British aplomb,  the merry mock-lugubrious image of sophistication. "Good evening," he always began.

"Television has brought murder back into the home," he said, "where it belongs." Like Grant he was a symbol, in America, of debonair elegance. Not your average food-on-the-teeth Brit.

Back home, though, he was lower-class. When he worked in England, even as late as Stage Fright in 1950, his actors complained that they couldn’t understand him through his Cockney accent. And notice, when he goes into the houses of the rich, how the camera always stays downstairs looking up at a world into which it dare not intrude. Strangers on a Train and Marnie fly to mind; here's Rebecca:

And Grant, real name Archie Leach, was, class-wise, Hitchcock's Bristol equivalent. He worried all his life that he lacked the background for what he was supposed to be. 

Both, despite their enormous success, were always slightly out of place in the US. Hitchcock's American films, though his obsession with detail is inspiring, never seem to me to be quite American: the people are too mild, too mannerly—too British. Even his salesclerks are polite—chatty without being intrusive. There is never the undercurrent of physical threat that haunts American movies, and indeed American life. Murder and psychopathology are there all right but they're disguised, as they are in Agatha Christie, not, as in the United States, a matter of style. 

Same goes for Grant: he was never all the way American. Imagine him getting angry. Impossible. Anger is the opposite of charm. Anger says things aren't going your way. Everything went his way, except when it didn't, in which case he ran like hell. Scarcely an American hero.

Part fool, part coward, is what he was, and here, I am at one with him. Punch somebody? No no no. When it comes to a fight, as in Charade, he allows the George-Kennedy giant to defeat himself, then lectures him on loving thy neighbor—though that wasn't entirely his policy. Fuck you, I'm Cary Grant, is more like it.

An article in The Atlantic, "The Rise and Fall of Charm in American Men," centers of course on Grant, but then shifts the focus to Orson Welles and James Garner—well, all right—but leaves Fred Astaire out entirely! And in predictable Puritan fashion it pronounces a negative judgement on charm: it is "amoral," unAmerican and to be watched out for. Thank God it's gone. Grant was gay.

And indeed, what would he do in a film by Crapola or Scorsleazy, advertisements, both, that America has run out of decency. It seems clear what he would not do, but what would he do? (For more on this see Italian-American Filmmakers.)

Which brings us to the question of the psychopath. Hitchcock had dealt with psychopaths in his British films, so I don’t know whether it was by insight or by predilection that he so consistently exploited this theme in Hollywood. As a Frenchman in one of my fantasies says, "The psychopath is an American tradition since Captain Ahab and poor Mr. Poe. One daren’t make a film without one. Such people are the norm here—corporate conventioneers, fast food waiters, religious fanatics—even the hotel clerks glow with sinister joy.  Observe yourselves in television audiences. You are all quite mad!"

A header in the New York Times: "Once I got pregnant I had to abandon the drugs that made me stable enough to want to be become a mother in the first place." Everybody's a psychopath. When Martin McDonagh came to make an American film he wrote for himself Seven Psychopaths, which, as a strategy, couldn't miss.

In Suspicion Grant plays the psychopath, and Hitchcock complained to Francois Truffaut (a man of extraordinary dullness) that he couldn’t end the film the way he wanted to because you can’t make Cary Grant a murderer.

He also told Truffaut that, although he had only made one overt comedy, all of his films were more or less comic. Perhaps this explains why my favorite Hitchcock films are the Cary Grant ones—especially To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest, which to me are romantic comedies—so much so that I’m inclined to regard Grant as their real auteur.

Now, please, Hitchcock is a master, for many people the master of cinema, an inventor not just of images—the chase among the umbrellas in Foreign Correspondent, the tennis-game in Strangers on a Train, all faces going back and forth with the ball except the psychopath’s—but of sounds: he was the first to experiment with electronic synthesis in The Birds. (And let's mention casting—George Sanders as a used-car salesman in Rebecca: inspired!)

But more than that he could give you the feel of a relationship. James Agee remarked of Notorious that Hitchcock was "as good at domestic psychology as at thrillers, and many times he makes a moment in a party, or a lovers' quarrel, or a mere interior shrewdly exciting in ways that few people in films seem to know." 

One thinks of his silent The Lodger, in which the lovers are endeared to us by their habit of hovering in a restaurant until they can pounce on their favorite table; and of Marnie (where the psychopath, for the first time since Rebecca, is a woman), when Sean Connery’s character tells her that, although marriages are said to succeed or fail in bed, they’re really about control of the bathroom.

And—this I love—Hitchcock was impatient with Method acting and the Actors Studio, which made Brando the punk and De Niro the lunk high priests of seriousness. ("When you hear the phrase a good acting job," says Toby, "it usually means a depressing movie.") As a filmmaker in Europe I always forget what I’m going to confront when I work with an American actor—back story, motivation and cetera, the whole spiritual exercise.  (See The "Character Arc".) 

"When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character," said Hitchcock, "I say, It's in the script. If he says, But what's my motivation? I say, Your salary." All he wanted Paul Newman to do was hold still for the camera, but no, he was too involved in the part. ("Never do eating scenes with Method actors," said Bogart, "they spit all over you.") "I don't feel like that, I don't think I can give you that kind of emotion," Ingrid Bergman told him. "Ingrid," said Hitch, "fake it."

When an actress asked him which of her profiles was better he said, "My dear, you're sitting on your best profile."

His attitude to character is clearest in Psycho: if you kill the heroine in the first act you'd better replace her—and yes, here comes her look-alike sister, thrown so together with the hero that she's set up to be his new squeeze. It's the kind of mix 'n' match you get in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Così fan tutte—whichever partner the dance gives you. But the Puritan must think one self, one love, one moral quest, and God help you if you enjoy it. I'm not a Christian but I did like the way Pope Francis ended his first speech: "Have a good lunch."

Nor does Hitch care much about connections. Plot, yes, his plots are tight, but he moves us from scene to scene with a beautiful arrogance. In To Catch a Thief policemen stalk Grant's character through a market (where, in Cannes? Nice? Monte Carlo? Hitchcock, usually so careful about place, uses all of them to compose a Riviera town) at an ever faster pace until he upsets a flower stall and the owner snags him by the sweater and won't let him go. "Madame! S'il vous plaît, Madame!" What happens—do the cops arrest him? Do they take him to the station? Do they question him? Hitchcock doesn't care, and neither do we: cut to lunch on the terrace overlooking the village on the sea, with not even the mention of a resolution of the previous scene. 

Or did he care? Did he, as most filmmakers would, agonize in the editing room over some dull takes he didn't dare slow the film down with? Did he perhaps realize that, like Fellini but in his unique way, he was a master of gorgeousness? We are accustomed to thinking of his art as severe but in that film, as in many others, spectacle was all that interested him.

On the other hand there’s a lot of b.s. about Hitchcock, to some of which he contributed himself. He said things like "If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on," and "When the screenplay has been written and the dialogue has been added, we're ready to shoot." Balls. Nobody has committed more bla-bla than Hitchcock. Psycho has three exciting, nay, emotionally scarring scenes, and an hour and a half of yack-yack.

A curious thing happened to this draftsman-cum-storyboarder: long about 1949 (though it might have come as early as Lifeboat) he fell in love with the theatre, and started directing movies as if they were plays. Rope, Stage Fright, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry—these could all be performed on the stage, and that’s the way he shot them. Dial M for Murder has one exciting visual scene, the scissors in the back; otherwise it’s all dialogue in rooms. And Under Capricorn—oh, God! "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible," he said. Uh-huh.

In the Grant films the problem disappears—perhaps not so much with Notorious, which, as Cary told Peter Bogdanovich, "Hitch threw to Ingrid." But in To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest we’re in the world of Cary Grant comedies and buoyed by the Grant charm, which never requires excessive dialogue.

He's not my favorite actor, I’m not saying that. I prefer the Boyer-Irene Dunne version of An Affair to Remember. (I prefer the Irene Dunne version of anything.) And, here’s an irony, Grant wasn’t as famous as Hitchcock. To quote the above Frenchman, "The very first rank of fame is to be known by your nickname, like Liz and Bogie and Di and Satchmo. The second is to be known by your initials—mainly for American presidents, but Brigitte was BB, which means in French baby, and Marilyn in the headlines became MMM. Then come the first names, Sophia, Marcello, Frank, and fourth are the last names, Garbo and Gable. And fifth…." Well, Cary Grant. Hitch’s nickname was a company-town secret until it got out, but it got out.

Let's tie this up with Charade, the best film Hitchcock never made. Stanley Donen, he of Singin’ in the Rain and Two for the Road, made it instead. It’s got Grant (hoarse at fifty-nine—why do actors seem to age so quickly?); it’s got the darling Audrey, clearly crazy about him and at her breathiest ("I’m not hungry at all any more, isn’t it marvelous!"); it’s got a score by Henry Mancini, one of the Magnificent Seven (Louis, Cole, Django, Stéphane, Henry, Nino and Miles); it's got Paris, and some nice digs at the French; it's got charm from every possible direction; and it’s got warmth, which you’ll look hard for in Hitchcock.

But it couldn't have happened without him. 

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Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, lives Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

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The Lubitsch Touch

If all the art and literature of the twentieth century, a century that took itself so seriously (though its record for slaughter is hard to match), were dropped into a dumpster, it wouldn’t be worth one work by Michelangelo or Botticelli.  Do you mind if I say that?

Here in our own nervous century we swim in a sea of cultural trash, illuminated by video games that excite the shooters, by pornography that has changed the shape of the human body (it's hairless now, as in fifth-century Greece and the Italian Renaissance; the dicks, even in quiescence, dwarf their predecessors; the breasts, which were out of control for a while, have again become natural), and by the preachings of the evangelists of Success, who promise us transformations (regard their tweets) beyond even the come shots that conclude the ritual sequence of postures in the videos, the actress licking her lips in anticipation.

And yet we ourselves are disembodied, and function with avatars like Mardi Gras masks on sticks.  We are discouraged from actual sex, and urged to cultivate narcissism and the internet, which are strangely aligned.  And indeed, one has learned to fear women who kick-box, or have tattoos.  

Beauty, that royal danger, that puritan's foe, is out of style. Our movie stars exhibit only a serviceable regularity of feature, often not even that, and appear in morality tales as predictable as the postures of the porn stars.

Action films have dwindled into displays of animation; even James Bond has become a cartoon.  And a film by Quentin Tarantino or Tim Burton can ruin the evening.

Love is out of style.  "Alliances" are in style.  Business plans are in style.  Brad Pitt made an entire film about the success of a business plan.  So elevating.  But that's where we are.  People fall in love with business plans.

One wonders what one does like about cinemah, and why one wants to make films, and when I’m in that mood I always think of Ernst Lubitsch.  Now, nobody can make a film like Lubitsch, let’s get that straight, but one can be inspired by him to make something as light as a soufflé, as subtle as a secret, as funny as a fart.

If only.

My favorite Lubitsch movie, Trouble in Paradise, is about a master thief who, in a Venice hotel (Grand Canal Venice, not LA Venice), robs someone in another room.  Then, resuming his pose as a baron, he hosts a dinner in his own suite for a countess he plans to seduce.  “And you see that moon, waiter?  I want to see that moon in the champagne.”  The waiter writes it down: “Moon in champagne.”  When the lady arrives, she and Gaston (his name is Gaston) pick each other’s pockets, discover that they’re both thieves, and fall in love.  And we fall in love with them falling in love.

But don’t expect a “cool” hero.  Suave, yes.  Charming, wow.  But not cool.  “Cool” is eminently a Puritan virtue.  (See Catholics and Puritans.)  Max Weber tells us that during the English Civil War the Puritans, because of their unemotional determination, were able to ride in strict formation, in cool formation, toward the undisciplined Cavaliers, Musketeer types who relied on gallantry and beer.

Henry James says of Daisy Miller’s first reaction to Winterbourne that she “had never seen anything so cool”—the first instance I know of the modern usage, and if I hear it much more I’m going to lose mine.  The attitude is one of detachment and distance, and becomes virulent in the fifties, Elvis and Marlon sneering at it all.  They are outsiders; the first line of Camus’s L'Etranger (The Outsider) is “Mother died today.  Or maybe it was yesterday.”

The opposite thing is best exemplified by the courtier John Denham, who in that same Civil War pleaded for the life of George Wither, a Puritan, “on the ground that, so long as Wither lived, he himself could not be accounted the worst poet in England.”

Gaston is not cool; he is operatic.  His every speech is animated by passion, and he is splendidly overplayed by Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg in World War I, which has to be disguised in the wide shots.  He was nevertheless an accomplished ladies’ man, and along with Peter Lorre and George Sanders, he’s my favorite actor.

 "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored...

I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

A Paris radio news report on one of Gaston’s spectacular thefts is followed by a commercial for Colet Perfume—“Cleopatra was a famous tantalizer, But she did it with her little atomizer!”—and now we’re on Madame Colet herself, the young widow who owns the company and refuses to cut salaries in spite of the Depression (we’re in 1932).  Such a smooth transition.

At the opera Gaston steals her jeweled purse (we never see these thefts happen; action for Lubitsch is vulgar), and when she offers a reward for the purse larger than he could get by selling it, he simply returns it—and plans to steal her money.  But they fall in love.  And we fall in love with them falling in love.  So now he loves two women.  And that’s the plot.

It moves incredibly fast.  I’ve watched it and watched it and watched it to figure out how it moves so fast.  The credit sequence of The Outlaw Josey Wales moves fast; I’m scarcely a Clint Eastwood guy but I must say it’s a tight little film in itself.  Trouble in Paradise, though, is a whole movie.

Partly it's that Lubitsch delights in ellipsis, which of course is always good for the budget.  I can think of three of his films in which scenes are played out in mime beyond glass.  In Trouble in Paradise a whole evening of seduction is done with voices over an Art Deco clock marking the hours.  Peter Lawford goes into a room to punch Charles Boyer (this is in Cluny Brown), and comes out having lent him money.

What any artist worth the name wants is to avoid Saying Things.  An artist wants to show you something, make you feel something, not Say Something.  If you’re experiencing a piece of art that’s trying to Tell You Something, you’re in the wrong hands.  And yet, who can avoid it?  In Shakespeare the characters, even the speeches, have lives of their own—they Say Things—but Shakespeare himself is nowhere to be found.  We others, however, speak with our own voices, and commit the sin of Saying Things.

What did Lubitsch Say?  He said, there’s no Mr. Perfect or Ms. Right.  He said, if your wife sleeps with somebody else it’s no big deal.  He said, why make an enemy?  He said (or rather the little boy in Heaven Can Wait said), if you want to win a girl you have to have lots of beetles.  He said sex, he said alcohol, he said big cigars, all with the utmost refinement.  And he said the over-refinement of being in love, from which all sweet ironies spring. 

In 1917 he made a short based on a Strauss operetta: A Berlin bon viveur who goes out drinking and dancing every night gets a subpoena to report to jail for a day "for disgraceful behavior". But when the cops come for him his wife's lover has to pretend to be him to save her reputation, and the lover does the time.  Meanwhile she disguises herself and goes to the party, and her husband picks her up!  Then the revelation, and from now on he takes her out drinking and dancing with him.

In Heaven Can Wait a rich young man falls in love with a woman and marries her, and continues to have the other women he wants.  He has it all.  Lubitsch loves to show people having it all—ain't it awful?  And when he's old and dying a beautiful nurse goes into his room and, well, closes the door.  As he tells the Devil (for he has not bothered to report to heaven) "Who could ask for a more beautiful death?"  And here, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, death imitates art: Lubitsch himself died in the arms of a call girl.

Interesting detail: his wife (the character's, not Lubitsch's) leaves him for her parents’ house is in Kansas, and these parents don’t speak to each other; their black servant conveys messages from one end of the breakfast table to the other, and with perfect humor and dignity.  You don’t get much of that in 1942, but that’s Lubitsch.

Clarence Muse

While we’re on the permissiveness that gives such taste to his sauce, he has a Wildean indulgence for embezzlers, and much in common with Wilde, whose people are always finding out that they're not "good"—loveable, but not good.  But this is where Lubitsch begins, not where he ends.  (In fact he made a silent version of Lady Windermere's Fan.)  They both loved everything about being a gentleman, except being a gentleman.

Something in him loves larceny.  In Ninotchka some Russian rubes come to Paris to sell jewels that had once belonged to the Grand-Duchess-in-exile, who's already in Paris, and who keeps a man (Melvyn Douglas), who calls on the boys: “Well, gentlemen, what about my proposition?”  “What proposition?”  “I just said, let's have some lunch!”  Cut to hookers and champagne, and the deal is developing.  In A Royal Scandal Catherine the Great (Tallulah Bankhead) confronts her embarrassed chancellor over his  embezzling: a little I can understand, she says, “but take it easy!”

We might have wished to say the same to our own chancellors, from Wall Street to Athens.

“Everybody and his Aunt Nellie,” as Audrey says in Charade, has a theory of “the Lubitsch touch,” and I have mine.  When Maurice Chevalier died, Lawrence Durrell described his appeal as “tender insolence,” and this says it.  Chevalier came to his Hollywood prominence in Lubitsch’s movies, and embodied the Lubitsch spirit, as did the screenwriter Samson Raphaelson.  I like to think that both of them took fire from Lubitsch.  Perhaps I’m oversimplifying.

Lubitsch's insolence pairs a superior tenderness with a daring attitude to pleasure.  In his own piece on Lubitsch, Peter Bogdanovich connects innocence to sophistication, and I like that; the true sophisticate is a naïf.

And oh, how Lubitsch was imitated!  He founded a whole genre, the screwball comedy.  Everybody tried to be Lubitsch.  His protégé Billy Wilder kept a sign up in his office: HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?

Pointless.  Wilder himself was too intellectual.  Everything in Jean-Luc Godard—the semiotics, the study of the image qua image, the postmodern mind split off from its referents—it's all there in Wilder.  And that’s the trouble.  Some Like It Hot is a gorgeous film, worth seeing just for Tony Curtis’s Cary Grant imitation.  But in much of Wilder's work the intellectual baggage is heavy.  Intellect is not refinement; intellect can be acquired.  (None of us know what we look like; these things are hidden from us; we can only appreciate them in others.)  And except for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which is all intellect, after Irma la Douce Wilder's films became crass.

Trouble in Paradise is a poem.  The effort is always to make poems.

I was about to say that To Be or Not to Be, about actors playing Nazis to escape Nazis, is my second-favorite Lubitsch, but then I thought of his The Merry Widow, another operetta (this one with sound), that's like drinking champagne—light, bubbly, intoxicating.  I hate decisions.   

In The Merry Widow Chevalier plays a womanizer-as-national-hero, and in his courtroom speech he pleads guilty: "Any man who can dance through life with hundreds of women, and is willing to walk through life with one—should be hanged!"  The peasants leap up and applaud.  On the other hand, To Be or Not to Be is a winter film; it gives me a cozy feeling that I also get in Some Like It Hot—a strange kind of warmth, I don’t know what it is, that can only happen in black-and white movies.

And it has Carole Lombard, my favorite actress along with Irene Dunne and Margaret Rutherford.  Beautiful as she was, Lombard never took herself seriously.  She said of her great love Clark Gable, “If his pee-pee was one inch shorter they’d be calling him the Queen of Hollywood.”

Sample dialogue with Jack Benny: “It’s becoming ridiculous the way you grab attention—whenever I start to tell a story you finish it, if I go on a diet you lose the weight, if I have a cold you cough, and if we should ever have a baby I’m not so sure I’d be the mother.”  “I’d be satisfied to be the father.”

A distaste for schmaltz is one of Lubitsch’s two great freedoms.  In-love-ness, OK, but you won’t find any of the sentimentalities that inform lesser filmmakers—childhood (invented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Christmas (invented by Charles Dickens) or America (invented by Frank Capra).

And he has a Shakespearian freedom from dogma that was singular in the last century: no Freud, no Marx.  Knowledge of psychoanalysis didn’t become general until the 50s, so he was able to spoof it in That Uncertain Feeling without being very deep about it. 

But Marx was the flavor of the 30s—all the kids were communists, real members of the Party, it was the thing, and of course in the 50s McCarthy ambushed them.  Stalin was a hero, Roosevelt was inaugurating revolutionary social programs, and even the future Nixonite John Ford made The Grapes of Wrath.  Not Lubitsch.  When Gaston confronts an outraged Trotskyite he ticks him off in Russian.  (Ah, how the super-hero has changed: for Lubitsch he was someone who followed opera, knew eighteenth-century furniture and spoke several languages.)

When the rubes in Ninotchka fail to make the deal, Ninotchka herself, an unsmiling puritan from the collective, comes to Paris and encounters Melvyn.  Love, baby.  “GARBO LAUGHS!” said the posters.  But the Countess blackmails her back to Moscow and to the Commissar, played, in an inspired piece of casting, by Bela Lugosi.

 Dracula in Lenin drag

To be a communist was to commit the sin of seriousness—bad manners.  But though Lubitsch presented himself as frivolous and easy-going—"the playboy," Graham Geene called him—he had the strength to resist, nay to mock, that whole zeitgeist.  Frank Capra was still selling a socialist vision in the Why We Fight series, and the Germans were attacking our Soviet allies, but even in wartime Lubitsch didn’t join the parade.

Peter Lawford (a young fool), at the outbreak of war: "I'm going to write another letter to The Times."  Boyer (indulging him): "Good!"  "No—no, I'll join the RAF!"  "Better!  Join the RAF!  Rise above The Times!"

Now look, Freud and Marx were brilliant men who gave their lives to trying to help people.  But enough!

And I love high spirits.  My own comic novels are inspired by P.G. Wodehouse.  I’ve wandered elsewhere, but I’d rather do comedy than anything else.  And in film, Lubitsch is the master.

You may, if you wish, leave comments here.

And in the spirit of Lubitsch,

Chocolate and Champagne

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

Frankly, I forgive myself.

In Bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film reviews

Favorite song

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean