Hitchcock

Suspense, Humour and Tone

Susan Smith

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Susan Smith's treatment of the works of the most subtle of all film-makers analyses the key elements of suspense, humour and tone across the whole of the director's career. Arguing that all three are central to our viewing experience, the book demonstrates how Hitchcock's masterly integration of those elements is the key to his success as a film-maker. Examining in detail such films as Sabotage, Notorious, Rear Window, Psycho, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope and The Birds, amongst many others, the book discusses the idea of the director as saboteur and the importance of 'the avoidance of cliché' in Hitchcock's narrative.

Chapter 1

A cinema based on Sabotage

Looking back upon his English film Sabotage (1936) in later years, Hitchcock frequently took the opportunity to criticise his handling of its central bomb scene. The episode concerned begins with Verloc, the saboteur, sending Stevie, his wife’s younger brother, out on a mission to deliver a package that, unknown to the boy himself, contains a bomb that the viewer has been forewarned is due to go off at a quarter to two in the afternoon. Continually hindered in his attempts to reach his destination due to the crowds that have gathered to watch the Lord Mayor’s Show, the boy eventually manages to board a London bus where he sits, happily befriending a puppy belonging to a fellow passenger. Following a protracted suspense sequence that repeatedly foregrounds the hands of a clock moving to the allotted time, the scene ends with the bomb exploding, killing Stevie along with all the other occupants of the bus. On discussing the scene with Truffaut, Hitchcock criticised his decision to let the bomb go off and kill the boy (an act which Truffaut, in a shared consensus of uneasiness over the incident, also describes as ‘close to an abuse of cinematic power’):¹

I made a serious mistake in having the little boy carry the bomb. A character who unknowingly carries a bomb around as if it were an ordinary package is bound to work up great suspense in the audience. The boy was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful.²

Similarly, during a television interview with Huw Weldon, Hitchcock proceeded to make the following claim:

I once committed a grave error in having a bomb, from which I had extracted a great deal of suspense, . . . I had the thing go off, which I should never have done. Because they needed the relief from their suspense – clock going, the time for the bomb to go off at such and such a time. And I drew this thing out and attenuated the whole business. Then, somebody should have said ‘Oh, my goodness! Look, there’s a bomb! Pick it up and throw it out of the window’. Bang! But everybody’s relieved. But I made a mistake. I . . . let the bomb go off and kill someone. Bad technique. Never repeated it.³

Hitchcock’s tendency to dismiss this famous sequence has probably contributed, one suspects, to the surprising critical neglect suffered by Sabotage over the years. The director’s high-profile media stance towards the bomb scene – consisting of disapproval of his own film-making approach together with a rather apologetic attitude towards the audience – functions like an extra-textual tonal influence that seeks to contain or ‘defuse’ this film’s more subversive elements. But Hitchcock’s tendency to construe the bomb scene as simply a miscalculation on his part is very much challenged, I would argue, by the deliberate, coherent way in which the film’s rhetorical strategies set about implicating the director’s film-making approach with the act of sabotage.

The final moments leading up to the bomb explosion.

This preoccupation is made possible by the strategy of housing the film’s main sabotage plot within a London cinema,⁴ for it is this setting which provides the necessary foundation for what becomes, I think, one of the most fascinating self-reflections upon the nature of Hitchcock’s own cinema. The title of this chapter therefore refers not just to Verloc’s use of the Bijou cinema as a base for his subversive political activities but also, more importantly, to the film’s attempt to define Hitchcock’s cinema as one itself founded, in its approach to its audience, upon the notion of sabotage. This is suggested right from the outset when the film addresses us directly using the following dictionary definition of the word sabotage, an extreme close-up of which remains on screen as the film’s actual title and Hitchcock’s name, among others, are superimposed:

sǎ·botage sà-bo-tarj. Wilful destruction of buildings or machinery with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness.

In offering us what is, in effect, a definition not only of its main plot activity but also of its own title, the film seems at pains to stress its intentions with regard to the bomb explosion right from the outset, with the phrase ‘with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness’ serving as a coded acknowledgment of its wish to disrupt and disquiet its own‘public’ by this cinematic act of ‘wilful destruction’. Looking beyond the film itself, this definition of sabotage also reads as a seminal metaphor for the kind of disruptive filmic strategies meted out by Hitchcock’s later cinema, most radically of all in Vertigo and Psycho (more on which in Chapter 2).

The metafilmic significance of Sabotage’s title consequently explains the film’s concerted strategy of stressing the disruptive impact of Verloc’s activities upon his own cinema patrons rather than upon the city’s general inhabitants (whose initial response, by contrast, is simply to laugh off the inconvenience). Verloc’s initial act of depriving his audience of light provides a particularly apt analogy for the way in which Hitchcock often plunges his audiences into darkness, both literally and metaphorically. One thinks, especially, of the disorientating effect of the train tunnel sequence at the beginning of Suspicion and the moment during the opening scene in Psycho when the camera makes its transition from the bright, sunny outdoors to inside a Phoenix hotel room. At the end of Sabotage, Verloc’s audience is disrupted once again when the threat of yet another bomb explosion (this time within the cinema itself) forces the police to order the auditorium to be evacuated in the middle of a screening.

In his dual role as cinema proprietor and saboteur, Verloc therefore serves as a rather compelling, complex surrogate for Hitchcock. At the beginning of the film, he is even shown trying to wash away the traces of his crime in a way that anticipates Hitchcock’s later attempts to absolve himself of his cinematic act of violence. Hitchcock’s recognition of the need to retain a bond with his film audience similarly finds voice in Verloc’s attempt to appease his angry customers by offering to refund their money on the grounds that ‘It doesn’t pay to antagonise the public’ (a tactic supported by Mrs Verloc who refers to them flatteringly as ‘all regular patrons and good friends’). But the analogy between saboteur and film-maker is illustrated most vividly of all during Verloc’s visit to the zoo when, having just expressed reluctance to carry out the bombing mission assigned to him by his chief (‘I won’t be connected with anything that means loss of life’ protests Verloc), this seemingly reluctant saboteur then proceeds to project an imagined scenario of blowing up Piccadilly onto one of the aquarium tanks which thus becomes transformed (via his subjective point of view) into a movie screen. In doing so, it is as if Verloc is drawn irresistibly, against his conscious wishes, to indulge in a fantasy of power on a scale that even outstrips what actually happens later on and in a way that suggests the cinema proprietor’s desire to usurp the role of film-maker. Both Verloc and Hitchcock, then, would seem to engage in spoken acts of denial that are at odds with their cinematic impulses and aspirations.

An explosive form of cinema: Verloc (Oscar Homolka) imagines blowing up Piccadilly.

If Hitchcock’s retrospective expressions of regret at having allowed the boy to be killed and his insistence that it was only a miscalculation on his part are countered by the film’s more subversive strategies, then Verloc’s own remorse at causing Stevie’s death (‘I didn’t mean any harm to come to the boy’) is similarly undercut by the suggestion that this act may in fact be unconsciously willed on the saboteur’s part. In explicit terms, of course, Verloc is motivated by his need to meet his pressing financial commitments as provider for both his wife and her younger brother. This is made clear during his visit to the zoo aquarium when he initially resists the bombing assignment, only to accede due to economic imperatives (his agent having already withheld the fee due to him from his previous sabotage of London’s electricity supplies). But the possibility that the bombing mission may serve, on a deeper level, as a way of ridding himself of such responsibilities (rather than merely fulfilling them) is suggested by the way that the bomb is delivered to him hidden away in a cage containing two canaries, the symbolic significance of which would seem to allude to the emotionally entrapping, potentially destructive nature of the Verloc marriage. With this analogy in mind, the Professor’s euphemistic written reminder to Verloc about when the bomb is due to explode (‘DON’T FORGET THE BIRDS WILL SING AT 1.45’) becomes a rather fitting allusion to the way in which such marital tensions will eventually find release in violent form.⁵

Verloc’s gesture of giving the caged canaries to Stevie is particularly significant for it is this surrogate son who provides the tenuous, ambivalent link between the married couple. On the one hand, he enables Verloc to exert control over his wife by using acts of kindness towards Stevie as a form of emotional blackmail (‘You’re terribly good to him. . . . If you’re good to him, you’re good to me. You know that’, Mrs Verloc tells her husband with a hint of both puzzlement and resentment). Yet ultimately he forms a kind of (sexual) barrier or impediment between the couple for, as long as Mrs Verloc has Stevie, it is implied, the issue of their having a child of their own is evaded. Verloc’s ‘inadvertent’ blowing-up of Stevie can therefore be read, on this level, as unconsciously willed, fulfilling a wish to be rid of the surrogate son that his acts of kindness otherwise attempt to deny and repress. His ambivalence towards Stevie is perfectly embodied in his ‘generous’ gift of the cage of canaries that had earlier been used to carry the bomb hidden away in its tray. Verloc’s joking remark that Stevie’s double errand (involving delivery of the film tins and bomb package) will ‘kill two birds with one stone’ accordingly assumes a much deeper level of significance for it refers to how the boy’s task enables the male protagonist to carry out not only his official sabotage duties but also an even more private, hidden agenda. In view of the parallels invited between the caged birds and the married couple, moreover, Verloc’s joke about killing two birds with one stone points to an even deeper desire on his part to rid himself not only of Stevie but of his marriage altogether.

Stevie (Desmond Tester) receives Verloc’s gift of the cage of canaries.

The film’s other main saboteur is the Professor⁶ and it is this figure who, in his role as the bomb-maker ‘who makes lovely fireworks’, serves to implicate the film-maker with the material source of the sabotage function itself. This is hinted at during Verloc’s visit to the Professor’s bird shop when the sound of a cockerel crowing loudly twice in the backyard, as the Professor takes his visitor to his living quarters at the rear, gestures towards Hitchcock’s own authorial presence in the background and in a way that seems to symbolically proclaim the director’s involvement with sabotage as an implied assertion of film-making potency. The Professor’s role as surrogate father towards his granddaughter also links him directly to Verloc, the bomb-maker’s shouldering of such responsibilities in a much more openly grudging way serving to make explicit (as the following exchange demonstrates) what was only implied in the other saboteur’s case:

Professor: There you are. No father, no discipline. What can you expect?

Verloc: Is the little girl’s father dead?

Professor: I don’t know. Might be. I don’t know. Nobody knows. My daughter would like to know too. But there you are. It’s her cross and she must bear it. We all have our cross to bear. Hmm?

The Professor’s desire to blow up his surrogate child is suggested during the same scene when he admits to having hidden away his granddaughter’s toy doll in the cupboard containing the bomb-making substances, only to then nearly drop this stand-in of her along with one of the jars of explosives, his subsequent self-rebuke (‘Slap me hard. Grand-dad’s been very naughty’) thereby constituting a double admission of guilty desire on his part. The Professor’s role as Hitchcock’s agent as well becomes even more evident during the bomb scene itself when his coded message to Verloc about the time for the explosion is appropriated by the film-maker as his own direct, suspense-inducing warning to the viewer (who is then confronted with an extreme close-up of it superimposed across the entire frame of the shot). But the closest analogy between sabotage and cinema ultimatel...