TV Quote of the Day (‘To Catch a Thief,’ With a Reformed Jewel Thief Professing No Interest in His Old Profession)

John Robie [played by Cary Grant]: “You know, I have about the same interest in jewelry that I have in politics, horseracing, modern painting or women who need weird excitement. None!”—To Catch a Thief (1955), screenplay by John Michael Hayes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

TV Quote of the Day (Alfred Hitchcock, on Why You Should ‘Treat Your Neighbor More Kindly’)

Alfred Hitchcock: “Thus ends tonight's story. After seeing it, I think you'll treat your neighbor more kindly. After all, he may be a former ax murderer. Of course, there's nothing to worry about. He's probably out of practice.”—Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 2, Episode 33, “A Man Greatly Beloved,” original air date May 12, 1957, teleplay by Sarett Tobias and A.A. Milne, directed by James Neilson

This Day in Musical History (Adaptation of O’Casey’s ‘Juno’ Opens, Then Flops)

Mar. 9, 1959—Juno might not have been a “can’t miss” musical, but it came loaded with expectations because of its constellation of talents when it opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater.

Its music and lyrics were by the creator of a legendary Depression musical, with a book by a playwright who would eventually write Fiddler on the Roof; a male lead with Hollywood credentials for comedy; an innovative choreographer who changed how dance worked in musicals; an Oscar-winning actor equally at home with directing for the stage; a beloved actress returning to Broadway; and an Irish playwright whose tragicomedy formed the foundation of the show.

But Juno the musical, like its titular heroine, was plagued by misfortune—more specifically, critics who couldn’t hide their disappointment with the result of this all-star team. It closed after 16 performances, and, despite defenders who have attempted revivals, it remains seldom performed.

The musical was based on a 1924 landmark of the Irish Literary Renaissance, Juno and the Paycock, generally regarded as the best entry in Sean O’Casey’s “Dublin Trilogy” set in the period surrounding the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. (See my blog post from a decade ago that reviewed a production at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre.)

The first adaptation of the play was for the screen rather than the musical stage, in a 1929 movie by Alfred Hitchcock—what biographer Peter Ackroyd called the director’s “first thoroughly conceived and consistent talkie.”

Uncharacteristically, that film included few of Hitchcock’s visual flourishes, but at least it stayed largely faithful to the source. It turned out to be more successful than Hitchcock’s last couple of releases, as he transitioned from silents to talkies.

But Hitchcock, possessed of a vigorous if often twisted sense of humor, may have felt little need to tinker with O’Casey’s dialogue.

In contrast, it was O’Casey’s socialism, not his comic sense, that appealed to songwriter Marc Blitzstein, who had achieved notoriety two decades before with his agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock.

More recently, his translation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera had turned that tale of Weimar corruption into what was then the longest-running musical in Off Broadway history—and giving him as much clout with investors as he would ever receive.

Book writer Joseph Stein, though no longer a Marxist, retained enough progressive sympathies as an Adlai Stevenson Democrat to work well with the more leftist Blitzstein.

All of that may have helped secure early on O’Casey’s approval of their project (called, at this initial stage, Daarlin’ Man). 

The playwright never left his home in England to view rehearsals or performances of this musical, and he could be caustic toward anyone who looked askance at his work (as the Abbey Theatre, which rejected some of his more expressionist plays after the “Dublin Trilogy,” could attest). 

But a discussion with Blitzstein and tapes of the songs contemplated for the show led O'Casey to green-light the project.

One fact, had it been considered more thoroughly, might have forestalled this blessing: though Stein and Blitzstein may have shared O’Casey’s leftist sympathies, they did not exhibit the sharp sense of humor that had leavened Juno and the Paycock. 

The tone of the musical, according to future Juno star Victoria Clark, more closely resembled another Weill piece of musical theater, the tragic Street Scene.

Two out-of-town tryouts, in Washington and Boston, proved increasingly troubled. In the spring and early summer of 1958, Blitzstein barely survived an appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which he admitted to Communist Party membership till 1949 but refused to name names.

Just when the production appeared to be coming together, Tony Richardson, a rising British theater talent who soon became famous for the film version of Look Back in Anger and the Oscar-winning Best Picture Tom Jones, backed out as director because of scheduling conflicts. His replacement, Vincent J. Donehue, had limited experience to that point with musicals.

Neither did movie and theater star Melvyn Douglas, called in to take over the role of “Captain” Boyle when the choice of the creative team, James Cagney, would only participate if the property were adapted for the screen.

Although the actress who played Boyle’s long-suffering wife and family mainstay, Shirley Booth, had somewhat more experience than Donehue and Douglas with musicals, she was nervous about executing Irish stepdances and playing a “heroic” figure that demanded “an Irish Judith Anderson.”

The production's only Irish actor, Jack MacGowran (suggested by O’Casey), after being provoked repeatedly by Donehue, unleashed a profanity-laced rehearsal diatribe indicating that nobody in the show knew anything about O’Casey or what they were trying to do.

This represented “a fusillade of abuse for director, company and producing organization such as I have rarely heard in many decades of performance work,” Douglas recalled, stunning all concerned because, the leading man conceded, “there was a great deal of truth to what he said.”

Though Blitzstein tried to stay even-tempered, even he was prone to snapping, as when he unloaded on choreographer Agnes de Mille (whose work in this instance, some would later say, was among the best of her career).

Reviews of the January 1959 performances in Washington, while observing that O’Casey’s play presented unique challenges in adapting, still pointed out the musical’s deficiencies in tone and tightness.

A month later, Boston critics—aware of word of mouth already spreading, as well as interviews in which Booth and especially Douglas confessed to their insecurities about the demands required by their roles— noted the same problems.

That proved the undoing of Donehue, who was sacked the morning after the Boston opening.

The history of Broadway includes occasional shows that are rescued from near-certain disaster. But it’s more often the case that the problems apparent before an opening are not fixed in time.

And so, despite the replacement of Donehue with Jose Ferrer, who brought considerable stage credibility and film renown (including an Oscar for Cyrano de Bergerac), and new, better songs from Blitzstein (“It’s Not Irish” and “For Love”), the creative team behind Juno could not improve matters enough in the month before opening on Broadway.

Years later, theater professionals and fans alike would wonder how a show with so much talent behind the scenes and onstage (not just Booth and Douglas, but also, in early stages of their careers, Jean Stapleton and Sada Thompson), could have misfired.

One of the less charitable detractors was Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. In the taxi ride home from the show, he and his wife ridiculed the show's “prosaic lyrics and unmelodiousness,” remembered their daughter Mary Rodgers in her posthumous memoir Shy. 

“Maybe the driver could sing ‘We Have Reached Our Destination’ to similar effect,’” Richard said acidly.

If Broadway musical history is filled with disasters, it also includes shows that, years after their underwhelming openings, find far longer lives, either through audiences who could better appreciate what its creators were attempting (Pal Joey, Chicago) or a combination of more appropriate stagecraft and casting (the current Stephen Sondheim revival, Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe).

Blitzstein had an example closer at hand: his Threepenny Opera translation that thrust the Weill-Brecht work into the elite circle of most-performed musicals. Undoubtedly inspired by that example, Juno revivals have been mounted over the years at New York’s Vineyard Theater and City Center, and Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre.

The outcome has been the same: a good try (especially in these productions’ unbending refusal to provide a happy ending), but still a failure. It’s not likely that this verdict will change soon--unless, perhaps, it's staged as an opera rather than a musical (as has been the case over the past four decades with Street Scene and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd--and how Blitzstein's Regina was fashioned from its 1949 creation)

The best way to understand why that situation is so sad is to listen to YouTube performances of some of the musical’s songs, including Rebecca Luker’s rendition of “I Wish It So” or the Celia Keenan-Bolger-Clarke Thorell duet of “My True Heart.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents,’ In Which The Master of Suspense Compares Examples of Perfection)

[Introduction. Alfred Hitchcock is in an armchair with a side table next to him, wearing a Sherlock Holmes cap, and smoking bubbles—yes, bubbles— out of a pipe.]

Alfred Hitchcock: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and Dr. Watson, wherever you are. Tonight's case is, er...”

[blows more bubbles]

Hitchcock: “Tonight's case is called ‘The Perfect Crime.’ I'm not sure who it was who said, ‘A perfect crime is like a perfect marriage—their being perfect depends on your not being caught.’"— Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 3, Episode 3, “The Perfect Crime,” originally aired Oct. 20, 1957, teleplay by Stirling Silliphant, based on a story by Ben Ray Redman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock 

This Day in Film History (Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ Acclaimed as Masterpiece Upon Re-Release)

Oct. 28, 1983—A quarter century after it underperformed at the box office and three years after the death of Alfred Hitchcock, the director’s moody psychological thriller Vertigo went back out in limited release in the U.S., giving film fans and critics a chance to reevaluate and better appreciate a work that Time Magazine had infamously termed "another Hitchcock-and-bull story."

Vertigo was one of five “missing Hitchcocks” withdrawn by the director from circulation for more than a decade. 

A London Times article in November 1983 offered several reasons for its disappearing act, including that Hitchcock increased the films’ value through their relative scarcity; that his hard-nosed agent had demanded steep prices for their re-release; and that the director and Paramount had faced lawsuits over the years that, in one case, complicated matters further.

Rear Window, re-released a short time before Vertigo’s, at the 1983 New York Film Festival, had been an unexpected financial success, perhaps benefiting in part from nostalgia over the death the year before of its beloved, glamorous co-star, Grace Kelly. Rope (1948) and The Trouble With Harry (1955) represented offbeat departures from Hitchcock’s higher-budget, studio fare. The fifth movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), was a color, big-budget remake of a project Hitchcock first handled before his move to the U.S.

But Vertigo may have benefited the most from the re-release. 

It had only broken even back in 1958, but over the next decade had become something of a cult classic, courtesy of French critics and American film school students about to make waves in the U.S. motion picture industry (perhaps most notably Brian DePalma, whose 1976 Obsession was—take your pick—an homage or a shameless imitation of “The Master of Suspense.”)

In a blog post from earlier this year commemorating the film’s 65^th anniversary, I mentioned that Hitchcock attributed the movie’s disappointing box-office returns to the aging appearance of the 50-year-old James Stewart, who was not an age-appropriate co-star for the 25-year-old Kim Novak.

But it’s doubtful that even a more youthful-looking Cary Grant (whom Hitch would soon cast in the considerably more successful North by Northwest) could have made the story of the acrophobic detective Scottie Ferguson and the “haunted” Madeleine Elster credible. 

So little of this film is realistic at all, including several plot developments. The audience had seen like if anything remotely like this before, including its implied necrophilia and downbeat ending.

Twenty-five years later, American filmgoers had seen far more surreal matter onscreen, as well as far more potentially risqué subject matter. 

Oddy enough, some Hitchcock fans would have been better prepared because of the publication of Donald Spoto’s biography of the director earlier that year, The Dark Side of Genius, to detect a case of art preceding life: in both instances, a lonely middle-aged man (Stewart in Vertigo, Hitchcock offscreen in the making of Marnie)  becoming dangerously obsessed with a cool blonde (on film, Novak; offscreen, Tippi Hedren fending Hitchcock in Marnie).

For a decade, Vertigo even managed to upstage Citizen Kane as #1 on the film magazine Sight and Sound’s list of the greatest films of all time. For ordinary film fans like me, long after its initial mystification has faded, it bears re-watching continually to see and ponder how Hitchcock continued to disturb us all the way to its astonishing conclusion.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Vertigo,’ With a Mysterious Figure From the Past)

John “Scottie” Ferguson [played by James Stewart]: “I got a call from Gavin [Elster] today. It's funny. He sort of dropped out of sight during the war. Somebody said he went East. I guess he's back. It's a Mission number.”

Marjorie “Midge” Wood [played by Barbara Bel Geddes]: “That's Skid Row... isn't it?”

Scottie: “Could be.”

Midge: “He's probably on the bum and wants to set you for the price of a drink.”

Scottie: “Well, I'm on the bum; I'll buy him a couple of drinks and tell him my troubles.”—Vertigo, screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, based on the French novel D'Entre Les Morts (“From Among the Dead”) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
(1958)

Sixty-five years ago today, Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo premiered in San Francisco. The director blamed its failure at the time on the aging appearance of star James Stewart—and, indeed, it did mark the transition of this leading man from romantic figure to more of a character actor.

But even before Hitchcock died in 1980—even when, its rights having reverted to him, he had withdrawn it from circulation—Vertigo was increasingly recognized as among the director’s best. By 1999, it had been recognized by the Library of Congress as being worthy of preservation. In more recent years, it has been listed at or near the top of the greatest films ever made.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the movie’s disappointing reception by contemporary audiences and critics related less to Stewart’s supposed lack of credibility in the role than with its mysterious, unnerving, even perverse nature.

After all, how many moviegoers, even now, feel comfortable with a plot that hints unmistakably at necrophilia?

Scottie, as the plot proceeds, is fooled by appearances—most famously, by that of “Madeleine,” the chic, elegant beauty impersonated by the working-class Judy (played, in both cases, by Kim Novak).

But fundamentally, and fatally, he is fooled by the old college acquaintance whose reappearance in his life is indicated in the dialogue above, Gavin Elster.

Elster, when Scottie meets him at his office, appears to be a cultured shipping magnate, deeply concerned that his wife may harm herself because of her belief that she’s possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother. In reality, Elster has concocted a plot in which his mistress will act as his wife, running to a tower that he knows that Scottie cannot ascend because of the trauma-induced acrophobia that forced him off the police force.

There are really only two true statements that Elster makes to Scottie at their initial meeting. First, the real Madeleine did have an ancestor Carlotta of some local lore.

Second, Elster says he is bored by his routine and he envies the power and freedom enjoyed by original settlers of San Francisco. It is for that power and freedom that Elster wants to murder his well-to-do wife and abscond with her money.

Since Notorious a dozen years ago, Hitchcock had sought to push against and test Hollywood’s censorship office, the Production Code Administration, notably in his treatment of sexuality. But in its way, Vertigo may have represented his most direct challenge to one of its ironclad rules: that villains be punished.

In contrast—and uniquely among all the villains in Hitchcock’s many film thrillers—Elster escapes unscathed and even unrepentant.

The evil he represents is signified by the collateral damage surrounding the murder of his wife:

*Judy, his accomplice in the crime, is dumped as his girlfriend, left with minimal money—and ends up ironically reenacting the fate of Madeleine in the tower, where an enraged Scottie has dragged her when he ferrets out the truth.

*Scottie, who still has a chance to establish a life after his disability-induced retirement from the police force, is driven to obsession, madness, and destruction of the woman he has come to love; and

*Midge, the bantering friend—and once-and-possibly-future fiancée of Scottie—loses him to illusion—and is herself driven to trailing Scottie himself as he trails Madeleine.

Present in less than a half-dozen scenes, Elster decisively tilts Scottie towards permanent loss of mental balance. His role is one of the less-remarked upon, but still fascinating, aspects of this masterpiece that offers something new with each new viewing.

Quote of the Day (Dwight Macdonald, on Illogical Thinking in Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“Tippi [Hedren] warns a teacher that crows are massing outside the schoolhouse; their jointly worked-out response to the threat is not to put the kids into the cellar but to march them outside to walk home. To no one’s surprise but Hitchcock’s, the birds come shrieking like Stukas onto the helpless little column.” —American cultural critic and editor Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

Sixty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds premiered in New York City. The above quote is only a sample of Dwight MacDonald’s ironic takedown of this film from the “Master of Suspense.”

A post of mine from nine years ago discussed how Hitchcock radically transformed Daphne DuMaurier’s dark, short tale of isolation and terror in a British cottage into something quite different. But I thought that Macdonald’s quote was not only worthwhile in itself to read, but pointed to the sharp critical divide that quickly developed around the film.

At the time, detractors assailed the film for a variety of reasons: a weak script, awkward acting, sadism, special effects at the expense of logic or motivation. 

Movie fans paid no heed to the naysaying reviewers, making this a financially successful follow-up to Hitchcock’s Psycho from three years before.

Even so, the film continues to split opinion, only this time Hitchcock critics call the director out for using live birds for the avian attic attack on Tippi Hedren—an experience that understandably traumatized the actress. (And that was before even  worse treatment she would suffer at his hands during the making of Marnie, when the director subjected her to sexual harassment.)

The Birds, then, is certainly controversial. Yet I hardly think I am alone in regarding it as mesmerizing and chilling, all the way down to its final, ambiguous—and deeply foreboding—image of a landscape filled with the birds, silent and watching.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents,’ on Unusual Entertainment at an Office Christmas Party)

Self - Host: [Hitchcock is putting up a display of glasses and bottles of alcohol on an office desk] “Good evening, fellow revellers. Tonight, we are indulging in an old city tradition. It is the event that turned a mild-mannered white-collar worker into a four-armed beast of prey…”

[shows off the display]

Self - Host: “…the office party. However, we had this room designed especially for the party…”

[looks back briefly]

Self - Host: “…by the girls in the office. It has no corners. I am in charge of the entertainment, which all should enjoy. After most of the hors d'oeuvres have been eaten, we're going to throw a company director to the lions. I realize it isn't much, but the lions are a great deal cheaper than the string quartet we had last year. They don't drink as much, either. And now, for the party.” [pours himself a drink]— Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 3, Episode 15, “Together,” original air date Jan. 12, 1958, teleplay by Robert C. Dennis, based on the story by Alec Coppel, directed by Robert Altman

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on a Fantasy Created by a Hitchcock Classic)

“In my waking hours in London I saw myself as Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent, wearing a double-breasted trench coat and hiding in windmills. I finally realized I was Perelman from Providence, Rhode Island.”—American humorist and Oscar-winning screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), quoted in Israel Shenker, Words and Their Masters (1974)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Psycho,’ With a Subtly Suspenseful Sequence)

Milton Arbogast [played by Martin Balsam]: “I'm a private investigator. I've been trying to trace a girl... that's been missing for, oh, about a week now from Phoenix. It's a private matter. The family wants to forgive her. She's not in any trouble.”

Norman Bates [played by Anthony Perkins]: “I didn't think the police went looking for people who aren't in trouble.”

Arbogast: “I'm not the police.”

Norman: “Oh, yeah.”

Arbogast: “We have reason to believe she came along this way. Did she stop here?”

Norman: “No one's stopped here for a couple of weeks.”

Arbogast: “Mind looking at the picture before committing yourself?”

Norman: “Commit myself? You sure talk like a policeman.”

Arbogast: “Look at the picture, please.”

Norman [looking at it]: “Mm-mmm. Yeah.” 

Arbogast: “Sure? Well, she may have used an alias. Marion Crane's her real name... but she could've registered under a different one.”

Norman: “I tell ya, I don't even much bother with guests registering any more. One by one, you drop the formalities. I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets, but old habits die hard. Which reminds me...”

Arbogast: “What's that?”

Norman: “The sign. A couple last week said if the thing hadn't been on... they would've thought this was an old, deserted...”

Arbogast: “You see, that's exactly my point. Nobody'd been here for a couple weeks... and there's a couple came by and didn't know that you were open. As you say, old habits die hard.”— Psycho (1960), screenplay by Joseph Stefano based on the novel by Robert Bloch, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I am afraid that, for all its formal cinematographic brilliance as an experiment in low-budget Gothic horror, the lesson of Psycho for subsequent filmmakers lay less in how to scare audiences—i.e., how to make them feel delicious tingles at the back of their necks over something that might or might not occur—than in how to shock them, with depictions of gore (though much of this, given censorship regulations of the day, was simulated).

But moments of anticipation, a tightening of mortal stakes for the film’s characters, did exist, even though they were not of the conspicuous kind present, for instance, in the famous shower scene. Such was the encounter—a portion of which I’ve excerpted here—between Norman Bates and Arbogast, a detective hired by the employer of embezzler Marion Crane.

What the audience knows—but Arbogast doesn’t—is that Marion has been stabbed to death in Bates Motel. But in the lines I quoted above, Norman—despite his attempts to stonewall the detective—has made a slip.

It's the slip that a nervous person, hoping to fill a conversational void or to add a detail that might add more weight to what he's said, might make. It’s a small error, maybe the kind that you or I might not immediately realize in the ebb and flow of a conversation. 

But Arbogast immediately pounces on Norman’s contradiction. He pursues the accidental disclosure that people have indeed stopped at the motel, and he uses it as an opportunity to persuade a now-tenser Norman to allow him to check the motel register and establish that Marion, under an assumed name, checked in. 

From there, the conversation gears shift rapidly. Little physical action occurs between Balsam and Perkins that would constitute a normal marker of suspense (a body dangling from a cliff, say, or two arms reaching for a gun).

No, the suspense lies in what is said and what is not—Arbogast's flat declaration that something is amiss (“If it doesn’t jell, it isn’t aspic, and this ain’t jelling”), followed by his increasingly confrontational, accusatory questions (“Did you spend the night with her?... Then how would you know she didn't make any calls?”) and Norman’s stuttering responses and sweating attempts to end the conversation-turned-interrogation.

Alfred Hitchcock didn’t give his actors much direction, believing that he’d chosen them for their skill and that they’d figure out how to play their scenes. Here, Martin Balsam justifies that faith.

Over the course of his long career, the character actor won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the mid-Sixties comedy A Thousand Clowns, acted in classics like Cape Fear, 12 Angry Men and Murder on the Orient Express, and appeared before a sizable weekly audience as Carroll O’Connor’s Jewish business partner in Archie Bunker’s Place.

But as Arbogast, he made the most of short screen time and limited plot function to suggest character dimensions not apparent in his dialogue.

The audience already knows something about Norman—his shyness, his domination by “Mother,” his weirdness beneath that nice-young-man exterior. But here, Balsam establishes Arbogast.

Well-schooled in his craft, the detective is cool and confident but also can be blunt, brusque and maybe cockier than this setting previously unknown to him might warrant. 

He has learned that something has happened here. But, once he glimpses “Mother” in the window in the house on the hill, the chief instinct of his profession—curiosity—leads him to disregard the chasm between his knowledge and the real situation.

His entry into that dark, foreboding house is inevitable, then, as is his ill-fated encounter with “Mother” on its stairs.

In October, which has become the de facto month for horror depiction on film and television, Psycho holds pride of place. The sequence I’ve discussed supplies many of the sinews of this classic—and, following the surprise dispatching of the focus of the first third of the movie, Marion, follows with that of Arbogast, whom we had only shortly before expected to relentlessly pursue her killer and bring him to justice.

The detective proved inadequate to the task. Blessed with the intelligence to sense a crime, even one different from the embezzlement he’d been hired to investigate, he still lacked the imagination to comprehend the level of insanity and evil—not to mention the danger that represented to him—in this sleepy backwater of the American Southwest. Who could?

This Day in Irish History (Brian Moore, Novelist-Screenwriter of Displacement, Born)

Aug. 25, 1921— Brian Moore, whose alienation from his ancestral faith and homeland took the form of a move across the Atlantic and a prodigious stream of novels, short stories and screenplays, was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Like literary hero James Joyce, Moore found history “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Though his father was senior surgeon at the Mater Hospital in Ulster, he was conscious of being a member of a beleaguered minority, the nationalist Catholic community of Northern Ireland. He felt doubly alienated when, at age 10, rebelling against what he saw as stifling church authority, he rejected his faith.

After serving in WWII with British Ministry of War Transport and early in the postwar period with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association, Moore emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a journalist for four years. Along the way, he became a Canadian citizen—a status he did not relinquish even after residing in his last three decades in California.

When he turned his hand to fiction in his mid-thirties, Moore returned, if only in his imagination, to Ireland and what he saw as the repressive conformity and diminished prospects experienced in that  community. His first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956)—adapted three decades later into a film starring Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins—was inspired by an elderly spinster known to Moore’s family.

It was not a surprise, given the censorship regulations of the time, that the novel was banned for indecency in the Republic. Closer to home, Moore’s devout mother not only griped about its “sex parts,” but cut out any of these before she mailed a copy of the book to one of her daughters, a nun.

From early on, filmmakers sensed the dramatic possibilities of Moore’s novels, with four of them adapted for the screen (most notably, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, starring Robert Shaw). But in 1965, he had a more signature opportunity to make his mark in cinema when Alfred Hitchcock, intrigued by The Feast of Lupercal, contacted him about working on an original screenplay. 

At the time, the reputation of Hitchcock still had magic, as his TV show had only recently left the air and the film Marnie regarded as an interesting failure.

What most people did not realize at the time was that making the latter movie had turned out unexpectedly traumatic for Hitchcock, as he lost interest in making it halfway through when actress Tippi Hedren spurned his advances. The studio that had previously allowed him wide latitude in shooting, Universal, was now making demands on the nature of his next material, including a more pop-oriented musical soundtrack and top box-office stars (Paul Newman and Julie Andrews) not necessarily to his liking.

Under these circumstances, Hitchcock felt more significant pressure than he had in years. According to a 2009 post on the blog Shadowplay, Moore had not felt especially interested in collaborating with the “Master of Suspense” on the screenplay, but his lawyer convinced him that he could use the money.

The team turned out to be a bad match. Moore was dismayed by Hitchcock’s lack of interest in character and the director was displeased by Moore's screenplay Moore. When Hitchcock tried to give screenwriting credits to the two men he turned to for a rewrite, Ted Willis and Keith Waterhouse, Moore took the matter for arbitration to the Writers Guild, which awarded sole credit to the novelist. Because the window of time for using Andrews was limited, Hitchcock had to start filming before he was satisfied with the script, a significant departure from his practice on other films, according to Charlotte Chandler's biography of the director, It's Only a Movie.

The eventual movie, Torn Curtain, a Cold War thriller, turned out to be a mess for everyone concerned. Moore’s comments to the press led him to be disinvited from the set and premiere, and Hitchcock saw his commercial and critical reputation take another hit. About the only benefit, for Moore, was that he did, as his lawyer had told him, now had enough money, this time to move to Malibu, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Moore’s later experiences writing for film and TV, while not as high-profile, were more pleasant, including The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Black Robe, in which he also acted as executive producer for this adaptation of his historical novel about a young French Jesuit missionary in New France. 

Particularly prescient was his 1973 TV adaptation of his novel Catholics, with a plot—a representative from the Vatican is dispatched to deal with a conservative priest whose intransigence threatens to open up a schism within the Church—that feels like an anticipation of current tensions under Pope Francis.

Altogether, Moore would write 20 novels before he died in Malibu in 1999 from pulmonary fibrosis. Since his death, his books have passed in and out of print here in the U.S., though they have been accorded a better reception in the U.K. His reputation may well endure, however, because he acquired a reputation of a “writer’s writer,” much esteemed by the likes of Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Flanagan, and John Gregory Dunne.

Dunne’s wife and screenwriting partner, Joan Didion, was especially generous in assessing their longtime friend, telling the Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten:

“Brian truly honored fiction, by his reading of it, by his respect for it, and most of all by the wit and intelligence and power he brought to the writing of it. He understood the craft, the discipline, and he understood equally the discipline required to practice it. He had no patience for the postures and quasi-celebrity of the literary life. Writing was just what he did most days of his life, and he never stopped being thrilled by it, taking risks with it, taking it to the far edge of where he knew it could go.”

Quote of the Day (Dwight MacDonald, Taking Issue With Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“The only characters in the film who aren't birdbrains are the birds.”—American cultural critic and editor Dwight MacDonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

This Day in TV History (‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ Premieres)

Oct. 2, 1955—When Alfred Hitchcock launched his half-hour anthology series on CBS, he found a new platform for his work in the growing medium of television and reached a level of recognition other directors of similar duration and distinction had never known.

As Peter Ackroyd observes in Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life, the English director was less personally involved in the show named for him than many viewers suspected. He did not write any of his droll intros or close-outs, for instance, and left crucial script and casting decisions to his long-time associates, executive producer Joan Harrison and associate producer Norman Lloyd. Moreover, on a regular basis, he only entered into the production process as he watched rough cuts of episodes, when his team knew how to follow up on his brief, sometimes cryptic comments (e.g., a camera-angle suggestion, or a “Well, thank you” that signified dissatisfaction).

None of this is meant to suggest, however, that his restricted role in Alfred Hitchcock Presents had no bearing on the focus of his attention: his films.

His penchant for self-promotion, already evident in the cameos that fans had come to expect from the “Master of Suspense,” now gave him additional money and clout in making movies as he wished. He could assess the work of actors he might use later for the big screen. And the 17 episodes he directed out of the series’ more than 300 enabled him to experiment cheaply and quickly with techniques and themes he would use more intensively for his larger canvasses.

In a sense, the visual that opened each show—the bald, rotund Hitchcock stepping sideways to the tune of Charles Gounod’s "Funeral March for a Marionette," until his figure formed a silhouette—could serve as a metaphor for how he shaped the series. (Unlike his work on much of the rest of the show, he worked on this sequence himself, harking back to his early days in the British film industry, when he illustrated title cards for silent movies.) In the case of the show, Hitchcock designed the outline. It was up to his collaborators to figure out how to give substance to his formidable shadow.

Several actors featured in the series would show up later in his films, including Barbara Bel-Geddes (Vertigo), John Forsythe (The Trouble With Harry, Topaz), Vera Miles (The Wrong Man, Psycho), Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern (both in Family Plot).

But, among the episodes in which he took the helm himself as director, Hitchcock delighted in the low-cost, low-risk environment of TV to try something different. In “Breakdown,” for example, he shot from the viewpoint of a callous businessman, William Callow. After Callow is paralyzed, then stripped of his clothes and left for dead following a terrible car accident, Hitchcock focuses on blank, horror-stricken eyes, much as he would with Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane sliding down in the shower in Psycho. (The tears coming down his face alert the coroner in the morgue that the body in front of him is, in fact, alive, so Callow is saved, ironically, by a show of emotion he scorned previously.)

But shooting immobility posed the danger of looking static. So, as Jack Seabrook pointed out in a post on the blog “barebonesez”, Hitchcock and editor Edward Williams used a “good variety of angles and distances that keep the shots of Callow's paralyzed form from becoming repetitive or monotonous.”

“One More Mile To Go” touches on a motif that Hitchcock would explore at greater length in Psycho and Torn Curtain: the need to clean up thoroughly after a gruesome killing. Death, he is emphasizing, is an extremely messy business. This second season episode also underscored the primacy of image in his work, as 10 minutes--one-third of its length--elapse before any character says a word.

“The Case of Mr. Pelham” is a small-scale version of the doppelganger or “double” theme that Hitchcock had employed previously in Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train (I examined the latter in this prior post), and would do so again in Psycho.

Far before the term came into common parlance, Hitchcock created a personal “brand” through the show. He drew a reported $129,000 per episode from CBS and sponsor Bristol-Myers, then, the following year, leveraged that into a deal to license his name for a new suspense publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (which still exists today).

That cushioned him against the inevitable flops that moviemakers sometimes experience (in his case, The Wrong Man and, at least on its original release, Vertigo). Better yet, it enabled him to self-finance Psycho when its gory subject matter made Paramount Pictures balk. (He even used the sets, camera and crew from the series.)

There really can be too much of a good thing, and so it proved with Alfred Hitchcock Presents. After six seasons, CBS decided to give the show an additional half-hour. Though the show survived another three seasons, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour did not benefit from the new length, losing much of its tightness and suspense. 

But in its most interesting early episodes, it offered useful employment to writers such as Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Henry Slesar, Ed McBain, and John D. MacDonald; opened space for a new, subversive tone on TV (Hitchcock’s close-outs were meant, in part, to circumvent censors who objected to any suggestion that a killer could get away with a crime); and helped its host achieve new levels of popularity even as it spurred his dark art.

Flashback, June 1960: Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ Sets New Template for Thriller Genre

Sixty years ago this week, Psycho shocked audiences in every conceivable way upon its release. Given a minimal budget by a leery Paramount Pictures, it became the most successful film in the five-decade career of Alfred Hitchcock. 

Although it did not earn “The Master of Suspense” a Best Director Oscar, the film influenced later generations of filmmakers more than the other nominees in this category, who included Jules Dassin (Never on Sunday), Jack Cardiff (Sons and Lovers), Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners), and even Billy Wilder (The Apartment). 

Hitchcock created a template for aspiring filmmakers eager to prove that a low-budget movie could be as entertaining yet artful as what the director called “glossy Technicolor baubles,” including sand-and-sandal epics of the period, such as another film released that year, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus.

To one extent or another, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) followed in the type of horror/suspense film that Hitchcock mined so successfully: the “slasher” genre. 

But some of these later movies would not get much beyond slavish imitation, while others descended into levels of gore that Hitchcock would never have contemplated. (Remember that the body count for Psycho is only four, and two of these killings—involving Norman’s mother and her lover—occur offscreen and in the past.)

 The following conventions of the slasher film assumed their later shape as a result of Psycho:

*A human monster, preferably one in disguise. The killer perpetrates the most horrendous, goriest crimes. While his identity will become known by the end of the film, he will appear with his face covered or otherwise obscured—the better to leave his victim (and the audience) unsure of his identity.

*Punishment of premarital or extramarital sex. As a residual element of Hitchcock’s Roman Catholic upbringing, he saw the need to make Marion pay, with her life, for her adultery with Sam Loomis. Later filmmakers working in this genre noted the primary audience for these films—adolescents—and made their victims hot-blooded teenagers.

* “The last girl.” This figure in the slasher genre is the survivor—the “scream queen” who manages to outsmart the murderer and bring him to justice or, better yet, kill him. (The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.) In Psycho, it was Marion’s sister Lila, who discovers the corpse of Norman’s mother. The quintessential “last girl” of the genre may be Laurie Strode, played by Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, in Halloween. (For an interesting but arguable ranking of the top "last girls," see this post from three months ago, on the blog "But Why Tho?", by Kate Sanchez.)

Why were contemporary audiences so shocked by Psycho? Several factors proved especially important:

*The virtually unprecedented death of the top-billed star so early in a film. Thirty minutes into the movie, Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, is killed off. One can only imagine the reaction of Paramount execs at this prospect: Can’t you keep her around for a while? But the reaction of audiences, not the studio, was what was really key here. They had expected a story of an adulterous thief and her success or failure in evading the law. Now, the narrative had switched to a timid but weird motel caretaker with mother issues. After this, filmgoers may have thought, anything was possible.

*The violation of a private, clean space. Bates Motel may have seemed creepy (12 rooms—and 12 vacancies, as Norman weakly smiles), but the shower in Marion’s room was a space of a different sort. The water coming down might have signified not just a physical cleansing, but a spiritual rebirth. (Indeed, she has flushed the $40,000 she stole from her company down the toilet, indicating that she will try to change the direction of her life from here on out.) But a peeping tom will violate her privacy—then, shortly after the glinting of a knife, her body. Critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich would remember: “Psycho is the moment in movies when for the first time movies weren't safe. I remember coming out of the screening and feeling I’d been raped or something, or mugged, it was absolutely terrifying. No one recovered from that shower scene.”

*Anthony Perkins’ boy-next-door appearance. Hitchcock didn’t change much in adapting Robert Bloch’s novel, but the alterations that were made were crucial. Turning Marion’s (or, in the novel, Mary’s) murder from a short beheading to a protracted shower-stabbing resulted in one of the most deconstructed scenes in film history. But the other change from the book was just as important. Norman in the novel is immediately off-putting: short, overweight, middle-aged, and unpleasant. No woman in her right mind would want to engage him in conversation. But casting Anthony Perkins—tall, young, good-looking—allowed Hitchcock to surmount that difficulty, with a character that, on first appearance, would be viewed as sensitive rather than sinister.

*The dissonant score. The nine-score, decade-long association between Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann ended abruptly five years after Psycho, when the stubborn composer clashed with the control-freak director over Torn Curtain. But in the case of Psycho, Hitchcock had enough sense to cancel his idea of a silent shower scene once he heard how Herrmann’s shrieking strings-only score magnified the suspense. Herrmann had conceived of an elegant aural counterpart to Hitchcock’s deceptively simple visual look: “a black-and-white score for a black-and-white movie.” According to Peter Ackroyd’s 2015 biography, Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life, the director not only doubled Herrmann’s fee but was quoted as saying, “thirty-three percent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music.”

*Shrewd pre-show audience manipulation. Hitchcock did everything he could to assure that audiences would be completely unprepared for what would occur, including: 1) reportedly instructing long-time assistant Peggy Robertson to buy up copies of the book to preserve the novel’s surprises; 2) referring to the project as "Production 9401" or "Wimpy"; 3) before production even started, securing the agreement of the entire cast and crew not to divulge any details of the story; and 4) in a brilliant stroke of marketing, telling theater owners not to admit anyone once the film had started.

Images were what obsessed Hitchcock, which explains both why he took so long to film the central shower scene (a week) and how he used 78 pieces of film in 45 seconds of screen time to imply a knife penetrating a nude body. But the contribution of his collaborator, screenwriter Joseph Stefano, should not be forgotten. 

Although Hitchcock used his usual method of intensely discussing beforehand his concept of the project with the screenwriter, he left it to Stefano to come up with motivation and nuance while the director concentrated on set pieces like the two onscreen murders. Three aspects of Stefano’s screenplay strike me as particularly worthy of comment:

*The interrogation of Norman by private investigator Milton Arbogast. First-time viewers of the film will pick up on the growing suspicions of the detective. Once he catches Norman in a lie, the tension ratchets up, as the viewers tries to figure where this is leading. Those watching the movie on subsequent viewings will watch aghast as even this enormously shrewd detective doesn’t grasp the jeopardy in which he has placed himself. (A writer at AlfredHitch Blog shares my affection for this scene.)

*The bird motif: Norman’s hobby—taxidermy—is referred to both explicitly and obliquely. Marion’s surname is that of a bird; at dinner, Norman tells her that she eats like a bird; a bird picture hangs on the wall; and the license plate on Marion’s call reads, “NFB 418.” The latter initials stand for “Norman Francis Bates,” with “Francis” referring to St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of birds.

*Mirrors: Normally, mirrors in film may symbolize schizophrenia or a fractured sense of self-worth. But in Psycho, the one figure who never appears in a reflection is Norman. This becomes a subtle way of making the viewer share the perspective and even consciousness of the killer.