The HBO broadcast this Saturday, October 20th, of the original film “The Girl,” directed by Julian Jarrold and written by Gwyneth Hughes, sheds light on a pair of movies that are, in themselves, among the best of all. The story concerns the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and “Marnie”; the title character is Tippi Hedren, who—discovered by Hitchcock (or, as the movie suggests, by Hitchcock’s wife, Alma) while she was working as a model—was the star of these two movies. The subject is her relationship, onscreen and off, and the film suggests, with a stark if shallow clarity, the torments that both endured to get these films made and that are an inextricable element in these movies’ greatness. “The Girl” is an exemplary work of a distinctive genre, a pisser of a docu-drama—it contrasts intimate behavior with grand history with an exhilaratingly blithe casualness and displays the private lives of the great with a cavalier simplicity. In short, it’s a fairly mediocre film that tosses out a pile of incidents with a superficial briskness. But: What incidents! What characters! And even—what impersonations!
Hitchcock, often derided in his day as a clever showman, is, of course, now widely recognized as one of the greatest directors of all time and, in fact, as the director of the movie recently voted the greatest of all, “Vertigo,” in this year’s edition of the decennial
Sight & Sound poll. He remains both the most popular and the most paradoxical of great filmmakers, both an exemplar and an exception. His work is loved for good reasons—starting with the sheer musicality of his images and reaching to the metaphysical terror of his religious vision—and for misguided ones. Prime among the latter: perhaps no director better expresses the dream of total artistic control, as suggested by his infamous remarks about actors—ranging from “Actors are cattle” to his rectification, “I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle,” to his remark to Paul Newman, who, during the shoot of “Torn Curtain,” asked about his “motivation”: “Your motivation, Mr. Newman, is your salary.”
Hitchcock may not have liked actors, may not even have respected their art, but he surely elicited great performances from them: Cary Grant and James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak and many others made iconic, career-defining impressions in his films. But no performer is as thoroughly defined by Hitchcock’s films (though Anthony Perkins runs a close second) as is Tippi Hedren. In turn, she delivered the ultimate Hitchcock performances—the definitive examples of acting, Hitchcock-style—in “The Birds” and, above all, in “Marnie.”
I’ve long thought that “Marnie,” not “Vertigo,” is Hitchcock’s best film—and, as such, is one of the greatest films of all time. It, too, is about disguise, deception, crime, and desire, about mental illness and unhealed trauma. The plot twists in “Marnie” aren’t as elaborate or as surprising, but it captures, more harrowingly, a sense of derangement—inner and outer, intimate and widespread—that reflects a world on the breaking point. Nobody would mistake Hitchcock for a political filmmaker, but “The Birds” and, especially, “Marnie,” are the work of an American Antonioni, whose psychological dramas are matched by architectural and symbolic ones, by a confrontation with the roiling chill of technological modernity.
But, yes, these movies also feature the performances of Tippi Hedren, which are not only the ultimate Hitchcock performances but—and especially that of “Marnie”—among the very best in the history of cinema. Nobody would mistake Hedren for Bette Davis in theatrical craft, but, of course, the cinema isn’t theatre, and the measure of performance is, rather, an aura, an expressive radiance which is sometimes even more present in varieties of inexpressivity, repression, opacity, which is exactly what Hedren delivers.
The story, as told in “The Girl,” can be outlined here with no fear of spoilers, because it has long been available, as in Donald Spoto’s biography of Hitchcock, “The Dark Side of Genius,” and Hedren has spoken with journalists about it. Hitchcock, an obese man past sixty who knew that he was considered ugly—and who admitted that he had never had sex with anyone but his wife of thirty-seven years, Alma, and that he could no longer have an erection—became sexually obsessed with Hedren when he cast her as the lead in “The Birds.” Hedren, who had been working in New York as a model (and whom Hitchcock’s wife took notice of when she was doing a commercial on the “Today” show), came to Hollywood, where her screen test for Hitchcock involved a long and luscious kiss with an ugly actor. Early on in the process, he lavishes upon her a kind of attention that called attention to itself—and to which he himself called attention, by way of a smarmy limerick he recited to her (the genre is one that he makes frequent use of throughout “The Girl”).
Once the shoot of “The Birds” got rolling, his sexual overtures to her became increasingly direct, increasingly importunate; he threw himself on her in the back seat of his Rolls-Royce, and she rejected him, angrily and unambiguously. Soon thereafter, the shoot of “The Birds” turned violent—Hitchcock impassively subjected Hedren to terrifying and dangerous action, including an attack by live birds, for dozens of takes, that left her bleeding and dazed.
When Grace Kelly turned Hitchcock down for the title role in his next film, “Marnie”—the story of a “frigid” kleptomaniac who is, in effect, held hostage by a wealthy businessman whom she has victimized and who loves her—he gave the role to Hedren and, while making that film, pressured her sexually all the more blatantly, crudely, and cruelly. She never yielded; she asked out of her contract with him, but he wouldn’t release her from it.
That’s the story that’s sketched out in “The Girl.” Toby Jones does a chilling Hitchcock imitation, though his accent sounds a tiny bit too Cockney and his tone is missing just that bit of plummy innocence, just that lag of calculating diffidence—of instinctive dramatic timing—behind the wicked humor; he sounds too overtly villainous. Sienna Miller’s version of Hedren is even tougher to pull off—it’s almost impossible to play an actor as anything but parody, but there’s one thing that she gets right, and it’s a great deal: the cold gaze that Hitchcock’s camera captures.
The best performance is the one delivered by Imelda Staunton, as Alma Reville Hitchcock, the director’s wife. As depicted in the movie, Alma knew that Hitchcock was sexually obsessed with Hedren. In one already famous scene, she apologizes to Hedren for her husband’s behavior, and Hedren responds, “You could stop it; you’re the only one who could stop it, with one word.” I won’t reveal what Alma does, there or in the time that follows. I’m reminded of a performance in a movie made just before “The Birds”—that of Claire Trevor, in Vincente Minnelli’s “Two Weeks in Another Town,” as the wife of an aging great director and blatant womanizer. Trevor plays a hard-edged woman who has taken her husband’s treatment for too long and now knows just how to wound him—but who, when push comes to shove, is also his most ferocious defender. The difference between the characters—between Minnelli’s fictional one and Hitchcock’s wife—is that Alma is an integral part of Hitchcock’s work, not just his life partner but his close artistic collaborator, whose contribution to his work is made clear in “The Girl.” On the one hand, Hitchcock depends on her for more than moral support; on the other, Alma has a personal investment in the work, an artistic soul to gratify. Staunton doesn’t need to do much to suggest Alma’s anguish before Hedren’s Pygmalion-like transformation, at her own role in the creation of a great screen persona who is also destroying her life, but she does just enough to conjure a third dimension that’s in short supply elsewhere in the movie.
It’s serendipitous that “The Girl” is being broadcast in the same week as Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” is being released here. That film stars Denis Lavant as an actor whose multiple roles and multiple disguises demand savage sacrifices of his identity even as they deepen and enrich his inner life. This is something of the subject of “The Girl” as well—the inability of an actor to deliver what he hasn’t lived. The terror that Hedren’s character evokes in “The Birds” is a real terror. The sexual revulsion and emotional dissociation she depicts in “Marnie” isn’t acting, it’s her own. Hedren’s resonant affectlessness, especially in “Marnie,” is two (or three) remarkable things at once: it’s both a representation of the vulnerable yet impregnable passivity that aroused Hitchcock—that he desired both carnally and cinematically—as well as Hedren’s actual disconnection of her inner self from her public face. It was precisely the severing of the modern acting connection—the one between one’s own true emotions and the performance—that made her performance, paradoxically, an even deeper and truer and more agonized representation of her actual self, which then becomes all the more closely that of Marnie. What Hedren endured in the making of these films—and what Hitchcock subjected her to—is a crucial element of their artistic power.
The greatest thing in “The Girl” is a seeming throwaway that nonetheless gets at a truth that the movie doesn’t explore (but that Hitchcock does, repeatedly, and that Carax unfolds ecstatically in “Holy Motors”): the profoundly troubling power and menace of costume. In the opening scene of “Marnie,” Hedren’s hair is dark. In “The Girl,” the dyeing of it is shown, and, remarkably, Hedren (as played by Miller) experiences the process and its results as a kind of trauma, as an act of aggression, as if Hitchcock were changing her very identity under the force of his will. I’m reminded (once again) of the face-mask scene in Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere”—and reminded, once again, of the truth of cinematic artifice. Another ancillary treasure in “The Girl” is the depiction of the trickery with which realism is simulated. In “The Birds,” a telephone-booth scene and an attic scene are shot not on location but in a studio. In “Marnie,” a scene of horse-riding uses a studio-bound dummy horse, and is filmed with a rear-screen projection of the passing scenery, as is a train-platform sequence.
The modern cinema embeds its making-of in the movie itself, includes it in the movie’s substance. “Marnie” is the movie in which Hitchcock did so most radically; it’s the movie where his personal torment and Hedren’s own burst forth in every scene, in every moment. “The Girl” is not an especially sophisticated or nuanced drama, but it’s an irresistibly fascinating one, simply for calling attention to what’s already there for the viewing in Hitchcock’s greatest film. In effect, “The Girl” is not a drama but a work of criticism—not one of any groundbreaking originality, but one that points to what everyone ought already to have been talking about in the first place: not least, that it’s no surprise to learn that a filmmaker whose art is devoted to pain, fear, control, and sexual obsession also experienced and inflicted them in life.
P.S. The feature film “Hitchcock,” directed by Sacha Gervasi, and based on Stephen Rebello’s book “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,” opens November 23rd. Reportedly, the story is centered on the relationship between Hitchcock and his wife. Anthony Hopkins stars as Hitchcock, and Helen Mirren plays Alma Reville Hitchcock; the cast also includes James D’Arcy, as Anthony Perkins, and Scarlett Johansson, as Janet Leigh. I haven’t seen it yet; will report back.
