Poems and Notes by John Tranter on Hitchcock (and Noir) on Hitch's Birthday

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Hamlet does not utter the words North by Northwest (a compass direction that does not exist.). He does say "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

“Shadow of a Doubt” was Hitchcock’s favorite of his movies: in it the young teenage girl is named Charlie, after her handsome uncle, played by Joseph Cotten, who (yes) is also named "Charlie”. 

 

See these poems in my book Starlight: “Boy in Mirror”, about Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its companion piece, the double acrostic poem “Girl in Water”, can be found in the “At the Movies” section of Urban Myths

 

The film (“Vertigo”) is based upon the novel D’Entre les Morts (From Among the Dead) which was written specifically for Alfred Hitchcock by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. A version is now available as Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo [Entre Deux Morts] (Between Two Deaths), London: Bloomsbury, 1997. — J.T

 

Here is the Santa Rosa house used by Hitchcock for the movie Shadow of a Doubt: 

 

 

 

From Urban Myths by John Tranter

 

Shadow of a Doubt

Handsome Uncle Charlie, burdened by crime. 
He laughs and scatters gifts, but he looks 
unwell – no, he’s fine – the man playing cards 
looks sick – he has a full hand of spades, 
but then, he gets to tell the story about 
how the ace of spades leads the pack. 
Suspicion follows you like a snake in the grass, 
so the story is torn up. But destroying the evidence 
points to the evidence. Sleeping dogs lie. 
Now, should a girl tell on the bad man? 
It would kill Mother. But Uncle Charlie 
has been killing plenty of those, it seems, 
the fat, lazy, greedy widows eating cake 
and wasting money – they deserve to die. 
Now those two men are here to see you, 
again – something about a survey, 
counting all the happy American families 
and listening closely to their apple-pie opinions 
as they look down from a high window through 
shade-dappled branches at a pair of neighbours 
pausing for a gossip in the sun. On the busy street 
the old traffic cop can’t help the girl, he’s 
avuncular and normal, and he has a job to do. 
Now everything falls to pieces 
and a killer pleads for his life. Traffic 
everywhere, an engine running and leaking gas, 
then back on the train again, the train 
that takes you out into the horrible world. 

The man with all the cards is here, somewhere, 
behind the viewfinder, watching everything, 
a resident alien with a point of view. 

Uncle Charlie has to die, we all knew that, 
it just took a while to fall into place 
in front of a speeding black locomotive 
somewhere out of town, and far away. 



North by Northwest

A hero breasts Manhattan traffic, always
ready to stop off at a tourist destination. 
A blunder with a telegram and Mother – 
a demon never seen, only hinted at 
in her distant, comfortable castle – 
will lose her little boy, who quickly 
plunges into an irritating adventure 
in the picaresque mode – leaping 
to conclusions as the scenery reels past, 
into bed and out again, dodging and weaving 
across a landscape more deadly and bucolic 
with each passing trick of the light. 
Of course it’s post-postmodern to have the hero 
an advertising man rather than a policeman-detective 
tough-guy action type, and the crop-dusting plane scene 
is funny and priceless. Perhaps the Master was trying to 
lighten up after Vertigo. There’s no fun there, just 
descending levels of madness and sadness. 
The blonde, unlike his sainted Mother, 
is very good and also devious and wicked, 
and so roller coaster morals are the norm 
and in fact this unravelling storm of incidents 
and grief is the painful future due to us 
when we stumble blinking into the light, 
for this sequence of parables was built 
by its huge crew of many talents to be seen 
and heard in the crowded dark, the wicked 
are found out and trampled on, another 
train, another bed, good night. 


Dark Passage 

Poor Vincent Parry: he rolls out of a garbage can 
and stumbles through a valley of coincidences, 
falling into the lap of a blonde. 

Poor Vincent: we are locked inside his head, 
seeing everything, feeling nothing but vertigo 
as the screen swoops and wobbles with his weaving 
and ducking to avoid his fate. He can’t 
have a drink, we would get splashed, 
he dare not look in a mirror, because 
we would be there gawking, dismayed… 

Poor Vincent: he gets disfigured by a man with a towel 
and a razor, and wakes up tied to the bed. 
Madge calls, and whispers, and goes away, 
and calls back again, spying, sneaking a drink, and 
every fragment of conversation ends with Madge 
who, if she can’t have what she wants, 
kills it. Vincent gets punched around 
and a pal gets it, beaten to death with a trumpet. 
Madge, fatal Madge, fallen Madge, 
defenestrated Madge on the sidewalk. 

Ah, Vincent: he used to look handsome 
with a pencil-thin moustache, then he woke up 
looking like some movie star. He wants to 
call out in his bad dream: Untie me! 
Set me free! But he will not be free 
until he takes the bus to distant Peru 
alongside a boring couple of jerks 
who have just stumbled over each other 
in a bus station of all places. 

Vincent dreams that he sits in a white jacket 
sipping a drink by the moonlit beach in Peru, 
feeling anxious until the music changes 
and a blonde appears: Well, tie me down, 
and start me dancing. 



Girl in Water 
                                                                           (Vertigo)

Waiting to meet a pretty girl – any pretty girl – 
hot summer day in 1958, beach crowd, emotional algebra,
also list and remember: makeup, perfume, lipstick, talc, 
telephone passion – no, a soda fountain, a pizza. 

Do they dream of mystery and adventure, women?
or do girls want to drown in literature? No, stupid. I 
bet she’d like a fragrant pizza topped with mozzarella, 
or is that just me? A movie: Item: Kim Novak. A drive-in –  

yes, more subtle and powerful appetites litter the sand. 
So become that detective, wounded, pitiful; so 
learn to love and fail in love in the back row at the Bijou, 
in parked cars, or snug among sandhills… your spyglass a nib, 

keyhole secrets memorised and filed away, until 
eternity comes calling at the foot of a staircase. 
After that ending, another climb, another cliff 
beyond which something awful awaits: love  

or falling in love or into love or falling into death, a
uniform and dizzying and swift descent 
that leaves you breathless, leaves you  
very unsteady like a cork in the water, 

effervescent and febrile and emotionally labile,
ready for almost anything. 
That conscious pilot spoke: scripsi quod scripsi: 
I have written what? I have written for 

girl in water ‘girl in water’, girl 
or woman in waves of water. I, 
keen to find behind mirrors, wavering echoes, burn 
in plots and complex narratives to draw 

many clues out, threads of meaning. A 
new insight into the convoluted plot 
of good and evil I can look for, where good men whine, 
villains struggle to prevail and bluster 

against ordinary background noise and hubbub: 
kaleidoscopes of criminality and subtle fiscal judo  
scam and prosper, and some ordinary guy 
will win and lose everything. I 

owe more than money. The key will turn: 
nervous ex-detectives afraid of causing harm 
drop into floods of anxiety, plunge into semi-
enervating doubt; whirlpools of suspicion, and later 

refuse help from well-meaning friends or  
from glum old girl-friends, dawdling, doodling, who 
understand too well their weaknesses, their 
lack of manly self-respect, who know how hypnotic 

those doubled mysteries within a mystery are. You reach
into a maelstrom of neurosis. Beyond bodily desire, 
these complex chess-like fantasies are the true romantic
scenes in your life: the most ludic acrostic paradises: click!

 

-- John Tranter

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