The Best American Poetry

Hitchcock Quiz # 6 - 9 [by David Lehman]

(6) Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

-- Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
-- Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
-- Grace Kelly offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they prepare for a chicken dinner
-- With one exception, everyone watching a tennis match moves his or her head as the movement of the ball dictates
-- Doris Day belts out Che Sera,Sera at a posh party peopled by diplomats in London

(7) "The better the villain, the better the film." Acknowledging that "better" is an elastic term, which of the following is the best villain? Discuss at least three.

(a) James Mason in "North by Northwest"
(b) The birds in "The Birds"--- Robert Walker in "Strangers on a Train"
(c) The American Nazis in "Saboteur"
(d) Claude Rains and his mother in "Notorious"
(e) Anthony Perkins and his mother in "Psycho"
(f) Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder"
(g) Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt"

What conclusions can we come to:
(a) bad guys tend to be guys, or guys with mother complexes, or enraged beasts
(b) "the more deranged -- Perkins, Walker -- the better"
(c) the "suave index" (Ray Milland, James Mason) makes the movies less threatening

(8) Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock joke?

-- to cuff his hero and heroine, leave the room and lock the door
-- to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck
-- to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
-- to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
-- to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

(9) In the auction scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant violates the hushed-room decorum by making wacky and contradictory bids in order to

-- attract attention because he is certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
-- attract attention and get ejected because the cops were preferable to the killers awaiting his exit
-- fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
-- warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message
-- arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

-- DL

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was In His Stars [by David Lehman]

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, one hundred and twenty-something years ago today, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as in 1993, 1999, and 2021,you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, who asks you for a job and sounds drunk. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers, which comes through in such movies as "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Pyscho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps."

When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower or the Statue of Liberty; from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or in an out-of-control merry-go-round at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given this man's stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train"), suave and attractive(James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder") or exceptionally complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt,"  the birds in "The Birds," the real imposter in "Spellbound")); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright, and Tippi Hedren. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably) blonde fantasy lady.

A tip of the fedora to Bernard Herrmann, a June Cancer, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind as well as soundtracks for such movies as "Citizen Kane" and Brian de Palma's  underrated "Obsession." -- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

from the archive; first published August 13, 2015

On Hitchcock's birthday, His Jokes, Heroes, Villains, and More: Multiple Choice [by David Lehman]

 

 

When August 13 falls on a Friday, as it does this year, let us honor Alfred Hitchcock, born on this August day. In the spirit of macabre and bemused jollity, I recommend that you listen to Shoistakovich's amazing Symphony no. 5 and ponder these multiple choice questions if you like the form, as I do. -- DL

Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

-- Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
-- Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
-- Grace Kelly offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
-- Grace Kelly finds the scissors on the desk and with a desperate lunge wards off the intruder and kills him
-- Jospeh Cotten deprecates the ordinary people of Santa Rosa, where the Hitchcock family lived (his house is pictured right), as if he were Orson Welles atop the Ferris Wheel in The Third Man

The better the villain, the better the film." Acknowledging that "better" is an elastic term, which of the following is the best villain? Discuss at least three.

(a) James Mason in "North by Northwest"
(b) The birds in "The Birds"
(c) Robert Walker in "Strangers on a Train"
(d) Claude Rains and his mother in "Notorious"
(e) Anthony Perkins and his mother in "Psycho"
(f) Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder"
(g) Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt"

What conclusions can we come to?
(a) some bad guys tend to be guys with mother complexes or enraged beasts
(b) "the more deranged, the better"
(c) the "suave index" (Ray Milland, James Mason) makes the movies less threatening
(d) murder like sex can be considered either as an art, a sport, a battle, a competition, or an act of passion

 Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock joke?

-- to cuff his hero and heroine, leave the room and lock the door
-- to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
-- to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
-- to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
-- to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

In the auction scene in North ny Northwest, Cary Grant makes contradictory and ludicrous bids in order to

-- attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
-- attract attention and get ejected because the cops are preferable to the killers awaiting his exit
-- fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
-- warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message, and what better way to do that than to to be caught holding the knife that killed the US Ambassador to the UN when that instiution was not yet immoral, irrelevant or fattening (to slightly misquote Irene Dunne on life's pleasures)
-- arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Good luck! -- DL

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

<<<
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

>>>

Groucho joins John Daly, Bennett A.Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, et al, on "What's My Line?" (1959)

Hooray for live television. On this week's episode of "What's My Line?", Groucho joins the panelists: Of one guest whsoe occupation must be guessed he asks, "Are you a corrupt politician? Or am I being redundant?" As tis is an era of decorum, the double entendre flourishes. "What a Freudian panel this is!"

On another evening, when Alfred Hitchcock was featured, the blindfolded Bennett Cerf, Random House publisher and What's My LIne? regular, asked whether the guest was a gentleman. "Sometimes," Hitchcock replied. The new movie he was promoting was Rear Window.  The names of Jimmy [Stewart] and Grace Kelly are dropped. The third guest that evening was Marilyn Monroe's dramatic coach. The producers did a terrific job that evening. The panelists -- Random House publisher Bennett Cerf,  NY Journal American columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, and actress Arlene Francis, one of the most likeable gals in show business..

Too bad the show went off the air before Mark Strand could have revealed his poetic line. -- DL

 and that should put you in the right frame of mind for this performance, a "classic by Mendel Picasso":

 And this: 

 

Some Notes on Hitchcock's Movies [by David Lehman]

Three of Hitchcock's movies are allegories:

"The Lady Vanishes" is an allegory of Western reaction to Nazi aggression as Europe crept to the second World War. On the train there is an appeaser and a pair of know-nothing sportsmen of the British ("Hello, what's this!") sort. Not coincidentally the appeaser is a two-timer in his romantic entanglements, and an indecisive one at that. He is a casualty of the incipient conflict. The sportsmen, good-natured and far from quick to leap to arms, line up on the right side.

"Lifeboat" is an allegory of the allies uniting to defeat the Ubermensch.

"The Birds" is an allegory of nature -- which is either angry and unforgiving, or unpredictable and indifferent to mankind, or possibly even diabolical.

These summaries leave out the love affairs in each of the movies, but in each it is of less significance than some odd detail.

In "The Lady Vanishes," it is the tune the lady sings and makes the young couple memorize.

In "Lifeboat" it is the expensive bracelet that Tallulah Bankhead donates to the cause of landing a fish.

In "The Birds" it is the birds and how quickly they can become menacing, they, the most poetical of creatures if Keats and Shelley and Whitman are to be believed.

Nevertheless it is always useful to remember that Hitchcock had a Catholic upbringing and worked out his guilt issues with the same vexed but poker-faced countenance as Montgomery Clift in "I Confess."

The character who gets clobbered and humiliated in "The Birds" is Tippi Hedren, who, as any TV summary of the movie will state, plays a "San Francisco playgirl," a woman of easy virtue with magnificent hair and a beautiful face. 

Sex is a punishable or guilt-inducing offense except when there's legitimate issue (the offspring in "The Man Who Knew Too Much"), and the beautiful blonde in a Hitchcock movie will be poisoned almost to death (Ingrid Bergman in "Notorious"), will leap to her death from the top of a church tower (Kim Novak in "Vertigo"), or will have to fight off a murderous husband's hired killer (Grace Kelly in "Dial M for Murder").

The fate of Farley Granger's wife in "Strangers on a Train" demonstrates Freud's theory that the wish is equal to the deed as far as its potential for producing guilt. It is tempting to regard the characters played by Granger and Robert Walker as split sides of a divided personality, with Walker as more interesting than Granger (whereas Mr Hyde is less interesting than Dr. Jekyll). 

There are times when the prankster in Hitchcock prevails, as when Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane fight in "Saboteur" and an onlooking couple comments that they must be very much in love -- or when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climb to the upper berth and the train penetrates the tunnel at the end of "North by Northwest."

The test of a true Hitchcock fan is whether you like Joel McCrea's speech at the end of "Foreign Correspondent."   

-- Take the Hitchcock quiz part one and part two.

On Hitchcock's Birthday [August 13]: His Cameo in "Marnie" [by David Lehman]

From Marnie (1964; screenplay by Jay Presson Allen, based on a novel by Winston Graham) is the second most Freudian of Hitchcock's movies, two quotes:

Marnie: "Men! You say 'no' to one of them, and bingo! you're a candidate for the funny farm."

*

Mark Rutland, to Marnie, re Mr. Strutt, the man who has threatened to blackmail her: "He's a businessman. That means he's in business to do business."  
"So?"
"So we try to do business with him." 

*

Quiz question: where does Hitchcock make his cameo in Marnie?

a) leaving one hotel room as Tippi Hedren enters another
b) walking across an elevated pedestrian bridge between two buildings
c) in New York, with a bus door slammed in his face
d) in a newspaper ad for a weight-reduction program
e) in the room where the pianist keeps playing the same theme

*

Happy birthday to the "master of suspense," who observed astutely that "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out," a statement that justifies tagging this post under not only "Hitchcock quiz" but also "spontaneous aphorisms." When August 13 lands on a Friday, watch out --  a drunken poet may phone you at midnight while a couple of bats sneak in through the bathroom window.

-- DL

Hitchcock Quiz # 1 - 5 [by David Lehman]

(1) Which of the following did not play the male lead in a Hitchcock movie?

a) Sean Connery in Marnie
b) Cary Grant in Notorious
c) Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
d) Laurence Olivier in Rebecca
e) Robert Cummings in Saboteur

(2) The title North by Northwest is a reference to

a) The Tempest and magic
b) Hamlet and madness
c) A popular route flown by Pan American Airlines in 1959
with change of planes at O'Hare and Mt Rushmore the final destination
d) Emily Dickinson's poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes"
e) Cary Grant's use of a road map as a disguise in the dining car 

(3) Identify Ambrose Chapel.

a) Albert Hall's younger brother
b) The kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much
c) A London Church
d) The MacGuffin
e) Montgomery Clift's parish in I Confess

(4) Hitchcock favored blond actresses because of

a) A childhood crush on a sweet trick named Dietrich
b) Unresolved Oedipal issues
d) Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Doris Day,
Joan Fontaine, Priscilla Lane,and Tippi Hedren
e) The idea, which occurred to him with the force of an epiphany, that
blond-versus-brunette mirrored the American power structure
f) The belief that in movies an actor's looks are more important than
her or his talent.

5) Which of these did Hitchcock invest with uncanny significance?

a) A glass of milk
b) A shattered pair of eyeglasses
c) A giant Sequoia Redwood
d) The key to the wine cellar
e) A burning mansion

Optional essay questions:
1) In Vertigo, who is real, Judy or Madelene?
2) True or false: The age difference between James Stewart and Kim Novak
helps explain the nature of their relationship,which is passionate but not exactly
sexual -- it is more like an event in the man's psyche, which he is destined
to repeat.
3) Bernard Herrmann's music and what it contributed.    -- DL