Hot Frosty Blondes
In Janet Maslin's 10.22 N.Y. Times review of Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (Harmony, 10.28), she paraphrases author Donald Spoto's view that "no understanding of the director's career can be complete without the dark side, and that great art need not correspond with saintly behavior.
"And [Spoto] suggests that this book be read as 'a cautionary tale of what can go wrong in any life.' After all, 'it is the story of a man so unhappy, so full of self-loathing, so lonely and friendless, that his satisfactions came as much from asserting power as from spinning fantasies and acquiring wealth.' By the time Hitchcock imploded with Tippi Hedren [during the making of The Birds and Marnie], the craving for such power had stifled the creative vitality of his work."
It's absolutely true that Hitchcock's downslide began right after The Birds ('63) and stayed in a downswirl mode until the end, despite the view in some quarters that he resurged with 1972's Frenzy. (Has anyone watched this film lately? It's brave and adventurous with two or three standout sequences, but at the same time much of it is tedious and meandering and seriously lacking in story tension. And certain portions of Anthony Shaffer's dialogue are dreadful.)
What Spoto's book seems to be saying, going by Maslin's assessment (and I would say this is true in most walks of life), is that if you're living a life afflicted by sexual or emotional repression sooner or later it's going to negatively affect your productivity or creativity. This was Hitchcock, all right. By all indications he had no sex life at all for decades. According to Spoto nothing happened with his wife Alma except for one incident. (Good God!) So he poured all his sensual appetites into power, wealth, travel, good food, etc. And quietly lusting after his actresses in differing ways
Posted by Jeffrey Wells on October 23, 2008 at 2:14 PM
comment #1
btwnproductions
says ...
FRENZY was not Anthony Shaffer's finest two hours, but the trailer is great.
Posted by btwnproductions
at October 23, 2008 3:43 PM
comment #2
arturobandini2
says ...
Frenzy is truly perplexing, but overall it's worth seeing. The police captain's wife's gourmet cuisine is a sub-Barney Miller attempt at levity (unless I missed a relevant metaphor), and the Billie Whitelaw scenes are indeed tedious. Jon Finch is an appealing actor stuck playing a despicable protagonist, and the controversial rape/murder scene is repulsive and still shocking.
[SPOILER ALERT] Where it falls apart for me is the murder of Anna Massey and the subsequent use of her corpse for black humor, when she's the only truly sympathetic character in the film. After she bravely escaped the murderous Peeping Tom a decade earlier, it sucked to see her bite it so casually in Frenzy.
Posted by arturobandini2
at October 23, 2008 5:18 PM
comment #3
lazarus
says ...
Family Plot never gets the credit it deserves. It may come off like a trifle, but to me it's much richer than Frenzy, which is like Hitch giving into the perversity of the types of films his classics inspired. It's well-made, but I'm glad he went out on a more positive note--that Barbara Harris freeze-frame was perfect.
Posted by lazarus
at October 23, 2008 5:53 PM
comment #4
arturobandini2
says ...
You're right, lazarus. And Barbara Harris was an intriguing counter-culture star in the '70s (Nashville, Freaky Friday). I'm trying to remember which director commentary described what a frightened bird she was ... she begged off the film and offered to buy the negative from the studio ... Was it Altman? Ashby? Do you know?
Posted by arturobandini2
at October 23, 2008 6:41 PM
comment #5
Che sucks
says ...
I wish Maslin had called Spoto out on just repackaging ground he already covered in THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS: THE LIFE OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK. The creepy story of Hitchcock's play for Hedren was detailed at length as was his whole spiel on the director's sexual repressiveness. What a joke that the New York Times bothered to review this derivative pile. Between this and his recent pointless bio of Joan of Arc (because you know there's only a thousand of these already) Spoto has become a hack.
On a sidenote, the trailer for FRENZY scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.
Posted by Che sucks
at October 23, 2008 8:55 PM
comment #6
T. S. Idiot
says ...
Agree completely with Che sucks. Maslin was once the Times main film critic, but she obviously has never read Spoto's Hitchcock bio. The new book apparently simply updates the old material by bringing the lives of the Hitchcock actresses up to date. While Dark Side of Genius is always fascinating, it is clear that Spoto's main goal is to suggest that personal foibles are more important than any artist's art.
Posted by T. S. Idiot
at October 24, 2008 5:55 AM
comment #7
Mark B
says ...
Hitchcock had one child, right? So is that the one "incident" with Alma that Spoto is referring to? Yikes!
Posted by Mark B
at October 24, 2008 7:33 AM
comment #8
jghoward
says ...
"if you're living a life afflicted by sexual or emotional repression sooner or later it's going to negatively affect your productivity or creativity"
but this assumes that his great works of art were forged in spite of, not because of, such repression.
Posted by jghoward
at October 24, 2008 9:20 AM
comment #9
Daviddb
says ...
Donald Spoto is an aging corpse-fucker. If he somehow managed in his pathetic creative life to crank out one piece of meaningful art that is worthy of the worst of Hitchcock, that would be a miracle...He is no better than those maggots from TMZ with their little video cameras...he just hides behind his advanced degrees...Hitchcock is no longer around to defend himself but this hack still is...sad.
Posted by Daviddb
at October 27, 2008 12:22 AM
comment #10
janee
says ...
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Posted by janee
at May 18, 2011 6:21 AM