The Catholic Hitchcock

7/28/2019 The Catholic Hitchcock

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The Catholic Hitchcock: a director's sense ofgood & evil.(Alfred Joseph Hitchcock)Commonweal - July 16, 2010Richard Alleva

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"I don't think I can be labeled a Catholic artist," the director Alfred Hitchcock toldFrancois Truffaut, "but it may be that one's early upbringing influences a man'slife and guides his instinct."

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, a districtof London's East End, to a grocer named William, and his wife, Emma. On hisfather's side, Catholicism went back perhaps only two generations, but Emmawas of Irish stock and her traceable ancestors were all Catholic. Hitchcock toldthe journalist Charlotte Chandler that his birth date was "one of the only Sundaysin my mother's life that she missed church." Though there was a higherpercentage of Catholics in Leytonstone than in other London neighborhoods,they were still regarded as peculiar, even socially suspect. According toHitchcock, "Just being Catholic meant you were eccentric."

In 1910, Hitchcock was enrolled in St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit "day school foryoung gentlemen," where he remained until he was fourteen. When asked laterwhat a Catholic education meant for him, he replied, "A Catholic attitude wasindoctrinated into me. ... I now have a conscience with lots of trials over belief."From the Jesuits, he said, he learned "a consciousness of good and evil, thatboth are always with me."

The director's Catholic upbringing threaded its way through the rest of his life inboth England and the United States. There was regular attendance at Mass inhis youth and middle years, Alma Reville's conversion when she became Mrs.Hitchcock, the Catholic upbringing of their daughter Patricia (who married thegrandnephew of Boston's Cardinal William H. O'Connell). There were friendshipswith priests and donations to various Catholic charities. But in his last yearsHitchcock ceased attending Mass and, according to biographer Donald Spoto(The Dark Side of Genius), he

rejected the suggestion that he allow a priest ... to come for a

visit, or to celebrate a quiet, informal ritual at the house for his

comfort. It had been years since he had attended worship ... but it

was not so long since he had expressed his distrust and fear of the

clergy. ... "Don't let any priests on the [studio] lot," he had

whispered to his office staff in the last year. "They're all after

me; they all hate me." There was no way of convincing him to see a


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clergyman at home, either, although he imagined their presences

there, too.

Did this intensely secretive man feel hounded by real or imagined priests who hefelt were trying to claim him as a Catholic artist?

But those reports shed less light on Hitchcock the Catholic than a childhoodepisode he loved to relate. Here's the version he told Charlotte Chandler:

When I was no more than six years of age, perhaps younger, I did

something that my father considered worthy of reprimand. I don't

recall the particular transgression, but at that tender age, it could

hardly have been such a serious offense. My father sent me to the

local constabulary with a note. The police officer on duty read it

and then led me down a long corridor to a jail cell where he locked

me in for what seemed hours, which was probably five minutes. He

said, "This is what we do to naughty boys." I have never forgotten

those words. ... I can still hear the clanging of the cell door

behind me.

When I try to put myself in the shoes of six-year-old Hitch, this anecdotebecomes a Catholic moment of terror. The boy was charged with bringing a notethat, presumably, he'd not read to a police station. Suddenly he finds himselfbehind bars. No time to weep, whine, or plead, just a mysterious short walk andthe clang of the cell door behind him. Sudden solitude, the growing awareness ofabandonment, perhaps even a child's version of despair. Then, after fiveseemingly endless minutes, the relief of being released, but also a warning thatcarried a whiff of accusation: "This is what we do to naughty boys." But how haveI been a naughty boy?

It's like a childhood version of Kafka's The Trial (which Hitchcock wanted to filmuntil the project was scooped by Orson Welles), in which the innocent Josef K.finds himself accused of a mysterious crime about which nobody will providespecifics. Over the course of the story, Josef comes to feel guilty simply becausehe is human: to be human is to be guilty.

But Alfred H. wasn't Josef K., and when Hitchcock told the story he justified hisfather's action, speculating that his own childish self had done something wrong,however slight. In the Chandler version he says he had "followed the tram tracks"until he "lost my way. ... My father had been forced to wait for his dinner. ... Inlater years, I considered perhaps he was angry because he was worried aboutme." So the father, unlike Kafka's irrational, unknowable paternal God, was notonly justified, he was lovingly worried--punitive precisely because he was loving.

And Hitchcock the adult could think of the boy as both guilty and not guilty. Goodand evil--they both were always with him.

When you couple the jail incident with what young Hitchcock must have beenlearning in his early religion classes, you arrive in Catholic territory. Isn't theepisode redolent of the story of the Garden of Eden? The boy knew that baptism,


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the only sacrament he had received, was for the remission of original sin, but hemust have been told that we remain fallible creatures even after original sin isgone. The gates of the garden remain shut. ("I can still hear the clanging of thecell door behind me.") Thus the necessity of the next sacrament, penance, whichhe wouldn't receive for some years but of which he must have been told. Each

confession would restore a state of grace that would only be shattered again bysin but could be restored and re-restored by further confessions: the stop-and-gorhythm of Catholicism. And since his recent "crime" had been so blithely, soabsent-mindedly committed ("I'd followed the tram tracks. I hadn't gone very farwhen it started to get dark, and I lost my way"), wasn't it a sure bet that he wouldsin over and over again? And hadn't he already been locked in the cell of a

jailhouse built to house wicked men? (That the local constabulary probably heldnobody worse than an obstreperous drunk is beside the point.) Couldn't he havefelt, in an inchoate, nonverbal way, that the criminals in the other cells were likean unseen part of him, waiting in ambush to welcome him into their fraternity("good and evil ... both are always with me")?

Alfred's father was fond of patting his youngest child on the head and muttering,"My little lamb without a spot." Maybe, at age six, little Hitch already knew better.

Is any of this dramatized in Hitchcock's many films? Yes, but only in a smallhandful over his nearly sixty years as a director. After all, Hitchcock made moviesfor the masses, not for those who shared his upbringing or religious obsessions.Furthermore, his projects were often determined as much by the books and playson which they were based as by Hitchcock's preoccupations. Rebecca (1940)has just as much Daphne du Maurier in its makeup as it has Hitchcock.

The small group of Hitchcock films that do bear witness to a Catholic sensibility(though certainly not to any doctrine) display an almost painful awareness of theCatholic democracy of souls that so engaged G. K. Chesterton, a boyhoodfavorite of the moviemaker: the certainty that anyone, finally, is capable ofanything, any sin, any virtuous act. No one is doomed; no one is among theelect; nothing is foreordained; everyone is vulnerable.

For his sixth Hollywood feature, Hitchcock knew what he was doing when hehired Thornton Wilder and Sally Benson to work up a script from a story outlineby Gordon McDonell and Alma Reville. As the authors, respectively, of Our Townand the stories that became the movie musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Wilder andBenson were the bards of happy families and cozy community. In Shadow of aDoubt (1943), family and community provide sanctuary for a killer.

The setting is Santa Rosa, California, a Sonoma County agricultural town thatmight be the Our Town of the West Coast. We first see it in a view of Main Street,presided over by a rotund, benevolently beaming traffic cop--presumably the onlypoliceman this community needs or has ever needed. A series of lap-dissolveseases us into a tranquil neighborhood, then a particular house, then a second-


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story bedroom where a teenaged girl nicknamed Charlie, played by the radiantlyyouthful Teresa Wright, is lying on a bed daydreaming. She feels that SantaRosa is all too idyllic and that her family has grown complacent. Then she has abrainstorm! Why not send a telegram to another Charlie, her mother's kid brother("the one we couldn't help spoiling"), a man of the world and a globetrotting

businessman, "a wonderful person who'll come and shake us all up ... just theone who will save us!" But when she gets to the telegraph office, the operatorinforms her that Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) has already wired anannouncement of his coming visit. This electrifies the girl, for it proves what shehas always suspected: that she and her uncle are telepathic partners and eternalsoulmates. As she tells him on the evening of his arrival: "I'm glad that Mothernamed me after you and that she thinks we're both alike. I think we are, too. ...We're not just an uncle and niece. It's something else. I know you."

A few nights later, the dinner-table conversation turns to the subject of how well-off widows amuse themselves in big cities. Uncle Charlie weighs in. Rich men, he

says,

leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the

wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best

hotels, every day by the thousands. Drinking the money. Eating the

money. Losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night.

Smelling of money. Proud of their jewelry but of nothing else.

Horrible. Faded, fat, greedy women. YOUNG CHARLIE: But they're alive!

They're human beings! UNCLE CHARLIE: Are they? Are they, Charlie? Are

they human? Or are they fat, wheezing animals? And what happens to

animals when they get too fat and too old?

Throughout the dialogue the camera, representing the girl's point of view, has

been moving slowly forward, tightening on the uncle's face. Joseph Cotten'ssuperbly frigid mask fills the screen and he looks directly into the camera. Hiswords and those remorseless eyes confirm the recent suspicions, planted inCharlie's head by two FBI agents, that her uncle is the "Merry Widow" killer whohas been strangling women, ostensibly for their money but really because he ison a psychopathic crusade to rid the world of "fat, wheezing animals."

Young Charlie undergoes many shocks in the course of the story, but theaudience gets one, too, when she responds to the confirmation of her uncle'sguilt. Does she try to stop his murderous career by sharing the evidence she'sfound (an incriminating ring) with the FBI? No, she just wants her uncle to go as

far away as possible from her family and town. She doesn't bother herself aboutthe killings that will certainly continue once he's again at large. Is this because ofsome vestigial affection for her uncle? Not at all.

The turning point comes in a sleazy bar where her uncle tries to persuade her notto inform on him. (This dive, where servicemen congregate, seems to be scarcelytwo blocks away from Charlie's middle-class home; it's as if one of MartinScorsese's mean streets has been plunked down next to Beaver Cleaver's


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neighborhood.) A pretty but dispirited waitress, a former classmate of Charlie's--the sort of girl who drops out in junior year after getting pregnant--takes theirorder while eying the incriminating ring on the table. "Ain't it beautiful?" she sighs."I'd just die for a ring like that. ... I'd just about die." The uncle brusquely placesan order, then starts in on his niece:

You're just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little

town. You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly

well that there's nothing in the world to trouble you. ... You sleep

your untroubled ordinary little sleep filled with peaceful, stupid

dreams. And I brought you nightmares. Or did I? ... You're a

sleepwalker, blind! How do you know what the world is like? Do you

know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts

off houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell! What does it matter

what happens in it?

Coming out of the mouth of a man she once idealized, this nihilistic apologiabrings home (literally) to Charlie the awareness that evil can be anywhere. But is

it everywhere, as her uncle preaches? That can't be. For that would mean SantaRosa, the family's Eden, was a foul sty. She must protect her town and family.

And if the mother, whose mental fragility is beautifully conveyed by PatriciaCollinge, learns that the baby brother she still dotes on is a killer, the Eden of hermind will be destroyed. Uncle Charlie mustn't be turned over to the law. Hissecret must be kept, but he must go away. And if he won't? Then young Charlieis willing to kill him.

There is something in Hitchcock's sensibility that takes perverse pleasure inyoung Charlie's psychological deflowering. Shadow, it seems to me, is, amongmany things, a Catholic criticism of the kind of mind that is without a true

awareness of sin, a criticism of an innocence that is as typically American asTeresa Wright's vibrant freshness. If a Catholic is brought up, as Hitchcock was,to know that evil is always at hand, then he or she is armed for this encounterwith malevolence. But young Charlie, up to the moment in the bar, is scarcelyarmed at all, and no one in her family ever will be if she has anything to sayabout it. They live in an American Eden and she will keep it safe for them, eventhough she herself can never get back inside.

The world is good. So says Catholicism, an assertion that sharply distinguishes itfrom several other religions. Yet it's difficult to be good, to embrace the world butnot the corruption in it. Think of the Catholic politician trying to steer clear of graft,

only to be forced to beg favors from pols on the take. Think of the Catholicjournalist whose expose may destroy innocent individuals while it takes down afraud. It's enough to make the angels weep. Or laugh.

Hitchcock laughs. In Strangers on a Train (1951), he gives us the dark comedy ofvirtue's necessary partnership with vice. When tennis star Guy Haines (FarleyGranger) encounters a fan on a train, he finds the feline Bruno Anthony (RobertWalker) entertaining but doesn't take his wild talk seriously, especially Bruno's


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theory of exchanging murders. "You do my murder, I do yours." If Bruno were toeliminate Guy's tramp of a wife so that the athlete could marry the girl of hisdreams, then Guy could kill Bruno's hated father. The police can't catch amurderer without a motive. "You think my theory's okay, Guy? You like it?" "Sure,Bruno, sure," Guy replies as a brush-off. But Bruno takes it as a green light, and

Guy's wife soon lies dead at a fairground.

In the Patricia Highsmith novel on which the movie is based, Guy subsequentlyyields to Bruno's pressure and kills the father. For Highsmith evil is basic andcivilization a mere facade. That's not what Hitchcock believed. What interestedhim was the covert, temporary partnership of good and evil. So he directed hisscriptwriter, Czenzi Ormande, to keep Guy guiltless of murder but to have himtemporarily protect Bruno from the law. In Shadow of a Doubt, Charlie shielded amurderer out of love for her family. Here, Guy Haines does it out of sheer self-preservation. Bruno, after all, is the only person who knows absolutely that Guyis innocent (even Guy's sweetheart comes to suspect him). And, as the police

grow increasingly suspicious of Guy, Bruno is the only one who can clear him.

But there is also a more sinister reason for Guy's legal inaction: Bruno was theagent of Guy's desire to see his wife dead, though the athlete never intended hiswish to come true. As Bruno remarks, "I have a murder on my conscience. Butit's not my murder, Mr. Haines. It's yours. And since you're the one to profit by it, Ithink you should be the one to pay for it." Actually, Guy is already paying for it.While the charming sociopath Bruno (Walker's performance brilliantly blendscomedy and menace) mouths the word "conscience" but feels no remorse, Guysweats, prevaricates, remonstrates, and withholds evidence. When good and evilare yoked by circumstance, it is good that will chafe against the yoke.

Highsmith's book, which denies the existence of goodness, is truly bleak.Hitchcock's film is merely sardonic and often funny.

Guy's unwilling partnership with Bruno is underscored visually rather than withdialogue, especially in the scene in which Bruno first reveals what he's done.Late at night, Guy has taken a taxi to his Georgetown apartment. As he mountsthe outside steps, he hears a ghostly voice calling him from across the street. Hesees Bruno standing next to a tall gate that fronts a courtyard. When Guy joinshim, Bruno moves behind the gate, which casts vertical shadows down his faceand body, as if he were behind prison bars. He reveals that he has fulfilled hisend of the "bargain."

GUY: Are you trying to tell me ... why, you maniac! BRUNO: But, Guy,

you wanted it. We planned it together, remember?

Guy starts off to call the police, but Bruno stops him with the comment that they'dboth be arrested, since the police would naturally conclude that Guy put Brunoup to the murder (which is what Bruno actually believes).


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GUY: I had nothing to do with this. The police will believe me.

BRUNO: Guy, if you go to the police now, you'll just be turning

yourself in as an accessory. You see, you have the motive.

As this begins to sink in, a police car drives up. Here is Guy's opportunity to turnin the murderer. Instead, he steps back behind the gate beside Bruno. Now we

see both men literally behind bars. Good and evil, cellmates.

Of course, Guy remains essentially innocent while Bruno is a monster. Hitchcockdoesn't equate them but gives us the comedy of unwanted association. All thislanded on the tennis player because he took a train seat across from the wrongstranger. And even then nothing would have happened if his shoe hadn't brushedagainst Bruno's. The situation is as farcical as it is dangerous. Strangers on aTrain, like Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux and John Huston's Prizzi's Honor, is agreat comedy of murder. It's also a burst of laughter at the Catholic precept thatwe must embrace the world but not the evil in it. Good advice, Hitchcockchuckles, but just try to take it the next time you get on a train.

A Catholic ambiance starkly pervades Hitchcock's next film, I Confess (1953). Fr.Michael Logan of Quebec (Montgomery Clift) hears the confession of a murderer,the rectory handyman, Keller (O. E. Hasse). Logan later discovers that theGerman refugee, disregarding the priest's admonition, doesn't intend to turnhimself in. While robbing the slimy lawyer Vilette, Keller had murdered the man ina panic. Keller's motive for the theft was to relieve his beloved wife Alma of theoverwork caused by their poverty. His excuse for avoiding arrest is that Almacouldn't live without him.

But then a backstory emerges that shows how entangled the priest is in the

murder. Before taking his vows, Michael Logan had been in love with Ruth (AnneBaxter), who married an up-and-coming politician when Michael was servingoverseas in World War II. After the armistice, Ruth, not telling Michael of hermarriage, had enjoyed a romantic tryst with him. It had been observed by Vilette.Shocked by Ruth's unfaithfulness, Michael entered the priesthood. Seven yearslater, Vilette, charged with tax fraud, tried to blackmail Ruth into interceding withher politician-husband. Ruth turned to Michael, who then scheduled anappointment with Vilette for the morning following the murder. All this, plus thefact that a priest (Keller disguised in Logan's cassock) was spotted leaving thecrime scene, make Michael the chief suspect. Brought to trial, Michael isdetermined to preserve the inviolability of the confessional, and so he presents

no solid defense. When the jury acquits him by virtue of reasonable doubt, thejudge makes matters worse by expressing public disagreement with their verdict.Only after a mob, infuriated at the seemingly corrupt priest, almost lynchesMichael does Keller's pitying wife tell the police the truth--which precipitates thefinal catastrophe.

A heroic priest, the seal of the confessional as a plot device, the Franco-Catholicambience of Quebec: if Hitchcock ever made a movie that could be labeled


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Catholic, surely this is it. Yet if I Confess is a Catholic film, it's not because of anyof these superficial features. It's because it explores the image of the priest insociety, what can tarnish that image, and how a fallible individual priest maysuffer under the burden of that image.

Consider what first arouses the suspicion of the officer in charge, InspectorLarrue (Karl Maiden). The handyman, before pretending to have discovered thebody, has sneaked the money back into the victim's cashbox, thus eliminating thetheft motive. Then Michael shows up and Larrue casually takes his statementthat he had an appointment with the lawyer, though the priest doesn't mentionthat Ruth was also coming to the meeting. So far, no suspicion falls on Fr. Logan.But then, while questioning Keller, Larrue's eye catches sight of Logan agitatedlypacing on the sidewalk outside the crime scene. When Ruth joins him and thetwo converse intensely, a melodramatic chord breaks into the soundtrack and theexpression on Larrue's face changes. The inspector is beginning to suspect thepriest.

Why? What Larrue sees could merely be a priest telling a parishioner that aterrible thing has happened. Yet the intense, troubled rapport between a young,handsome priest and a beautiful woman in the vicinity of a murder doesn't lookright to Larrue. The adage about Caesar's wife applies to priests in this intenselyCatholic community: he must not only be innocent, he must be above suspicion.The trial is conducted in an atmosphere of scandal, and after the priest'sacquittal, the mob's derisive laughter ("Preach us a sermon, Logan") is just asmuch about his putative concupiscence as it is about murder. Throughout themovie, the image of the chaste priest works against Fr. Logan.

The most profound element in I Confess--an element fully realized in theotherwise uneven, bumpy script by George Tabori and William Archibald, andburnished by the superb acting of Clift and Hasse--is the relationship betweenpriest and killer. And this too involves the image of what a priest should be--though refracted through a murderer's desperate mentality.

Unlike Uncle Charlie or Bruno, Keller is neither a serial killer nor a madman but apracticing Catholic whose horror at his deed sends him immediately to theconfessional; and once his fear of the hangman's noose is aroused, he counts onFr. Logan to remain mute. The image of priests as silent brokers between manand God, transcending all civil law, becomes Keller's best hope to escape earthly

justice.

This leads to the two men becoming a torment to each other. Keller is racked bythe priest's enigmatic silence--is Logan about to turn him in?--while Logan'smisery stems from anticipating his own arrest and the fact that Ruth has beendragged into the case, with her reputation and marriage likely to be destroyed.


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But there is something else. The initial absolution of the killer went hand in glovewith the priest's admonition that a confession to the police must followimmediately. (One of the bumps in the script is that the confessional exchangebetween priest and killer is not shown completely; Keller only summarizes it laterfor his wife.) When Keller refuses to turn himself in, the sight of him in the rectory

reminds Logan that, like young Charlie in Shadow and Guy in Strangers, he isshielding a murderer. The priest's silence fulfills his priestly duty: to follow Jesus,he mustn't denounce Cain. Hence, his torment, and his silent treatment of Keller,whose daily presence in the church and the rectory seems an obscene joke. Andwhereas Charlie had an FBI agent to partially confide in, and Guy finallypersuaded his sweetheart to believe in him, Michael Logan has no mortal ear tolisten to him. No wonder that, in the final scene, when the priest confronts thegun-waving killer (who has just murdered his beloved wife), the despairingemigre says,

I am as alone as you are. LOGAN: I'm not alone. KELLER: You are.

To kill you now would be a favor to you. You have no friends. What

has happened to your friends, eh? They mock at you. ... They call atyou. ...

Given his overly earnest, idealistic nature, what he has been through, and thelikelihood that the shadow of scandal will always hover over him despite hisacquittal, Logan may always be a lonely man. Yet he is right to say that he is notalone. God may be a frustratingly silent confidant but a confidant he is. WhenLogan gives a second absolution to the dying Keller, he is making sure that themurderer is not alone either. Whatever the film's faults (the uneven script, DimitriTiomkin's overly emphatic music, Anne Baxter's flat performance), the conclusionof I Confess is immensely moving. Its final benediction unknots Michael Logan's

spirit, ends his torment, and fulfills his duty to both God and man.

Are these three films the only Hitchcocks that reflect the concerns and the valuesof Catholicism? I'm sure there are moments and entire scenes in others thattestify to a Catholic sensibility. For instance, at the climax of The Wrong Man(1957), the mistakenly accused Henry Fonda, on the verge of ruin, prays beforea picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. His prayer is answered when the realcriminal is apprehended in the very next scene. But that moment of prayer existsapart from the rest of the movie, whose real theme is the way any good citizencan be caught in the toils of the law. The story, by its very nature, demands thatits protagonist be passive in his suffering, and this passivity precludes any

dramatic movement of the spirit. Catholic values may be present but they don'tinform the entire drama.

No artist can keep his or her religiosity discreet from national habits, sexualyearnings, filial and parental feelings, political ideas, etc. Religion mingles withthe mess of life. But I'll stand by this: Catholics viewing Shadow of a Doubt,Strangers on a Train, and I Confess will recognize a spiritual brother behind thecamera.


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Richard Alleva is a film critic for Commonweal. Funding for this essay wasprovided by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

Citation Details

Title: The Catholic Hitchcock: a director's sense of good & evil.(Alfred JosephHitchcock)Author: Richard AllevaPublication:Commonweal (Magazine/Journal)Date: July 16, 2010Publisher: Commonweal FoundationVolume: 137 Issue: 13 Page: 14(6)

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The Catholic Hitchcock