'A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy' by Tony Lee Moral
In A Century of Hitchcock, Tony Lee Moral recounts the familiar outline of a great career. He touches all the usual pivot points: the German Expressionism Hitchcock absorbed while making his first film (1926) in Germany; how his style solidified with The Lodger (1927); the invention of the MacGuffin in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) …
Aside from honoring the Master of Suspense on the centennial of his directorial debut, Moral gave himself the larger task of scraping the mud from Hitchcock’s personal and professional life. The mud was hurled at the director by Donald Spoto, whose 1983 biography, The Dark Side of Genius, became the seminal text on the subject (at least in the U.S.). Moral sets out to refute Spoto’s claims that Hitchcock was a sadistic voyeur, a stalker of female stars, a cruel task master on the set. The pillar of Spoto’s assault was forged from the accusations of one person, Tippi Hedren, the vexed star of The Birds and Marnie.
Moral approaches his task along two routes. He gathers many quotes from people who disputed Hedren’s memories and painted a happier picture of the director from their own experiences. Hitchcock never lacked defenders after The Dark Side of Genius was published. Leading the counterattack was the star of Vertigo, the ultimate tale of male voyeurism and obsession, Kim Novak. She insisted that “the Alfred Hitchcock I knew was a good man, a professional man, a good director and a good person.”
A Century of Hitchcock becomes a biography of Spoto, who comes across as moralistic and salacious (a not uncommon coupling) as well as emotionally disturbed. Moral depicts him as the disappointed fan boy who turned on his hero. Before becoming a biographer, he taught classes on Hitchcock “with a religious fervor,” a student recalled. Spoto was intelligent, the product of a Jesuit education (like Hitchcock) but “struggled to find personal and professional direction” and projected “his own familial and personal struggles onto Hitchcock’s themes of guilt, power and repression.”
After the reverence Spoto paid in his first book, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, he expected to be granted membership in the director’s inner circle and write the authorized version of the director’s life. He was rebuffed. Hitchcock preferred the company of the man who became his official Boswell, British film critic John Russsell Taylor.
Spoto nursed his hurt feelings and plotted revenge. Moral dissects The Dark Side of Genius at length, finding it tendentious and false. Many nasty stories recounted by Spoto have been contradicted by witnesses or were taken out of context. Moral tracked down the transcript of Spoto’s 1980 interview with Hedren, containing the most damning indictment of Hitchcock, and finds that he “framed his questions carefully” as if “to steer the conversation to validate his thesis.”
A Century of Hitchcock becomes an essay on the dark side of biographies, which almost inevitably reflect the concerns of the authors as much as their subjects. At worst, they become the repositories of their writer’s bitterness. Spoto’s tome left a stain on Hitchcock’s reputation that has proved hard to remove, even with the 2003 publication of Patrick McGilligan’s even handed Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Hopefully, A Century of Hitchcock will help dissolve Spoto’s legacy.
A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy is published by University Press of Kentucky.
