Hitchcock and his ladies

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The power of seduction drew me to filmmaking as a young boy. The movie that brought me to the genre of drama was the Alfred Hitchcock film: ‘Rebecca.’ Most individuals of a certain age only knew him in the early 1970s from his TV anthology series: ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’ “Good Evening” was instantly known along with his rotund silhouette to open his show introductions. I bring up Hitchcock because he was a true forerunner for what has evolved in terms of the modern day multi-media director. Look at the current crop of top line directors from Spielberg to Ridley Scott, all of them owe a debt in story style, narratives lines, and visual motif to Hitchcock’s influence use of camera, sound, and use of actors.

The career of Alfred Hitchcock is one of the great enigmas in cinema history. While considered one of the top 10 directors in the history of moviemaking, his personal life and obsessions make him an equally interesting subject. Hitchcock’s near psychopathic interest in a series of his leading ladies (Joan Fontaine, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, and Vera Miles) has been well chronicled in modern media. However, in October HBO Films will take a fictionalized look at his interactions with his last starlet discovered Tippi Hedren (Star of ‘The Birds’). ‘The Girl’ is a look at the assent of their relationship, the greatness of her performances, and the descent of their pairing into acrimony.

Meanwhile, as detailed in ‘The Girl,’ offers up a more complex psychological nature of Hitchcock's frailties as a man are strongly suggested. His need to control every aspect of the women that he was enamored with whether for sexual conquest or in professional terms were all focused on Hedren. As it had been with Vera Miles (the star of ‘Psycho’), Hedren by this time to feel the full weight of Hitchcock's power and in his ability to destroy the path of her stardom.

In the end, the HBO film shows the complex level of Hitchcock’s obsession. Moreover, this brilliant man destroys himself as a director of feature films. He’d only direct four more motion pictures between 1964 and his death in 1976. This legacy to a certain generation, it would be tied to television. And as a 9-year-old, my introduction to the other Hitchcock would be tied to ‘Rebecca.’ The rest is a history tied to not only greatness, but also the frailties of behavior.